Project management software 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 and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource
allocation, collaboration software, communication, decision-making, quality management and
documentation or administration systems. Today, numerous PC and browser-based project
management software and contract management software solutions exist, and are finding
applications in almost every type of business.

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 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 replaced the Hrongram with the
more advanced Gantt chart, a scheduling diagram which 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 critical part of all project management systems.

Emergence of the ‘project management’ term and modernized techniques

The term project management was not used prior to 1954, when US Air Force General Bernard
Adolph Schriever 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 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 to estimate the time needed to accomplish
each of them. As with Gantt charts 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 presented the work breakdown structure (WBS) to dissolve projects to 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 which
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 (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 and Artemis 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’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 (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) trend began in 2008, qualified by users as the most flexible
type of project management software for their teams. In 2009, US News classified project
management as one of the most demanded skills for obtaining a well-paid job.

From 2010 on, the most popular project management solutions were cloud-based, designed for
the needs of virtual teams looking to access information from any location or device. As a result,
2012 brought the first mobile project management apps users can apply on the go.

Trends

With the advent of the Internet-of-Things, 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 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 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 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 web application to be accessed using a
web browser. This may also include the ability to use a smart phone or tablet 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.

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-specialised 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 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 extranets, 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 that runs on users' desktop computer 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, the visualization mantra of “overview first, zoom and
filter, then details on demand” is often followed.