Aside from all of the administrator duties, such as entering everyone's information, schedules, billing rates, etc. - is the basic action that kicks everything off: actually creating a project! From a user standpoint, being able to create a project should be as easy as pie. I don't want to be worrying about navigating to the correct page to be able to add a project or worry about accidentally putting a project in the wrong place.
The most important thing here is to make it extremely easy to find and understand how everything within a project management solution is organized. Once a user can understand the basic structure of organization, learning how to navigate appropriately is a cinch! One of my favorite new features within Project Insight, web-based project management software, is the ability to add a project from the main portal page. That's as simple as it gets!
Once a project is named, created and ready to start filling in...it will also bring a sense of relief to the user if it's all self explanatory and intuitive. Having to click and wait for another window to pop up to fill out tasks, dates and more can be very time consuming and difficult for the end user. It's a big plus to be able to fill in a task list from one view and simply keyboard strokes (similar to using MS Excel).
What features would make creating a project easy for YOU?
Janelle Abaoag, Project Insight
