Best Project Management Tools of 2024

What is a project management tool?

Usually, when you are working on a project, you will be working with a team. And all the members will be working on the project and performing their tasks. A project, irrespective of its complexity and scale, requires different structures and it comprises different categories. And keeping all this in memory and doing it day in and day out really requires extra-ordinary skills.  And synching the work of all members will be complicated.

To organize everything that deals with managing a project, such as noting the information, plotting deadlines, and sharing the documents among team members, there needs to be a sophisticated tool that keeps everything in place. And project management software is the tool that every team requires for the smooth running of the project they are managing.

Unlike sharing everything over the mail services, a project management tool lets the team members access the project and the documents surrounding it, in real-time. And it also paves the easiest way for collaborating with external members or sharing the developments or updates with the owner of the project.

If you ask us what separates project management tools from other tools, the project management tool is used only for projects. You cannot use project management tools for any other tasks. But if you choose the right project management software, you are assured that all the tasks that are involved in managing a project are covered.

And it can be any kind of project. There is no limitation on the type of project you can manage with this tool. If you consider a website to be a project, it involves creating the website, getting inputs from the client, and managing that website will be a continuing process. The creation will have a start date and delivering the final product will have the end date. All this might seem complicated, but with the help of the project management tool, this turns out to be a very simple and organized task.

How does project management software work?

Understanding how a product management tool works can be a bit confusing for beginners. But the ones who have already had hands-on experience with using a project management tool will find it extremely easy to understand the working of a project management tool. 

As you already know, multiple people work on a project and these people will be using the app to update their tasks. Usually, the tasks designated to each individual are put up in the software and any progress made and the time spent to do the designated task is updated by every individual.

While there must be a dedicated person to act as the project manager, that person will be the one who leads the project. Just because they are the project managers, it does not necessarily mean they are the ones who handle the software. He or She might be managing the project only offline without even using the app or manage both.

As far as a project manager's role is concerned, he or she will have access to all the task lists of every team member and can analyze the job done by each and everyone on the team. They can easily see who is performing better and who is not performing up to the mark. The software can also help in redistributing the tasks between two or more individuals, depending on the load on them.

And if you think where within the app is all the files and documents stored, most of the project managers come with storage space for all the project data to be stored. While this storage space will be enough for small scale projects, if you are working on a large scale and a complex project, you will need more storage. This is where the option to connect to cloud storages like google drive, dropbox, OneDrive, and more, comes to your rescue. You can easily upload your data to these third-party storage spaces and it can also be easily accessed by the team members.

Project Management Software vs Collaborative Tools

There is much confusion surrounding these two types of software. People often consider collaborative software like project management tools and vice versa. The fact is that what collaborative tools help you do is just one part of project management. Collaborative tools can help you in communicating with other team members or share data.  Project management is a lot more than that. 

But nowadays, project management tools are loaded with native collaborative tools, and with the help of these, you can connect to the collaborative software that your team might already be using. So it is clear that project management software can do everything the collaborative tools do, but you can use collaborative tools just to carry out a part of project management, not managing the whole project.