PPM-001 pdf - Professional in Project Management(PPM) Updated: 2024

As companies grow, they tend to handle more projects, with main teams and subteams managing different projects. To keep everyone in sync and ensure they consistently deliver quality projects, organizations need a way to consolidate these various initiatives across the company. Project portfolio management software centralizes the management of an organization’s projects by helping managers determine which resources to allocate to a specific project.

PPM tools help business leaders align organizational goals with teams’ efforts and provide a structured approach to managing the overall project portfolio, including resource allocation strategies, risk management and performance measurement. PPM helps managers determine which projects are meeting the organization’s objectives in order to make data-driven decisions about which projects to decompose or break into smaller tasks, how to allocate resources and how to prioritize competing demands on those resources.

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Top Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Software: Comparison chart

Top Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Software & Tools

The best PPM software for your enterprise depends on your unique needs, use cases and preferences. This guide analyzes the top seven project portfolio management software, including their standout features, pricing and pros and cons.

Planview PPM Pro: Best for resource management & capacity planning

Planview PPM Pro, formerly Planview Innotas, enables project management office leaders to prioritize tasks, track workloads and measure performance. The tool centralizes project portfolio management to establish a single source of truth for all work and resources. Moreover, Planview includes the capability of managing project costs against budget across portfolios by providing comprehensive views into each project’s budget, real and forecast.

With Planview, managers can measure the team’s performance and view key performance indicators to determine if the team’s efforts align with company goals (Figure A). Planview also helps managers make informed decisions on projects and tasks based on resource availability, capacity and utilization to meet the organization’s current and future demands.

Figure A

Pricing

Planview PPM Pro pricing information is unavailable on the vendor’s website. Potential buyers can request a product demo to learn more about this tool’s capabilities and receive a custom quote.

Standout features

• Project planning and scheduling, including project phases, tasks and milestones.
• Project financials management, including in-flight expense tracking to help teams stay on budget.
• Variance reporting of performance measurement against baselines to determine the differences between forecasted and real efforts.
• Optimized resource allocation and risk management.
• Automated notifications for new and out-of-tolerance assignments.

Pros

• Improves team collaboration.
• Promotes lean and agile work.
• Time and expense management capabilities.

Cons

• Users report that this tool is pricey.
• There is a complex initial setup process.

Planview PPM Pro Integrations

Planview PPM integrates with over 60 third-party services including:

• Jira.
• ServiceNow.
• Asana.
• Microsoft Azure DevOps.
• Git.
• BMC Remedy.
• Trello.
• Zendesk.
• Xray.

Why we choose Planview PPM Pro

We selected Planview PPM Pro for its advanced PPM features that allow you to manage all aspects of your project portfolio on one centralized platform.

Interested in Planview? Check out these other top Agile project management software.

Smartsheet: Best for reporting

Project teams and managers familiar with spreadsheets will find Smartsheet easy to use due to its spreadsheet-style dashboard. Smartsheet allows users to create formulas, manage projects, track progress, automate manual processes and customize workflows.

Smartsheet’s project and portfolio reporting capability allows users to visualize and report on portfolio data with configurable widget-based views (Figure B). Smartsheet automatically adds data from new projects to the team’s portfolio reports and dashboards. Project teams can also track projects, budgets and resources to ensure they align with the organization’s goals.

Figure B

Pricing

Smartsheet doesn’t advertise the rates of its Smartsheet Advance plan on its website – the plan that includes portfolio management. They encourage potential buyers to contact their sales team for quotes. The free, pro, business and enterprise lacks PPM feature.

• Free: No cost for one user and up to two editors.
• Pro: $7 per user per month, billed annually, or $9 per user billed monthly.
• Business: $25 per user per month, billed annually, or $32 per user billed monthly.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for a custom quote.
• Smartsheet Advance: Custom quote. This plan includes portfolio management.

Standout features

• Captures and compares variances between planned and real schedules.
• Provides report grouping into logical categories or classifications.
• Offers grid, Gantt chart, card and calendar views.
• Automates repetitive tasks and processes.
• Benchmarks performance against expectations and goals to estimate value accurately.

Pros

• Highly customizable.
• Feature-rich.
• Excellent reporting capabilities.

Cons

• Smartsheet is expensive for small businesses.
• Users report that Smartsheet is infrequently slow when running large projects.

Smartsheet integrations

Smartsheet connects with 96 third-party services. Some of the popular integrations include:

• Slack.
• Quip.
• Tibco Spotfire.
• Google Docs.
• Microsoft Teams.
• Dropbox.
• Easy Insight.
• Jira Software.
• Okta.

Why we choose Smartsheet

We selected Smartsheet for its strong reporting capabilities in project portfolio management. The platform offers interactive dashboards that allow you to drill down into specific project details for a comprehensive view of your portfolio.

For more information, check out our full Smartsheet review.

Wrike: Best for task tracking and capacity management

Wrike is primarily a project management service provider with extensible PPM capabilities that help teams manage multiple projects and visualize and prioritize resources for a better workflow. The tool has a prebuilt, ready-to-use PPM template and project portfolio analysis capabilities (Figure C). These features help teams manage multiple projects, track progress and manage resources efficiently. And Wrike’s collaboration features help teams collaborate, communicate and coordinate tasks. Wrike is available as a cloud-based, desktop and/or mobile app solution for businesses of all sizes.

Figure C

Pricing

Wrike’s project portfolio management features are only available in the Business, Enterprise and Pinnacle pricing tiers:

• Business: $24.80 per user per month for five to 200 users.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for a custom quote.
• Pinnacle: Contact sales for a custom quote.

Standout features

• Advanced resource and capacity planning.
• Workflow automation to eliminate manual processes.
• Drag-and-drop capabilities.

Pros

• Enhanced collaboration, especially among distributed teams.
• Time tracking capability.
• Visual proofing capability.

Cons

• Complex initial setup process.
• Steep learning curve.

Wrike Integrations

Wrike integrates with 400+ third-party applications. Some of their top integrations include:

• Tableau.
• Slack.
• Salesforce.
• Zoom.
• Microsoft Teams.
• Jira.
• HubSpot.
• Power BI.

Why we choose Wrike

Our analysis found that Wrike uses AI to minimize your project portfolio’s risk and it maintains a risk log to ensure consistently high standards across your portfolio. Wrike also ranks high for resource utilization, it evaluates capacities and distribution of work by visualizing upcoming requirements – this ultimately helps avoid employee burnout.

For more information, check out our full Wrike review.

monday work management: Best for value

With monday work management, teams can create customized workflows, automate routine tasks and easily collaborate on projects. The software can be used by teams of any size in any industry and is available on the web and mobile devices. monday work management provides users with many beneficial features, including time tracking, customizable templates, team boards, calendar views and integrations with other tools and services.

Further, monday work management allows managers to allocate resources and prioritize tasks to meet the company’s objectives. Its PPM templates deliver stakeholders a high-level view of their portfolio information and overall health (Figure D).

Figure D

Pricing

• Free: No cost for up to two seats.
• Basic: $8 per seat per month, billed annually, or $10 per seat billed monthly.
• Standard: $10 per seat per month, billed annually, or $12 per seat billed monthly.
• Pro: $16 per seat per month, billed annually, or $20 per seat billed monthly.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for a custom quote.

Standout features

• Resource utilization and capacity planning.
• Advanced reporting and analytics.
• Over 200 templates available.
• 99.9% uptime service-level agreement.

Pros

• Built-in time tracking.
• Self-service knowledge base.
• Budget-friendly.

Cons

• Limited reporting capabilities.
• The user interface may take time to learn for first-time users.

monday work management integrations

monday work management integrates with over 200 third-party services.

• Pipedrive.
• Slack.
• Jira.
• Trello.
• Mailchimp.
• Zendesk.
• HubSpot.
• Zoom.
• Gitlab.
• Stripe.

Why we choose monday work management

We selected monday work management for its advance features that make it an excellent choice for project portfolio management. The PPM platform gives you value for your money by providing quality tools for managing projects, tasks and resources.

For more information, check out our full monday Work OS review.

Asana: Best for small to large businesses and contractors

Asana PPM helps project managers monitor their team’s initiatives, such as project status, progress and resource allocation, in a unified dashboard. Asana provides a comprehensive view of an organization’s project portfolio, enabling managers to prioritize projects, allocate resources and manage budgets more effectively.

With Asana, teams can track project progress, collaborate on tasks and set up reminders and deadlines. It also includes a workload view (Figure E), which helps managers identify team members’ capacity and balance their workloads.

Figure E

Pricing

Asana’s PPM features are only available in its Business plan, which is priced at $24.99 per user per month when billed annually, or $30.49 per user when billed monthly.

Standout features

• Project views for timeline, list, board and calendar.
• Custom workflow automation.
• Project planning, task management, risk management and issue management.

Pros

• Short learning curve.
• Excellent collaboration features.
• User-friendly interface.
• Highly customizable.

Cons

• Asana can be expensive for teams looking for more advanced features.

Asana integrations

Asana integrates with over 100 third-party apps, including:

• Adobe Creative Cloud.
• Okta.
• Tableau.
• Google Drive.
• ServiceNow.
• Looker.
• Canva.
• OneDrive.
• InVision.
• GitHub.
• Trello.

Why we chose Asana

We selected Asana for its ability to manage multiple projects and large-scale initiatives and easily visualize progress across initiatives for executive stakeholders. Asana Portfolios can also help you monitor project timelines and dependencies, allowing you to prioritize and allocate resources effectively.

For more information, check out our full Asana review.

ClickUp: Best for customization

ClickUp consolidates productivity, project management, work management, document collaboration and communication on a unified platform. It is designed to be an all-in-one platform that can be customized to suit the needs of various teams and industries, from small businesses to large enterprises. ClickUp provides stakeholders with extensive insights into all projects’ progress and reports on milestones.

ClickUp has over 15 customizable project views and an extensive template library for various use cases (Figure F). The tool has over 50 native integrations, making it easy for teams to connect with existing apps in their toolkits.

Figure F

Pricing

• Free Forever: No cost for 100MB storage and unlimited tasks.
• Unlimited: $7 per user per month, billed annually, or $10 per user billed monthly.
• Business: $12 per user per month, billed annually, or $19 per user billed monthly.
• Enterprise: Contact sales for a custom quote.

Standout features

• Advanced task views, such as Gantt chart, table, timeline, workload, box, activity, mind map, list, calendar and map.
• Task dependencies capability.
• Natural language processing.
• Work in progress limits.
• ClickApp mobile application.
• Risk management capability to assess multiple projects’ performance against strategic organizational objectives.

Pros

• Self-service knowledge base.
• Highly customizable.
• Support for multiple assignees.

Cons

• Steep learning curve.
• Mobile app has limited project views.

ClickUp integrations

ClickUp offers over 50 native integrations. The popular ones include:

• Slack.
• Google Drive.
• GitHub.
• HubSpot.
• Loom.
• Figma.
• Vimeo.
• Zoom.
• Zendesk.
• Tableau.

Why we chose ClickUp

We chose ClickUp because it provides templates to help you manage resources, tasks and objectives, visualize progress and performance and align your teams around goals and priorities. It allows you to organize tasks into sixteen different statuses, including new, complete, at risk and in progress.

For more information, check out our full ClickUp review.

Celoxis: Best all-in-one PPM and resource management software

Celoxis is all-in-one enterprise-level PPM software that offers project planning, resource management, task tracking, time tracking, budgeting, collaboration and reporting features for optimized project portfolio management. These features help businesses of all sizes plan, manage and track projects from start to finish.

Celoxis offers fully featured resource management capabilities to maximize team utilization and project performance. It enables managers to allocate tasks based on skills, roles and availability while considering employees’ time zones and work shifts. Celoxis also offers a comprehensive suite of real-time dashboards, reporting capabilities and customizable workflows to help managers measure, analyze and optimize team performance (Figure G).

Figure G

Pricing

Celoxis offers two deployment plan options: Cloud and On-Premises. Pricing information for both On-Premises and Cloud plans are available upon request. The Cloud plan requires a minimum of five users.

Standout features

• Intake management capability automatically captures and ranks project requests from web forms, emails and other sources.
• Resource management features optimize distributed teams’ resources and analytics.
• Customizable portfolio dashboards allow users to monitor schedules, margins and other custom metrics.
• Project accounting provides profit and margin tracking, revenue forecasting and custom financial KPIs.

Pros

• Time tracking.
• Multilevel approvals.
• PDF option for exporting reports.

Cons

• Celoxis lacks a free plan.
• Cloud user storage space is limited to 2GB per user.

Celoxis integrations

The tool connects with over 400 third-party apps, including:

• QuickBooks.
• Slack.
• Google.
• Microsoft.
• Salesforce.
• Trello.
• Harvest.
• Slack.

Why we chose Celoxis

We selected Celoxis for its versatility. Whether we are managing complex projects with multiple dependencies and stakeholders or simple projects with a few team members, Celoxis offers PPM features that you can align to your specific PPM needs.

See how Celoxis compares to our list of the top 10 project management software.

Key features of project portfolio management software

Project portfolio management software provides analytics and dashboards to help managers and stakeholders gain insights into project performance and make informed decisions. Its features include project tracking and reporting, financial management, collaboration and communication. Other key PPM features include:

Portfolio dashboard

PPM tools often provide a dashboard that displays an organization’s project portfolio overview. It offers a real-time snapshot of the portfolio’s health, including KPIs and OKRs, such as project status, resource utilization and budget, plus forecast versus the real baseline. With this feature, project stakeholders can identify and address potential issues, looking at resource constraints and breaking down large projects to increase success rates.

Resource management

PPM tools typically offer resource management functionality, which allows organizations to plan and allocate resources across multiple projects. Given resource constraints, this feature helps ensure resources are not under- or over-utilized and project timelines are realistic. Resource management functionality also allows organizations to identify and address resource conflicts before they become critical issues.

Project prioritization

PPM tools often include functionalities to help organizations prioritize projects and programs based on strategic goals, available resources and other criteria. Project prioritization enables stakeholders to make data-driven decisions about which projects to pursue and how to allocate resources. Organizations can maximize the value of their project portfolios by prioritizing projects based on strategic goals and objectives.

Risk management

The best PPM tools include functionality to help organizations identify, assess and manage risks associated with projects and programs. When potential project risks are identified and addressed early in the project life cycle, there is an immediate increase in the project success rate.

However, if risks are not properly managed, they could delay delivery, cost the team more money and affect the team’s overall performance. PPM risk management functionality enables organizations to monitor and mitigate risks throughout the project life cycle, minimizing the impact of unforeseen events.

Reporting and analytics

The ability to make data-driven decisions about project selection, resource allocation and other strategic initiatives is essential for the overall health of a company. With PPM reporting and analytics features, organizations can identify trends and patterns in project performance, enabling them to track KPIs and measure the success of their project portfolio. Reporting and analytics features provide valuable insights that are needed to enhance individual projects and project portfolios.

How do I choose the best project portfolio management tool for my business?

Choosing the right PPM tool is crucial to your organization’s project portfolio management success. Here are some key factors to consider when selecting a PPM tool:

• Alignment with organizational goals.
• User-friendly interface.
• Integration with other tools.
• Availability of project tracking and reporting, resource allocation and scheduling, risk management and portfolio analysis features.
• Customization and flexibility.
• Vendor support and training.

Ultimately, the best PPM solution for you depends on your company’s requirements.

Methodology

When we evaluated the best PPM software, a few criteria were considered. As a baseline, we evaluated software features to ensure each solution offers project portfolio management capabilities. We also reviewed the cost of the software, the ease of implementation and use and customer service and support. Finally, we considered the reviews and ratings each solution has received.

There are four basic areas you should consider when choosing a portfolio management software solution. The first is cost, as every company needs to find something that fits into its overall budget. When considering cost, look at the monthly costs as well as any third-party costs (such as integrations with other software) that may be necessary to have an efficient system.

With that said, you also want to make sure you’re investing in a system that can keep up with your daily workflows. Efficiency is the second thing to consider when choosing a PPM. Choose a system that helps keep your people efficient in task management. The ability to create tasks and track them through a project timeline helps you make sense of complicated projects with a lot of moving parts. Having the right management features is crucial in a service of this kind.

Flexibility is another thing to consider. Things change quickly in many company operations. Your project portfolio management software should deliver you plenty of options for customising workflows, tasks, and other options. This way, you have a solution that morphs into what your company needs to organise projects rather than something you need to change systems to fit into.

Software integrations can fill a lot of gaps in your system when it comes to flexibility. Many leading providers offer the ability to connect data with other types of business apps, from customer relationship management (CRM) systems to cloud storage systems and beyond. These integrations can automate a lot of tedious work on your end by automatically connecting information from these other platforms and bringing that data into your project management solution.

For example, you could bring in customer information from a CRM like Salesforce into your project portfolio management solution and attach that customer to a task for an agent using Wrike. When they close a sale with that client, they could use that integration to update customer info in their platform and have it automatically update within the Salesforce app while saving them the trouble of having to log into that platform. These small conveniences can add up to save a lot of time and effort for you and your staff.

Finally, find a PPM that makes the whole process visible with transparency to all stakeholders.

Parties should be able to see the whole slate of projects, where each is at and review which take priority on the list. With that said, having a robust set of permissions options can help you maintain project security. While some workers on your team may need full edit access of task items, there could be scenarios where you’re dealing with sensitive information and want to block out unrelated parties from the project. You should also be able to toggle view-edit access for users depending on their involvement in the project.

Add Value to Your Organization with Purdue Training for Employees

Purdue University’s online project management courses are a popular choice for employers who seek best-in-class training for their employees. We offer Project Management Essentials, PMP® exam Preparation and Agile courses to support employees across the project management field. Employers recognize the value of our proprietary coursework that is developed and supported by industry leaders in accordance with Purdue’s high standards of excellence as a Project Management Institute (PMI) Authorized Training Partner.

Our expert instructors have decades of experience successfully implementing respected project management knowledge and skills necessary for career advancement at major corporations. Our courses are developed by active professionals who frequently update curricula to ensure the tools, techniques and processes they teach are consistent with the evolving standards of today’s organizations.

At Purdue, learners are taught how to retain current project management knowledge so that they will immediately apply learned skills to their work.

Corporate Pricing

Employers are eligible for corporate pricing when they register a group of employees. Please contact a Program Advisor to discuss special pricing for online employee training in project management at PMonline@purdue.edu or (888) 390-0499.

Visit our payment page for general pricing information.

Employers

Executives, trainers and employees from some of the world’s most prominent organizations have selected Purdue for project management certificates. They include:

PMP® exam Preparation is an in-depth, live, virtual course offered by Purdue University Online. This course follows our Project Management Essentials course. Some learners also complete the Agile Certificate Online Course before taking this exam preparation course.

This course offering assumes you qualify to take the PMP exam according to Project Management Institute (PMI) criteria, which includes being an experienced project manager (minimum 36 months of experience leading projects within the past eight years, with a four-year degree).

The PMP exam also requires you to have 35 hours of project management education, which this course fulfills.

You should already be familiar with the content of the PMBOK® Guide before enrolling. If you feel like you need a refresher on the content of the PMBOK® Guide, taking the Project Management Essentials course first is strongly suggested.

Course Overview

PMP exam Preparation is a live, virtual course based on the PMBOK® Guide.

Enrollment includes 90-day access to all of the course material, which is 100% aligned to the Project Management Institute’s PMP® exam Prep content. Purdue also provides complimentary 90-day access to the PMtraining^™ online practice test website (a $59 value).

Certification

PMI’s PMP exam consists of 180 multiple-choice, multiple response, matching, hotspot and limited fill-in-the-blank questions. The exam is demanding and learners must engage in independent study following the course to pass.

Only individuals who pass PMI’s PMP exam are officially certified as a Project Management Professional®. A certificate of achievement from Purdue University, however, is awarded to learners who successfully complete the PMP exam prep course.

Yaniv Shor is the founder and CEO of Proggio and the author of the book Time to Deliver, a must-read for project managers.

With all the buzz around ChatGPT, artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot syllabu across nearly every business sector and application.

Project portfolio management (PPM) is no different. Even Gartner has predicted that by 2030, AI will take over and “eliminate” as much as 80% of project management tasks, including data collection, tracking and reporting.

While the promise of generative AI (the likes of ChatGPT) may be a bit further off in this field, there are many possibilities for AI within PPM, but it’s also not without some significant challenges that must be overcome.

Five AI Use Cases For Project Management

Let’s talk about what it can do before discussing some pitfalls and concerns you need to be aware of:

1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)

If you’ve ever asked Alexa anything or said, “Hey Siri…” you’ve used NLP, a form of AI that can recognize and respond appropriately to natural spoken language.

In the context of PPM, being able to query your system of record about specific needs can drastically Improve data insights and save time. For example, instead of poring over Gantt charts and spreadsheets and comparing those to manpower management, you can simply ask the platform, “Do I have resources for [insert specific task or project] next week?” Or, “Who can fill in for James when he’s on holiday next week?”

With NLP, the system can help you find resources with similar skills and availability to plan appropriately.

2. Data Collection And Analysis

Gartner is right: The potential here is huge. After all, chasing down data to report to management is a large part of the PPM function. AI will deliver us the ability to do that much quicker and arrive at performance insights and risk assessments much faster.

Not only will this help guide decision-making, but it will enable project managers to do what they should be doing: coaching and supporting teams.

3. Scenario Planning

AI’s super-human ability to analyze data and deliver insights at incredible speed provides unprecedented clarity that can guide realistic scenario planning. Let’s say you’re planning next year’s project roadmap. You already have 50 projects in process, and you want to add 40 more.

With AI-powered scenario planning, you can see, in real time, whether you realistically have the resources to support that plan, whether you should put some projects on hold, which you should prioritize, and perhaps discover you’ll need to hire additional talent.

4. Accelerated Decision-Making

Because AI enables these real-time insights, an AI-driven PPM platform allows you to see various parameters, dependencies and roadblocks more clearly to make better-informed decisions and adapt on the fly.

Prior to AI, in that same meeting from above where you’re planning next year’s roadmap, you’d have to discuss potential scenarios, adjourn the meeting, go back to the drawing board to work on revised plans and then reconvene in three or four days to review the options.

AI can accelerate that process, so you can stay on track with timelines and business objectives, not to mention gain or maintain a competitive advantage by being able to move faster.

5. Risk Analysis

The ability to analyze more data from more sources—and do it faster—can provide better insight into risk potential.

Especially as projects become more complex and involve cross-team coordination, there are a lot of factors that contribute to risk: the more tasks, people, and dependencies, the higher the risk of delays, resource shortfalls, missed OKRs and, ultimately, project failure.

Using AI to analyze real-time and historical data can help PPMs identify those roadblocks and risks sooner and help you devise and navigate mitigation strategies.

Four Potential AI Pitfalls For PPM

While all of this sounds amazing—and some of this capability already exists in the market—there are a few areas of caution that organizations should consider before diving headfirst into the AI-driven solution pool:

1. Don’t adopt AI for the sake of AI. Decide what functions or capabilities you need first, and then find an AI tool that delivers. With so much hype around AI, it’s tempting to think you have to have it, but it’s a waste of time and resources if it doesn’t serve your needs.

2. Take an incremental approach. Going all-in on AI right out of the gate can be a mistake, completely upheaving your entire workflow and exposing potential shortcomings in the solution only after it’s been fully implemented. As with any new solution, a managed approach to adoption and implementation is essential. You’ll want to ease into the process to minimize risk, assure user confidence and understand what’s working and what’s not throughout the process.

3. Prepare to standardize. One of the biggest problems in many organizations is scattered and siloed data, which prevents them from gaining insights that depict an accurate and complete picture. An AI solution will have the same problem if you don’t standardize it. If marketing is using one tool and product development is using another, an AI solution can’t magically integrate that data. It’s essential that everyone is on the same system in order to be on the same page.

4. Beware of “black box” solutions. One of the biggest risks that also diminishes trust in AI solutions is that they don’t explain how and why they arrived at that solution. ChatGPT doesn’t cite sources, for example. In a business context, users need to know where the data is coming from and how the AI solution arrived at its conclusions because there may be nuances that the platform doesn’t understand. Just like in middle school algebra, an AI platform should show its work, not just the final answer.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt AI has tremendous potential to Improve the efficiency, operational workflow, clarity and accuracy of the project management function. And there are tools that are already implementing these capabilities and showing promise.

For organizations looking to jump on the AI opportunity, a careful, results-oriented approach with phased adoption is the most prudent strategy.

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We extensively research the key competitors within an industry to determine the best products and services for your business. Our experts identify the factors that matter most to business owners, including pricing, features and customer support, to ensure that our recommendations offer well-rounded products that will meet the needs of various small businesses.

We collect extensive data to narrow our best list to reputable, easy-to-use products with stand-out features at a reasonable price point. And we look at user reviews to ensure that business owners like you are satisfied with our top picks’ services. We use the same rubric to assess companies within a particular space so you can confidently follow our blueprint to the best project management software.

The best project management software has positive user reviews on customer review sites. Project management companies should provide customers with fast and reliable support. Using a combination of phone support, live chat and knowledge bases, customers should be able to quickly resolve issues 24/7.

Project management software should include robust mobile apps and desktop platforms that allow project managers and tasked employees to work collaboratively in real time to meet their goals and deadlines. It should be affordable compared to competitors and free versions should be offered for testing purposes. Software should include role assignment features, timelines and dependencies to ensure that project members stay on track. Various project views, such as kanban boards and gantt charts, should be available to help visualize project progress. Budgeting features should be built into the software to ensure that project managers are tracking the project’s budget along with timelines and helpful software integrations should be available to link your project management software with your other business tools.

All project management software should expand on a basic feature set that includes customizable templates, milestone tracking, expense tracking, billing and invoicing and guest/client access.

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The best project management software makes it simple and easy for teams to organize projects and tasks.

With the normalization of home working following the pandemic, project management software is more important than ever, giving remote teams an easy way to manage projects and tasks.