There are 4 components to professional project management: cost, timing, duration and producing a satisfactory result. Professional project managers also aim at making the organization of work more efficient. Take any project and you will observe that it employes labour, funds and tools to deliver needed results. To work with projects successfully one need to work on quite a few factors. A couple of them can be found in the next paragraph:

- Task setting and reviewing progress.

- Managing risks. Most feature a this or that level of uncertainty.

- Allocating labor and tools for the project.

- Defining the products of the project.

- Controlling the project from the point of view of who is performing what and when.

- Making sure that the products of the project are of satisfactory quality.

- Managing changes. Everything changes. When you start out on the project, you have to anticipate in what way it will evolve with time.

- Exchanging information with project stakeholders.

To deal with these components you can employ pencil and paper or perhaps a spreadsheet program. Nevertheless, specialized project tracking software has a number of significant benefits:

- Idividual jobs are easier to assign to time blocks. The software can automate timing adjustments. It is possible to set work calendars for different people. Tracking work-in-progress also becomes less of a problem.

- Coordinating several projects with various requirements. Executives can use project management software to simplify analysis of several big projects.

- It helps you find the critical path. The critical path is an important principle in project management. Should a task on this path change duration, the rest of the project is going to be affected. At the same time other tasks that are not on the critical path can last longer or shorter without changing the timing of the whole project.

- Allowing all involved be aware of what is going on. Big projects require information exchanges. Groupware productivity tracking software allows each participant to know what is up every time.

Should you every time choose task tracking software?

Project tracking solutions might not be appropriate in 100 percent of all cases. It delivers the greatest value when used for several big projects. It could be a good idea to operate smaller projects by hand, so that there is little need to incur large overhead associated with using complex software solutions.