Project management software (PMS) has the capacity to help plan, organize, and manage resource tools and develop resource estimates. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it can manage

estimation Estimation (or estimating) is the process of finding an estimate or approximation, which is a value that is usable for some purpose even if input data may be incomplete, uncertain, or unstable. The value is nonetheless usable because it is de ...

and planning, scheduling, cost control and

budget management Cost accounting is defined as "a systematic set of procedures for recording and reporting measurements of the cost of manufacturing goods and performing services in the aggregate and in detail. It includes methods for recognizing, classifying, al ...

resource allocation In economics, resource allocation is the assignment of available resources to various uses. In the context of an entire economy, resources can be allocated by various means, such as markets, or planning. In project management, resource allocatio ...

, collaboration software,

communication Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inqui ...

decision-making In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either ra ...

, quality management,

time management Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. It involves of various demands upon a person relating to wo ...

and

documentation Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system or procedure, such as its parts, assembly, installation, maintenance and use. As a form of knowledge manageme ...

or administration systems. Numerous PC and browser-based project management software and

contract management software Contract management software is the range of computer programmes, libraries and data used to support contract management, contract lifecycle management, and contractor management on projects. It may be used with project management software. Advanta ...

products and services are available.

History

Predecessors

The first historically relevant year for the development of project management software is 1896, marked by the introduction of the Harmonogram. Polish economist

Karol Adamiecki Karol Adamiecki ( Dąbrowa Górnicza, 18 March 1866 – 16 May 1933, Warsaw, Poland) was a Polish engineer, management researcher, economist, and professor. Life Karol Adamiecki was a prominent management researcher in Eastern and Central Eur ...

attempted to display task development in a floating chart, and laid the foundation for project management software as it is today. 1912 was the year when

Henry Gantt Henry Laurence Gantt (; May 20, 1861 – November 23, 1919) was an American mechanical engineer and management consultant who is best known for his work in the development of scientific management. He created the Gantt chart in the 1910s. Gan ...

replaced the Harmonogram with the more advanced

Gantt chart A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, named after its popularizer, Henry Gantt (1861–1919), who designed such a chart around the years 1910–1915. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationshi ...

, a scheduling diagram that broke ship design tasks down for the purposes of Hoover Dam in early 1931. Today's Gantt charts are almost the same as their original counterparts and are a part of many project management systems.

Emergence of the term "project management" and modernized techniques

The term ''

project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...

'' was not used prior to 1954 when

US Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sig ...

General

Bernard Adolph Schriever Bernard Adolph Schriever (14 September 1910 – 20 June 2005), also known as Bennie Schriever, was a United States Air Force general who played a major role in the Air Force's space and ballistic missile programs. Born in Bremen, Germany, S ...

introduced it for military purposes. In the years to follow, project management gained relevance in the business world, a trend which had a lot to do with the formation of the

American Association of Engineers American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

AACE (1956), and Rang and DuPont's Critical Path Method calculating project duration ever since 1957. The trend is also related to the appearance of the Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) in 1958. PERT went further with monitoring projects, and enabled users to monitor tasks, being at the same time able to evaluate their quality and estimate the time needed to accomplish each of them. As with

s and CPM, PERT was invented for military purposes, this time for the US Navy Polaris missile submarine program. In 1965, there was a new improvement in project management technology. The

US department of defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national sec ...

presented the

work breakdown structure A work-breakdown structure (WBS) in project management and systems engineering is a deliverable-oriented breakdown of a project into smaller components. A work breakdown structure is a key project deliverable that organizes the team's work into ...

(WBS) to dissolve projects into even smaller visual units, organizing them in hierarchical tree structure. WBS was an inspiration for Winston Royce’s Waterfall Method (1970) where management phases are organized in a way that doesn’t allow a new task to begin before the previous ones are completed.

The first project management products and associations

In the period between 1965 and 1969 were formed two of the leading project management associations: the International Project Management Association (IPMA) in Europe, and the

Project Management Institute The Project Management Institute (PMI, legally Project Management Institute, Inc.) is a U.S.-based not-for-profit professional organization for project management. Overview PMI serves more than five million professionals including over 680,0 ...

(PMI) which trains project management professionals and issues certificates. With business shifting towards technology-based and paperless methods, the first project management systems started to emerge.

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ...

and

Artemis In ancient Greek mythology and religion, Artemis (; grc-gre, Ἄρτεμις) is the goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, wild animals, nature, vegetation, childbirth, care of children, and chastity. She was heavily identified with ...

launched their project managers in 1977, while Scitor Corporation did the same in 1979. Many improvements followed in the upcoming decades: in 1986,

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

’s Software Engineering Institute introduced capability maturity software, a five-level project management method for rapidly maturing processes, while in 1988 users met earned value management which added processes’ scope and cost to the schedule. The trend continued with

PRINCE2 PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a structured project management method and practitioner certification programme. PRINCE2 emphasises dividing projects into manageable and controllable stages. It is adopted in many countries wor ...

(1996) which increased the number of processes to seven, because of which developers considered designing products for managing complex projects. In 2001, they adopted the Agile project management concept and focused on adaptive planning and flexible response to changes. In 2006, users were already able to trigger total cost management, a framework that helps controlling and reducing costs in project management.

SaaS and cloud-based project management software

The

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is co ...

(software-as-a-service) trend began in 2008, qualified by users as the most flexible type of project management software for their teams. In 2009,

US News ''U.S. News & World Report'' (USNWR) is an American media company that publishes news, consumer advice, rankings, and analysis. It was launched in 1948 as the merger of domestic-focused weekly newspaper ''U.S. News'' and international-focused ...

classified project management as one of the most demanded skills for obtaining a well-paid job. From 2010 on, popular project management products and services were cloud-based, designed for the needs of virtual teams looking to access information from any location or device. As a result, 2012 brought mobile project management apps.

Trends

With the advent of the

Internet-of-Things The Internet of things (IoT) describes physical objects (or groups of such objects) with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other comm ...

, project management software was developed to incorporate testing technologies, development tools, and improved cyber security methods.

Tasks and Activities

Scheduling

One of the most common project management software tool types is scheduling tools. Scheduling tools are used to sequence project activities and assign dates and resources to them. The detail and sophistication of a schedule produced by a scheduling tool can vary considerably with the project management methodology used, the

features Feature may refer to: Computing * Feature (CAD), could be a hole, pocket, or notch * Feature (computer vision), could be an edge, corner or blob * Feature (software design) is an intentional distinguishing characteristic of a software ite ...

provided and the scheduling methods supported. Scheduling tools may include support for: * Multiple dependency relationship types between activities. * Resource assignment and leveling * Critical path * Activity duration estimation and probability-based simulation * Activity cost accounting.

Providing Information

Project planning Project planning is part of project management, which relates to the use of schedules such as Gantt charts to plan and subsequently report progress within the project environment. Project planning can be done manually or by the use of project m ...

software can be expected to provide information to various people or stakeholders, and can be used to measure and justify the level of effort required to complete the project(s). Typical requirements might include: * Overview information on how long tasks will take to complete. * Early warning of any risks to the project. * Information on workload, for planning holidays. * Evidence. * Historical information on how projects have progressed, and in particular, how actual and planned performance are related. * Optimum utilization of available resource. * Cost maintenance. * Collaboration with each teammates and customers. * Instant communication to collaborators and customers.

Types

Desktop

Project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...

software has been implemented as a program that runs on the desktop of each user. Project management tools that are implemented as desktop software are typically single-user applications used by the project manager or another subject matter expert, such as a scheduler or risk manager.

Web-based

Project management software has been implemented as a

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serv ...

to be accessed using a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

. This may also include the ability to use a

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whi ...

tablet Tablet may refer to: Medicine * Tablet (pharmacy), a mixture of pharmacological substances pressed into a small cake or bar, colloquially called a "pill" Computing * Tablet computer, a mobile computer that is primarily operated by touching the ...

to gain access to the application. Software as a service (SaaS) is also web-based and has become a common delivery model for many business applications, including project management, project management information system (PMIS) and project portfolio management (PPM). SaaS is typically accessed by users using a thin client via a web browser.

Mobile

In recent years project management software has moved to Mobile devices. In 2015 there are more cell phones than computers in the world, therefore the move of SaaS applications to the mobile devices makes perfect sense. This migration has had the additional benefit of enabling the users to view and update project details on the go.

Open Source

Project management software is often published as

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

, comprising approximately half of the applications listed in the article Comparison of project management software.

Personal

A personal project management application is one used at home, typically to manage lifestyle or home projects. There is considerable overlap with ''single user'' systems, although personal project management software typically involves simpler interfaces. See also ''non-specialized tools'' below.

Single user

A single-user system is programmed with the assumption that only one person will ever need to edit the project plan at once. This may be used in small companies, or ones where only a few people are involved in

top-down Top-down may refer to: Arts and entertainment * "Top Down", a 2007 song by Swizz Beatz * "Top Down", a song by Lil Yachty from '' Lil Boat 3'' * "Top Down", a song by Fifth Harmony from '' Reflection'' Science * Top-down reading, is a part of ...

project planning. Desktop applications generally fall into this category.

Collaborative

A collaborative system is designed to support multiple users modifying different sections of the plan at once; for example, updating the areas they personally are responsible for such that those estimates get integrated into the overall plan. Web-based tools, including

extranet An extranet is a controlled private network that allows access to partners, vendors and suppliers or an authorized set of customers – normally to a subset of the information accessible from an organization's intranet. An extranet is similar to ...

s, generally fall into this category, but have the limitation that they can only be used when the user has live Internet access. To address this limitation, some software tools using client–server architecture provide a

rich client In computer networking, a rich client (also called heavy, fat or thick client) is a computer (a "client" in client–server network architecture) that typically provides rich functionality independent of the central server. This kind of computer w ...

that runs on users'

desktop computer A desktop computer (often abbreviated desktop) is a personal computer designed for regular use at a single location on or near a desk due to its size and power requirements. The most common configuration has a case that houses the power supply ...

and replicates project and task information to other project team members through a central server when users connect periodically to the network. Some tools allow team members to check out their schedules (and others' as read only) to work on them while not on the network. When reconnecting to the database, all changes are synchronized with the other schedules.

Visual

A common problem in project management is a difficulty with both viewing and understanding large amounts of fluctuating project data. To tackle this, some project management software utilize information visualization, so that users can more easily find, analyze and make changes to their data. To avoid

information overload Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety, and information explosion) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, ...

, the visualization mantra of “overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand” is often followed.