A project is a temporary endeavour, having a defined beginning and end (usually constrained by date, but can be by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet particular goals and objectives, usually to bring about beneficial change or added value.
The above definition of a project is taken from Wikipedia, and does a good job of summarising what a project is. At its most basic level, this application will help to complete these projects in an efficient manor by bringing together all the people involved in the project into a centralised system, where they can easily collaborate, share resources, track deadlines etc. What functionality is included as part of a project will be described in the appropriate sections, but I will outline some of the project specific functionality.
Projects can be nested
This is something which seems to be lacking from a lot of web based project management systems, but is requested by a lot of users. A project can have any number of sub projects, but each project can only have 1 parent (a top level project has no parent project).
Only one company and client account per project
At first, this may seem like a limitation, but this “limitation” combined with nested projects makes sense. If you have a project with 2 or more companies working on it, one of those companies will be leading the project. In this case, the lead company controls the top level project, and the second company is a sub project which has the parent company as its client. This even works for very complex project structures, as you can have the hierarchy of any width and depth, but at each level, there is always a company in charge of its sub hierarchy.
Projects, do it your way
Everyone manages their projects differently, so the PMS will not force a given system onto you, but aims to be as open as possible, so you can do it your way. One example of this is with deadlines, as mentioned in the opening definition, most projects are completed to a deadline, but not all of them, so this won’t be a required piece of information, although giving it will provide added value.
As mentioned earlier, the main purpose of the project is to act like a container, so it can group relevant data together, which will be discussed in more detail later.
