Importance of Software Engineering Project Management Tools

Summary: Develop software in a more structured way by using Project Management Tool. Find out why you should switch to project management software and ditch your regular spreadsheets. We’ve picked an interesting case study for you to understand the importance of this software.

Software development is a long process that involves multiple stages, professionals, and even teams. But managing everything comes on to just one project manager who has to create project timelines, allocate tasks, manage finances, generate reports, and do a lot more.

Doing all this manually or merely on a spreadsheet leads to inefficiencies in processes, delayed project deliveries, and untracked resource spending. However, implementing software engineering project management tools can assist software engineers and other associates in managing their teams, budgeting, and project deliveries.

Let’s check out why you need a project management tool in software development and how you can use it to maximize your output.

What are Software Engineering Project Management Tools?

Software engineering project management tools enable project managers to plan, schedule, effectively allocate resources, and track a project’s progress to develop software and execute web projects.

Why Project Management Tool is Important in Software Development?

Here’re a few important functions of a project management tool for software development:

Task Management

Get your tasks done quicker by creating, assigning, and setting respective due dates using a project management tool. Project managers can even track time by developers on a particular task, create checklists for them, set timelines, automate recurring tasks, and more. Moreover, project managers can also add tags and create unlimited sections to organize tasks as per their stages in the software development process. For instance, users can create task columns in Kanban boards for testing, bugs tracking, design, etc.

Resource Planning

Team leaders can plot their human resources and other assets strategically to maximize productivity and build innovative solutions. They can use Gantt style views to understand which employees are already occupied with some projects, and who are ready to take up more tasks. Accordingly, project managers can assign new tasks using the drag and drop scheduler functionality.

Time Tracking

Senior software engineers can track the log time of every individual engineer on a particular task with a start-stop time tracker, predictive timesheets or calendar view. You can track how much time has gone into each stage which includes creating software design mockups, PRD, testing, integration, and final launch. In fact, team leaders can also generate customized detailed timesheets with their preferred fields and metrics like phase, billable & non-billable hours, summary, status, title, etc.

Project Budgeting

Project managers can define budgets or individual projects that involve one-time and recurring costs using different billing models. As per the set project timeline, project heads can make an estimate of the billable man hours, tools & integration costs, and other miscellaneous costs to create an overall budget estimate for the project.

Workflow Management

Senior software engineers can create and optimize workflows using project management software. The software allows you to visually see your processes and their progress with task status so far. You can use Kanban boards to gain more clarity and understand which tasks are completed, in-progress, and pending. Moreover, the workflow management feature can also be effectively used to define task accountability.

Business Reports

Project leaders can easily generate summarized and brief reports within minutes using a project management tool. These reports can be further used for performance analysis, advanced financial forecasts & simulations. In addition to this, reports can help you compare the gap between set and achieved goals and identify bottlenecks. In fact, users can also generate visual reports in the form of pie charts and different graphs with their custom filters and metrics.

Interesting Read

1. 35% of IT Executive Leaders have recognized organizational agility as one of the most important factors in achieving organizational success.

2. The Project Management Software industry is estimated to register a 10.67% CAGR from 2020 to 2026.

3. An average of 11.4% investment goes to waste merely because of poor project performance.

Use Cases of Project Management Tool in Software Development

Let’s understand how a project manager can practically use software engineering project management tools to make the most out of it. Let’s see project management business case example.

Find the Right Skills & Resources to Assign Tasks

To get started with your project, you need to find which of your developers, coders, and designers are available using the assignee filter on Kanban, Scrum, or other boards. Moreover, managers also need to check which of their team members have the right set of skills for a given project, which can be done by extracting blind CVs.

These CVs only contain employees’ professional information and skills, and not their personal information, which leads to a fairer selection of employees for a project. For example, you can assign the PRD task only to employees that are proficient in the required programming language. Using a project management tool, you can allocate all tasks with complete information and supportive material to the right person.

Make Profitability & Time Estimates

After you have found the right developers and designers for your next software development project, you need to make estimates on different phases that your project would go through. For example, in software engineering, these stages would include research, PRD, designing mockups, testing, RFL, Live, etc., depending on your organization’s workflow. The software also helps in making estimates about time, project profitability, and more.

Track Team’s Productivity & Optimize Workflows

Project management software can allow your developers to log their time spent working on a task. This can be easily done by clicking on the start and end timer buttons. Further, this time tracking allows project heads to keep a check on which employee is taking how much time to complete a task and eventually know their productivity levels. Based on this, project managers can optimize the entire project workflow and modify its timelines, if required.

Work on Finances

So, now that you know the required number of manhours and other tools needed to complete a project, you can easily estimate the project budget as well. Using a project management tool, project heads can calculate the profit through a specific software project.

This can be done by adding the cost of man hours, tools, and other fixed & recurring costs, along with the income that the project has generated. In fact, if there are changes in the costs, timeline, or deliverables they can be easily viewed and tracked using the real time reports and its various filters.

Custom Report Generation with Custom Metrics

If you have completed or are in the middle of a sprint or a whole project, you can easily stay up to date with the latest progress using reports. Reports will give you real time insights into your employees’ availability, project finances, vacancy reports, etc.

Users can customize these reports using different metrics such as scheduled time, tracked time, estimated cost, capacity hours, positions, etc. In addition to this, users can also convert these reports into visual formats using pie charts, bar graphs, and more.

Let’s Understand the Impact of Project Management Software in IT Companies

Let’s check out an example of a leading IT firm and understand the benefit that it derived from implementing a project management tool.

SovTech, a leading IT services company in South Africa implemented project management software and increased its overall profitability with the bird’s eye view of its project-related finances.

When the organization started to grow and reached a head count of 170 people with 25 major projects under its umbrella, its manager, Oliver started to face challenges while managing the company’s financial processes. At that time, the company was witnessing significant growth with around 220 employees working across 40 projects.

Challenges Faced by SovTech

Making frequent changes in the spreadsheets on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis
Frequent calculation and estimation errors started happening, which took hours to be corrected
Taking regular updates manually at every stage from all the assignees regarding the task’s progress, estimated completion time, task accountability, and more.
No clarity on employee’s availability and their task responsibilities
Identifying and assigning tasks to the right professional
Lack of on-demand report generation

Tackling all these challenges with spreadsheets and manual follow ups was creating chaos. Also, the company’s finances and employees’ productivity were impacted. It became difficult for SovTech to establish and estimate the real project profit margin and costs spend in its operations and development. Even using a general time tracker didn’t help because it was only able to calculate the time spent on a task but not its revisions, changes, or further modifications.

Impact After Implementing a Project Management Tool

As SovTech’s spreadsheets started to get longer and processes became more complicated, the IT firm decided to give the project management tool a try. The tool helped them streamline chaotic processes and other things that include:

Forecasting and checking task capacity for every employee
Optimizing and allocating resources efficiently with a 360-degree view of dashboards
Monitoring task progress and related cost changes
Effectively allocate workload among available and skilled human resources
Monitor other factors that might impact project financials
Track how and where the current budget is being spent

All of this helped the project manager, Oliver to understand that he can work more effectively by using software engineering project management software. It provides him with a bird’s eye view of all the processes and he does not need to take manual follow-ups from anyone.

“For a Project Manager, staying within budget and saving time is always the top priorities and with a project management tool, you can see your data, your resources, planned vs actual, track activities, and much more.” – Aditya Ghosh, Product Manager

Conclusion

Building software is a complex process and involves multiple tasks and teams which can be confusing and tiring to manage for the project manager. In fact, this confusion can also result in delayed project deliveries and over budgeting. But, implementing software engineering project management tools will equip your project manager to manage, schedule, assign, and track the project’s progress. Moreover, this will help the team leaders to ensure timely deliveries and stay on budget.