Advantages of using project management tools are:
- Tools can facilitate the creation and maintenance of project artifacts (e.g. project schedule) and especially good at complex analysis (e.g. Earned Value Management);
- Tools are very good at linking to sub-projects or other work packages/plans;
- Tools are very good at providing various outputs (e.g. Gantt Charts, Milestone Charts, Network Diagrams etc)
- They can assist in the estimating/scheduling/planning stage and many scenariOS can be run to find the most appropriate course of action;
- They are a good reminder of what needs to be done and what is outstanding;
- They can help record, link and analyse lots of data (e.g. Requirements Management Tool, Change Management Tool; Stakeholder Management Tool or Lessons Learnt Tool);
- They are good for trend analysis and looking at prioritising or re-scheduling activities (e.g. resource scheduling);
- Contribute to the build up of statistical information to assist in improving management of future projects;
- Allows a more objective comparison of alternative actions/decisions and provides repeatable results;
- Helps distinguish between good and bad luck and good and bad management;
- It can provide electronic methods of approvals, speeding up decision making;
- Can be very good when teams are not co-located at one place, and the team can access data when they need it and not rely on any individual (e.g. methods and procedure database with the most up-to-date versions on it);
- Can be good at generating automated reports (e.g. timecards associated with individual projects), if they are setup in the right way in the first place;
- Very good at re-assigning authority when individuals are away, so decisions can still be made and do not rely on single points of failure;
- The requirement to measure physical items facilitates tighter management controls;
Disadvantages of using project management tools are:
- Some people (including management, team members, stakeholders) can find them difficult to understand;
- Tools can sometimes take too much time just to maintain the data and keep the tool updated - Don't under estimate the cost of capturing the data;
- They take time and effort and funding to train the staff to use;
- Often can often be expensive and there is a license fee attached to the tool (if not developed in house) and annual maintenance charges;
- Change them and updating can be costly and complex;
- Staff can use them inappropriately and not enter the required data to make them worthwhile (e.g. risk management tools);
- They can require lots of data to be generated and if it is not generated, then the results of the tool maybe suspect;
- If not understood properly they can be prone to error and can produce misleading results and can lead the Project Manager to make ill-informed decisions;
- They can be too complicated, too time-consuming and unnecessary for small projects;
- Use with caution on very large and complex networked projects because you can make a change and this could affect the rest of the project and you may not be aware of the automated changes the tool makes;
- People can tend to trust the tool outputs without questioning the rigor that went into producing the results;
- It can be very difficult retrospectively looking at what happened if you didn't capture the input data at the time;
- Tools can hide the detail and provide a whole project view, which may hide over performance in one area and under-performance in another.
Project Management Tools are very useful if applied in a disciplined manner. If they are used to replace expertise and in other inappropriate ways, then they will not provide value for money. Project Managers should constantly review the use and output of tools, because just because one was bought some time ago, it doesn't mean it is still of value today or in the future. If you want to migrate data to the next generation system, consider using open architecture or commercial standard tools and systems, otherwise if you use be-spoke systems it could be more costly in the future. Also look at what tools your customers and competitors use.
