Project Management Tools

There are several tools available in the market for various aspects of Project Management. I am sure there must be quite a few that you must have also used in your career span.
This post attempts to touch upon a few which have had a long standing reputation and manage to get the job done. Please comment on any ones that you use but do not see in the list below and your view points on why you use them or should be used over any others.

Several of these tools available in the market are sold on a per User/Project or Organization level licenses. There are some tools that are open sources. Some of the tools are used based on personal user preferences or are simply organizational choices.
Most or all of these are available as a web version for easy information sharing across teams and facilitate collaboration.

If i were to select a Project Management tool my decision would be based on the following objectives, The tool/s should be
1> Cost effective

2> Rich functionally

3> Good Support and Customer service

4> Intuitive and scalable

Listed below are a few Project Management tools by their areas of application

 Application LifeCycle Management

Application lifecycle consists to right from Project initiation, planning, execution, control and closure. The tool that serves most or all of these functional areas and has minimal need of other products integrations and plug ins and even if it does, can be easily integrated to the other product (e.g. Project Management tool integrating with a HR System or an accounting system etc)

There are several tools that are available for total Project life cycle management and are mostly used at the program level along with project level. They effectively support areas of projec planning, documentation, QA & Testing tracking, communications, scheduling, time tracking, resource management, content and issues management etc.

TeamForge Collabnet is one such complete application management tool that i have used which allows Collaborate development of multiple projects in areas such as 
Testing, QA activities, issues and Tasks tracking etc. This is a web based tool which is extremely flexible in terms of environments support, other tools and processes to be integrated in a project.

Project planning and Scheduling

Microsoft Project is a Planning, Scheduling and Tracking tool which i am sure everyone is familiar with and has used at some point or another of their career. The reason for its popularity and wide use is its simplicity of use and functionally rich and user friendly Interface.
This tool allows you to manage and monitor multi million dollar large projects to small initiatives ranging in a thousand dollars. Though on smaller projects i always prefer to use Excel rather than MS Project. As they say, why use a cannon to kill a mosquito.
MS Project allows you to plot scheduling and tracking graphs, charts, so you can run executive and Management reports and monitor your project progress and take corrective actions wherever necessary.
The only issue i have seen with MS Project is backward compatibility wrt files by older versions of MS Project

Time Tracking

WorkTime is a PC Productivity and project work time tracking tool. This tool provides various options and categories under which you can track your time. The best part of this tool is that it allows you to create reports which give you an exact picture of the time statistics you logged. Users will be able to successfully slice and dice the data by activities, tasks and projects.

Defects and Issue Tracking

There are several Defects, issues and bug tracking tools available in the market. I am sure you also must have used quite a few in your projects so far.
I found JIRA very helpful and user friendly.
JIRA is an Issues and a Bug tracking Software. It is a very customizable, friendly  and easy to use tool. JIRA offers a number of Plug-Ins for Time tracking plus Project Management.
Licensing cost and pricing are not too heavy. It is definitely a scalable and very secured system to use. 
Another tool which is definitely a strong contender to JIRA is ClearQuest from IBM Rational. It has all the features that JIRA provides. One strong advantage of IBM Clearquest is its very Intuitive user friendly UI


Conference and Messaging

Microsoft Sharepoint is another easy publishing and sharing tool that allows the entire staff/Team to update, upload and download documents on the fly with features such as check ins and checkouts to prevent accidental delete of files. There is also a version and user tracking history maintained to audit who changed a document when and why.
This tool also does a lot more than just content management. Sharepoint will allow you to share workspaces, dashboards and portals across Projects and Teams internal and external via MySites thus help in project and cross project communication and collaboration. It also allows you to search internal Documents and message other employees for communications through a central portal system.

ActiveCollab is another project collaboration tool used for Content and Document Management across projects. This tool allows communication and coordination across multiple Teams and persons like Microsoft sharepoint. This tool can be used across multiple projects and has very Intuitive UI, is easy to use and provides value for the money.
The only disadvantage i would like to point out is, this product is no longer free as it once was.
There are other tools in the market like GoPlan and Basecamp which are also very similar functionally to ActiveCollab and one tool may win over the other on some subtle points.

Costing and Pricing

WinCost is a Cost and billing tracking tool that allows you to enter and track cost and pricing details on a project. This beauty of this tool is it provides realtime reports and statistics on the cost effectiveness of a project. It has a vast library of accounting rich fetures that will help you enter your accounting details.
This tool will allow you to do write offs, reconciliations and other accounting adjustments.

Again, this is in no way an exhaustive or a very up to date list. It is something i have pulled together based on what i have used over time or have seen some of my colleagues use to manage their projects.
If you have some other tool suggestions that others may benefit, please feel free to comment below.