‘Smart' Project Management: Smartphone ‘Apps' for Project Management

‘Smart' Project Management: Smartphone ‘Apps' for Project Management

Céline M. Silvius, Gilbert Silvius
Copyright: © 2016 |Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9867-3.ch011
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Abstract

Mobile devices and applications are changing the way individuals gather, process and share information. A development which also applies to project management. This chapter reports an explorative study on the functionality of 50 project management apps. The apps were analyzed on the variables: type of functionality, project management processes supported, methodology/standard supported, topics covered, website support, languages supported, project roles supported, number of team members supported and number of projects supported. Our analysis showed that the functionality of project management apps today is mainly focused on two application areas: (A) Supporting the role of the project manager individually in the planning/organizing processes of the project and (B) Supporting team communication and team collaboration. Lacking in functionality seems to be the communication/collaboration with project sponsor and other stakeholders. Based on our study we recommend project managers to be selective when starting to use project management apps.
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Selecting Project Management Apps

The operating system platforms for smartphones and tablets appear to be settling on IOS from Apple, Android from Google and, on some distance, Windows Phone from Microsoft. Figure 1 shows the number of apps available in the official app stores for these platforms.

Figure 1.

The number of apps available in the leading app stores

978-1-4666-9867-3.ch011.f01
(Source:Statista, 2015)

The Google Play store has now over 1.6 million apps available, with an approximate number of downloads of over 70 billion (Wikipedia, 2015b). The number of apps available for the IOS platform is approximately 1.5 million, with over 75 billion downloads (Wikipedia, 2015). The Windows Phone store now has approximately 340.000 apps available (Statista, 2015) and in total some 3 billion downloads (Hachman, 2013). As the Windows Phone platform is clearly trailing the IOS and Android platforms, we focused solely on the latter two.

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