MODERN TOOLS FOR PROJECT PLANNING, MONITORING AND EVALUATION

Abstract

In project management, a number of basic requirements apply to the selection of planning, monitoring and evaluation tools in the IT products market: - possibility of forwarding files; - built-in powerful communication functionality; - setting calendars for project resources; - the possibility of visualizing project works using calendar plan, Gantt chart, network graphs, progression chart; - the ability to create, configure, delegate and control tasks. Also, such factors as a friendly interface and an acceptable design are important for a modern software user. In addition, depending on the specifics of the projects and the type of company, requirements specific to their sphere of activity have been formed: - for designers and the field of IT-development design, the requirements for the extended functionality of matching the layouts with the customer’s expectations are relevant; - for educational organizations, it is important to have convenient access to documents (training courses, tests) with the possibility of effective design of presentations; - for manufacturing enterprises, functionality that allows synchronizing project management processes with the resource base and/or accounting systems is in demand. In recent years, the requirement of compatibility with other popular digital products has been updated. The most popular software products in recent years are listed below, which include a variety of project planning, monitoring and evaluation tools: Trello, Asana, MS Projects, Wrike, Zoho Projects. Summarizing the results of the content analysis of the publication of scientists and practitioners in the field of project management, it can be noted that the traditional toolkit, which is used for the purpose of planning, monitoring and evaluating projects, is improving slightly; permanent shifts and updates apply to such a class of tools as IT products, when more and more software appears on the market, which is aimed at providing specific user requirements and takes into account organizational factors in different ways: the size of the organization, the specifics of its strategic management, project maturity, the used project management methodology, basic values and spheres of activity of the organization, type of organizational management structure.