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What is your opinion on Product Management softwares?
Do you think that projet management software is worth the investment? Do you think it is really beneficial, or can companies do well without it?
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3 Answers
To say you can do without project management at all would be nonsense - people at a minimum need to keep track of what they're doing and where they are, so people can check that things are progressing.
Do you have any particular packages in mind? From what I've seen, it is marginal, but then it depends on how large your organization is and how many people you are managing.
IMHO there is no reason why you couldn't work with a spreadsheet.
I have found it is more important that people talk to each other and discuss what they're doing and get on with it, than spend thousands on project management software and fail to communicate because they think it is all taken care of.
I'm not even sure a dedicated project manager is worth it - you need people to be organized at all levels of a project, not just managers at the top.
Communication is the key. At the start of a project, be sure everyone knows what the overall objective is (if this is possible - it isn't always), and what their role in reaching that objective is. After that you can break it down into working teams and go from there. How you record it is up to you, but I feel project management software is too rigid as not every project runs the same.
It is important that someone keeps track of what they or their team are doing, and says something when it starts to deviate. Project management software alone won't do this.
It very much depends on the size of your organization, the number of development projects you have ongoing, the number of product managers, and the amount of cross dependencies among your projects.
I agree with the comments above that some process and tool is necessary to organize and prioritize your product management process. For many organizations this can be done on spreadsheets.
However, if you have a large PM organization, multiple projects, and a great deal of interdependencies between your projects, a formal tool could be very helpful to your team.
I have worked in environments that used spreadsheet effectively. But, I always found that it relied a great deal on good communications among product managers. Once you have more than 5 or 10 product managers, a more formal tool will provide value.
I have also worked with a simple tool called JIRA. This is a lower cost, simpler product. It is actually more often used for ticket tracking and development projects. However, it can be used as a PM tool to help track and prioritize feature requests.
I have also been involved in a project to evaluate the need for PM software and evaluate different solutions. It is hard to justify the investment with hard payback figures. It comes down to the fact that you will have better data to make better decisions faster. By doing a trial of the software for some of our projects, we were able to prove see that we had better reports and tracking of our features and requirements, making it easier to make decisions. But, it was hard to quantify direct cost savings or revenue gains. At some point, either the pain is so great that you must do it, or you go with your gut feel that it is a good decision that will help your business.
In the end, our company chose FeaturePlan from Ryma. It provided the most robust feature set, the best reporting, the best user interface and it worked well with the Pragmatic Marketing Framework.
Sheldon,
In direct response to your question, it's been my experience that project management software adds critical value to the project management practice.
Well-seasoned project managers who have good knowledge of the business practice may be able to successfully complete projects using tools like excel. However, even these managers experience a productivity boost with better, more specialized tools.
While some companies may be able to do without it, I don't believe they can do WELL without it. The more complex the project, the greater the value of project management software.
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