Eight Common Project Management Tools

Citation: Introduce 8 commonly used project management tools

This paper provides effective project management tools, including Gantt chart, WBS, calendar, timeline, state table, HOQ, and mind map making tools.

project management involves effective planning and systematic management of work. It includes defining project objectives, making trips and arranging tasks to achieve specific goals. There are many graphical tools that can make project management more effective and efficient. There are Gantt chart, PERT chart and mind map in common use. Timeline, WBS diagram, state table and fishbone diagram. These are very useful tools to visualize the project scope. You can choose a tool that suits your situation.

Yitu has powerful drawing function of project management graphics. With rich built-in templates and symbols, and simple drag-and-drop drawing function, you can easily make professional-looking project management graphics.

Gantt chart helps to plan and manage projects. It divides a large project into several small parts and presents them in an orderly way. Each task has an expected completion time, represented by a horizontal bar, the left end represents the start date, and the right side represents the completion date of the person. Tasks may be gradual or parallel, with overlapping time. During the project, important events can be marked as milestones with a small diamond.

From a Gantt chart, you can clearly see what subtasks are and when each task starts and ends. Visualizing a project can also easily understand what will happen at each stage, thus tracking the progress of the project.

PERT is the abbreviation of project evaluation and review technique. This is one of the main project management tools for planning and arranging the whole project trip and tracking the implementation stage. PERT chart can also show task division, time allocation and start and end dates. Unlike Gantt chart, which uses bars to represent tasks, PERT chart uses relational model to show information, boxes to represent tasks, and arrows to represent the relationship between tasks. The typesetting form of PERT chart makes the relationship between activities more obvious than Gantt chart. But its disadvantage is that the task is difficult to follow up because there are too many contacts and tasks.

Calendar is a time-based and easy-to-understand project management tool. This is more suitable for personal time management and can help you manage your daily, weekly or monthly schedule better. The great thing about this tool is that it has a lot of room to add a to-do list. It will remind you of what you have to do every day and ensure that things can be completed before the deadline.

Timeline is also a visual project management tool, which helps to track the project progress. Through the timeline, you can intuitively see when a task needs to be completed. This is a more orderly way to know the task time. However, the timeline is not as popular as Gantt Chart, because it has limitations in showing the contact and completion status of tasks.

WBS, namely work breakdown structure, is a commonly used project management tool. It helps to visualize the work by decomposing the project into components that can be effectively arranged. WBS is a tree structure, with the total task at the top, broken down into sub-projects, and then further broken down into independent tasks. WBS is similar to the flow chart, and the components are logically connected. The components of the task are explained in words or shapes.

Mind mapping is also very useful for project management. Different from other project management tools, mind maps are less formal and more flexible. You can use it to break down a project into small tasks, manage a to-do list or analyze problems. Through mind mapping, you can insert pictures, link files and hide branches to focus on a certain part, which other project management tools can't do.

state tables are very effective for tracking project progress. It does not include details such as project duration and task relationship, but pays more attention to project status and completion process. The excellent function of the project status table is that it also includes the person in charge of the task, so that the person in charge of the project can better evaluate the performance of the employees and know who is responsible when the problem occurs.

HOQ (house of quality) refers to the house of quality, which is used to define the relationship between customer needs and product functions. This tool is used for quality function configuration and promotes team decision-making. Although it looks complicated, Yitu can also help you easily create all the elements in HOQ. FOQ, including the roof, matrix, legend and annotation, which have been built into the software. You can easily make professional HOQ.