IT industry has been keen in developing tools which has easy access and usability in recording as well as monitoring industrial tasks. Together, it has worked on development of tools to track project status and their implications. Organizations have been defining their own sets of projects for time to time measurement and review of organizational expansion.
Many IT companies are working on building end-to-end solutions for the dealing with the project management issues. Enterprise Resource Planning is one of the known software applications. These applications are broadly divided into a number of stages and tasks to get successfully realized. The process of implementing these software have been purely managed and monitored on project management tools. We have been knowing a rise of integrated and standalone tools which caters the need of such project management. One such tool which has emerged out of excellence is ZOHO PROJECTS. ZOHO has been developing various kind of online applications and SAAS applications under its umbrella which accommodates various functionalities supporting business processes. Some successful and dominating office suits from ZOHOs are ZOHO CRM, ZOHO PROJECTS, ZOHO BOOKS, ZOHO HR and many more.
ZOHO Project Management
The objective of ZOHO Project is planning, organizing, integrating and managing the projects along with their resources under a single hood. The projects planned can be integrated with various other cloud and web based apps for timely updates. It has also been developed for mobile platforms which has made the user access at their tips. The distinguishing features of ZOHO Project management are:
Planning Projects with Ease
With ZOHO Project Management, organizing and planning of project becomes easier through cutting down phases of projects into measurable units. This has maximized the controls and reduced the complexity on monitoring the project status. The phases of projects have been divided into various recognizable sections called “Milestones”. With the features of tagging the responsibility and start time and end time, the milestones have got unique handling features. Users can also flag milestones as internal or external for certain bifurcation involving separate parties in a project. Collective tasks or steps are tagged to a milestone to control the completion of a certain phase. Each task or step can be further divided into sub tasks.
Determining Task List and Criteria
The completion of any stage can be measured through achievement of task list. The tasks can be drilled down to sub tasks. These sub tasks can be dependent on one or more tasks. With functionality of flagging dependencies, the scheduling of tasks gets easier. The task list on other hand can be managed based on its property of occurring i.e. repetitive tasks or one time tasks. With this, the arrangement of task under the same stage can be managed and recorded separately.
Seamless Collaboration
While working on different projects simultaneously, the core of success remains in cooperation among different stakeholders of the project. Primarily consultants, project managers, developers and testers locally or from onsite needs proper updates on the project status for on time delivery of the product. In this case, a collaboration channel is needed and ZOHO has made the platform online with the access of internal and external teamwork easier.
Time Tracking
As every project is duration specific, it is essential to monitor every hour for the sake of measuring the productivity of the resource and the cost involved. Time tracking is also beneficial to track the billable hours in case of involvement of freelancers or part timers. Timesheets are used in order to track time for each task. Variances can be measured on the basis of timesheet for each tasks and milestones with reference to the planning done at the beginning.
Management of Documents
There are always some commercial, functional and technical documents associated to each project which are statutorily made in order to trace the requirements for final delivery. These documents are subject to be updated at each stage of SDLC which are often referred to sustain the software development process. ZOHO project has kept the provision to upload the documents and the respective revisions at each stage. These documents can be made accessible to all the project members and clients.
Project Management Template
For projects having similar kind of life cycle and workflow, the complete project planning of a project can be copied along with inputs of required start time and end time. This copies all the tasks and sub tasks including milestone from existing project to a new project with new defined start and end date. Such template will be useful in determining dynamic estimation of some complex projects.
Alert Management
A good project management tool should always be able to notify about actions, activities and status of the project to their stakeholders. ZOHO has an enhanced ability of notifying the status of project tasks. Alerts have been made by default on overdue of tasks, activities on project, milestone completion and many more. The alerts can be managed on the base of role and responsibility of the resource over any project.
Reporting and Dashboard
Home page for each specific user has been defined with different types of quick charts showing various information related to ownership of task/project. The dashboard derives information for:
- Total task achieved vs pending – Collective tasks from each project
- Overdue work items – List of work items that are past from their due date
- Team Work status – Overall team’s work status
- Total Bugs submitted – Total number of bugs reported
- Bug Fixers reports – Top user bug fixtures
- Weekly reports- Week wise work status
- Milestone status – Keep track of milestones
- Upcoming Event – List of events planned
- Budget status – Time logs for billed and unbilled task against resources
- Today’s Work Item List – List of work planned for today
- Task Progress Chart – Task count based on level of completion of project
- Timesheet Summary – Project billing status.
None of the software applications can tackle everything which is needed at different phases of projects. It is also necessary to handle projects according to business logic and functions. Sometimes it’s better to rope in software that handles a specific part of workflow masterfully.
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