Time is of the essence.

If you’ve tried to accomplish multiple projects at once in a team environment, you know the significance behind this statement. There’s dozens of things to do, yet you find yourself losing time waiting for emails, searching for documents, or looking for progress reports.

Enter project management software. Properly utilizing one can eliminate time wasting frustrations while simplifying workflow.

60% of companies currently use some type of project management software, but only 25% have implemented one company wide.

Let’s talk about 5 benefits of project management tools:

Improve Collaboration

Collaboration is a must! Creative teams see their best results by working together; multiple feedback sources, ideas, and skills contribute to a superior outcome. Project management software give teams the platform they need to instantly share updates and provide feedback.  

Track Projects

Keeping projects on time can be a difficult challenge, especially with large projects that have multiple facets assigned to different people. Within most project management tools you can set a start and expected completion date, with an in depth timeline showing individual team members’ tasks. Having the ability to track projects to completion ensure they get done. A study published by the Project Management Institute shows that high-performing organizations who use a project management software successfully complete 89% of their projects, while low performers complete only 36%.  

Improve Communication

When working in big teams it’s important to keep everyone on the same page. Project management tools assist in this process by alerting team members in real time through desktop and email notifications. A staggering 57% of projects fail due to issues with communication.

By subscribing or tagging team members to relevant projects they know when improvements have been made and what’s left to complete the project.

Delegate Efficiently

Creative companies often face obstacles that cannot be addressed by one person alone. The solution is to break these challenges into smaller pieces to be completed by a team rather than an individual. Project Management software streamlines this process while keeping everyone on the same page. 80% of project management executives don’t understand how their projects align with the company business strategy, which can make the final results seem uncoordinated. Being able to see all aspects of a project helps everyone see the big picture.

Instant Document Sharing  

Emailing large files to everyone on the team can be time consuming. This problem is exacerbated if a project includes several images, videos, or documents that are a work in progress. Having a place to instantly share these files with everyone on the team not only saves time and effort, but also encourages timely feedback. Plus the file can be found later without having to dig through your sent folder or inbox.

Utilizing a project management software can be the difference between disorganized chaos and structured progress. Peter Stern, then Executive Vice President of Time Warner Cable, gave credit to project management software as the key to the revival of his company, saying “Project management has been one of the linchpins of our turnaround over the last couple of years. The discipline has made our product and technology deployments faster yet less impactful to customers.”

Improvements to team communication and collaboration produce immediate results. The ability to track project completion progress, access files, and assess team member roles in a larger task saves time while drastically improving efficiency.