632598256894

Often, a manager is faced with the challenge of managing the many details concerned with a project,
be it the construction of a building or pulling together a financial plan. With fairly simple projects,
paper and pencil or a simple spreadsheet might be adequate tools for coordinating the people and steps
involved in a project. But as the project gets complex, involving, say, more than a few people and/or
more than a few dozen steps, one should consider using project management software to help with the
planning and control of the activities.
Project management software allows a manager to plan for and then control the steps in a project
with an eye toward managing the people and resources required for the project. Good project
management software can help a manager foresee bottlenecks or constraints in a plan and can help the
manager bring the project to completion in the shortest available time.
One popular tool for managing projects is called Microsoft Project. Exhibit 19.11 presents a typical
screen from Microsoft Project. It shows the steps in a project along with a graphical representation of
those steps in a format called a Gantt chart.
Exhibit 19.11 Gantt chart in Microsoft Project.
Networking
One of the advents of the recent decade was extensive networking, or interconnecting, of computers,
which has facilitated the sharing and exchanging of data and information. The interconnecting may be
directly through wires within a building; using modems via a public network (cable, DSL, or dial-up);
or utilizing wireless modems that use radio frequency transmissions between the computers.