By Leonardo Faig
A project is a way of turn ideas to reality. We develop projects for a lot of different things, not only in a job. If you want to travel abroad to work, you can start a project to help you achieve the goal. A lot of jobs need projects to control and conduct the duties. Every project has the proper time to develop it, the scope (the target of the project), a specific level of quality and the cost.
Management is a technique of controlling and dealing with the time and costs, using the best quality available to reach the scope. Finally, the project management is the application of every skill the person has to develop a project, trying to reach the final expectations (and keep the quality as high as possible without wasting so much time and trying to spend as less money as possible).
There are some important questions regarding the project management. The questions are: why (why doing this project?), what (what is the purpose?), who (who is the person or who are the people in charge of this project?), when (when we will have to deliver the project?), how (how are we going to develop and implement this project?) and how much (how much it will take to develop the entire processes?).
There is a lot of ways of doing that, and one of this ways is using project management tools.
According to Wrike (available at: https://www.wrike.com/project-management-guide/faq/what-are-project-management-tools/), project management tools are “softwares to help organize work and collaborate with colleagues on projects”. They have a lot of different features. The tools could be used to Plan and Schedule your works and tasks; add commentaries and approvals inside a project; edit and save any type of document; evaluate the productivity of a company, seeing its growth, with charts or other way of control, etc.
A lot of important peoples inside big companies use the project management tools to grow together with the industry, trying to keep up with technology itself. Even the translators (freelancers, in-house translators, people who work for a specific company, etc) use the CAT tools to do their job. And to make a CAT tool, someone had to implement the software. And it is possible that a lot of people behind the software used project management tools to help them achieve the scope.
We will now see some different project management tools and its functions. Asana is a tool that works as a “to-do list”. A lot of project management softwares have this option to create lists with things you should do and steps you have to take to finish a good work, but Asana has an incredible option that allows you to share your list with your co-workers. Very good in big projects involving a lot of people or different areas inside a big company. The interface is also clean and nice to look, very friendly.
Trello is also a good option. It works with boards as frameworks. It’s simpler and practical. You just click to add a new project and Trello will create a new board. It is a good option for people who look for a easy software. Maybe it is a good start to understand project management tools.
Aha! is a more complete mechanism. It create charts with horizontal bars that shows information like dates, progress, milestones and dependencies. It was designed by Henry Gantt, an engineer. His chart was already used in other softwares, but Aha! is the tool that has the best utilities with it.
Paymo is a good option for people who works directly with clients. We have the same kind of tool when we talk about CAT tools (using SmartCAT to deal with clients. There we can access an online chat to talk to them in real time). Here you have a dashboard, so you can access multiple projects at the same time and manage your work better. Saving some time is always a great thing when we have to deal of a lot of different information.
Finally, we have Basecamp. It is a tool of collaboration utilities. We have a search bar to look for different material other professionals in any kind of area have done so far (of course, they must share their work previously so you can access the content). It is good to help other supporters. This tool is a little bit different from the other ones, because it was created to help the entire community of employers or employees. You will probably come across it sometime.
These are some of the different project management tools that we can use to save us some time and do our jobs with quality.
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