Project management "tools" not only help with the calculations but also solve the tasks that could not be solved manually.

Project Management software:
1) Creates reliable project schedules that optimize resource usage and takes into account all project constraints like resource, calendar, financial and supply limitations.
2) Calculates project material requirements at any time period.
3) Calculate project resource (labor, machines) requirements for any time period.
4) Calculates project budget and financial requirements for any time period.
5) Collects project performance information and adjusts project plan basing on performance results.
6) Forecasts future project results and shows any deviations from the approved baseline.
7) Controls project contracts performance.
8) Analyzes risk and uncertainties and calculates necessary contingency reserves.
9) Analyzes trends of project parameters.
10) Supplies project stakeholders with the reliable estimates of project performance.

Most of these functions are based on the item 1) - creating feasible schedule that takes into account all project limitations. It is very hard and time consuming to do manually if the size of the project is real (not some token project with 20 activities) and without PM software you will repeat it again and again after entering actual information. It is impossible and as the result you will not adjust your schedule for new situations, you will try to adjust everything to your schedule.

PM software is the the tool that changed the way people manage projects.

Regards,
Vladimir

Stephen, are you sure that you don’t adopt the position that it is way more fun to do all of the planning calculations manually because you are mischevious.
OK, sure it’s fun and educational if you know what you are doing. But it is time consuming and error prone.

Also, you don’t learn anything about the tools if you don’t use them, and you need to learn to use them by using them on simple projects first, before tackling the big, complicated ones.

Also, the tools can be useful for working through and illustrating the basic concepts.

Also, people who say that MSP etc are "just tools" (ie they don’t really know what they are for or how to use them and have no intention of learning what, why or how) are really just fabricating a justification for avoiding tackling something they don’t understand. When you find people saying, "we don’t need those tools because our projects are all very simple etc etc", you won’t find good planning being done some other way, but maybe just something that is being passed off as planning but isn’t really.

Of course, you will also always find the tools being used superficially or primitively as well.

Ritesh,

I’d like to take the position that project management software is completely unnecessary.

Pretty much anything that you can do in the software, you can do by hand, using sticky notes and flip chart paper. With a small project, say, < 200 activities, the analysis that the software will let you do in five seconds or less will take about half an hour -- but it’s much more fun to do it by manually! And various studies suggest that project managers and plannners like to have fun. Whenever a variance occurs, it’s great to be able to pull out a new pack of stickys, and change the old ones.

Now as the project grows in size to, say 2,000 - 10,000 activities, the software will now do in ten minutes the things that take ten hours to do manually, so it might seem like the software is more important on a bigger project. But this ignores the fact that as the size of the project increases, so does the fun of manually analyzing and changing the data -- those ten hours will now be far, far more fun! And if you’re exceptionally lucky, maybe you’ll occasionally get a 20,000+ activity project -- the term "barrel of monkeys" doesn’t even come close, and sleep is very overrated.

That’s the position I’d like to take, anyway. . .