7 Benefits of Using Cloud-Based Project Management Tools

By Megan Cacioppo, Deltek

“The cloud.”  It’s a term that gets thrown around quite often these days – in both a personal and professional context.  It’s where you likely store the thousands of photos of your kids, pets and friends from your iPhone. It’s also where businesses are turning in an effort to reduce costs and improve the access and flexibility of their applications in today’s data-driven world. And project-based organizations are no exception.

What Are Cloud-Based Project Management Tools?

Cloud-based project management tools coordinate the planning, collaborating, monitoring, and delivering of a project, and enable organizations to manage their multi-cloud resources and services.

Today’s Challenges

Whether you’re in construction, energy, or serve the needs of the government – we all have similar goals: to grow, innovate, expand and be profitable.  But achieving these goals is no easy feat.

• We often work with internal and external teams (like sub-contractors) who are spread out across the nation or globe, making communication and gaining real-time insight into project status more difficult.
• We struggle to incorporate new tools and capabilities that would make executing projects much simpler because our IT shops are hyper-focused on delivering corporate initiatives.
• We’d ideally like to focus solely on project delivery, but often get bogged down with IT issues – like server procurement, software upgrades and patches, etc.
• We’d benefit from sharing lessons learned across projects to drive continuous improvement, but struggle to tie together data from disparate systems and tools.
• All of this holds us back from doing what we were hired to do in the first place – execute high quality projects on-time and on-budget.  Enter “the cloud.”

7 Benefits of Moving to a Cloud-Based Project Management Tool

Moving project management tools to the cloud eliminates the typical challenges project teams face.  At a high level, it allows you to deliver greater flexibility to your network of project participants while reducing overall internal IT costs to host, support and manage core project applications. But if you’re unsure or scared of “the cloud” – don’t be! Here are 7 key benefits of leveraging cloud-based project management tools.

Benefit #1 – Reduced implementation time

Cloud-based solutions get you up and running in a matter of days or hours instead of weeks. No more waiting on hardware to be procured, shipped, installed and configured. Simply log-in and start executing right away.

Benefit #2 – No more duplicate data entry across systems

With cloud-based project management tools, your disparate tools for scheduling, cost management, risk management and reporting will be able to “talk” to each other – eliminating the need for duplicate data entry across systems.

Benefit #3 – Enhanced communication and productivity

The anywhere, anytime access nature of the cloud allows you to cut down typical geographical barriers and tie your distributed project team together in one platform. This enhances communication, productivity and the overall likelihood of project success.

Benefit #4 – Increased access security

Do you work with multiple stakeholders on a project? Cloud-based solutions allow you set up role- and team-based permissions to ensure only the right people have access to the right project information.

Benefit #5 – Lowered costs

Lower total cost of ownership. By moving to the cloud, you can lower your overall total cost of ownership. Traditional costs for hardware and maintenance are completely eliminated, allowing you to increase the profit margins on your projects.

Benefit #6 – Control software upgrades

Ever been in the middle of a project and a required software update throws off your current settings and delays project progress? With cloud-based solutions you can control what versions are being used. No more desktop installs and upgrades, and releases are pushed out only when it works for you at a much more rapid pace.

Benefit #7 – Save time

With cloud-based project management tools, you’ll save time – from implementation all the way through to project execution and close out.

As you can see, cloud-based project management tools are no longer a thing of the future.

In fact, Deltek has teamed up with LoadSpring to offer its industry leading Project & Portfolio Management suite through a unified cloud platform – Deltek PPM in the Cloud.  The ultimate goal? To help you streamline your project controls and win more business.

To learn more about cloud-based solutions for project management, contact Deltek or LoadSpring to schedule a more personalized demonstration.