Project management software doesn’t necessarily mean the discipline of project management

I use the term “project management” to mean a set of disciplines for keeping a complicated set of tasks on time and efficiently run (See my post of April 28, 2009: project management skills at SABIC Innovative Plastics; and June 24, 2007: project management with 5 references.)

Others use the term “project management” more broadly, such as for organizational software that helps you collaborate and communicate within the department and with outside counsel, which includes such functions as sharing documents, to do lists and calendars. LTN – Law Technology News, Vol. 16, Sept. 2009 at 29, has a good piece by David Newdorf about three inexpensive but capable packages that provide this kind of manage-this-project support. He recommends Basecamp which starts at $24 a month. Newdorf also commends ProjectPier, a free, open source program that does almost everything Basecamp does. A third offering is activeCollab, which you can host on your own server.

I know nothing first hand about this genre of software but it appears able to help in-house counsel keep on top of large projects (See my post of July 8, 2009: iFramework for litigation management.).