Effective project management requires a combination of wisdom, process discipline, critical thinking and bold decision making.
Companies orientation towards choosing the suitable package of software for project planning and controls divide to three main point of view.
On first orientation, Projects planned by a professional planning and control software such as Primavera P6, MS Project or etc. and controls by the same software. All projects Data such as list of drawings, procurement data and detailed material consumption will record in a professional database as PRIMAVERA Contract Management or other tools. To sump information and create reliable reports, all systems connected with and Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Microsoft POWER BI or ORACLE BI and create on-demand live reports for different level of users.
In second orientation, the team provides project plan in Planning software and delegate project control to MS Excel to sum up detailed actual data, integrate phase completion information and gather actual volumes of works then, provide project status reports and analysis. Although this system is easier to setup and run, users has a huge volume of data entering and data integration works. Report creation takes times and users cannot analysis the latest project situation per request.
In last orientation, both of planning and controlling phases, provides by MS-Excel and surely, this solution is only suitable for short scale projects.