Software Best Practices

Hi everyone,

I was just wondering what project planning tools everyone is using and what you feel the pros and cons are?

My current experience is biassed towards MS Project and an old version of Project Management Workbench (which I believe has evolved into Open Workbench). I intend to spend some time soon evaluating some of the different products that are available. Open Workbench is one that I plan to look at as well as new style tools like Extreme Planner and Liquid Planner.

I'd be really interested to hear about other people's experiences. 

 If we are talking about straight scheduling and resource software, I use OmniPlan. It's a Mac only product, for those who have them. It is the easiest to use scheduling software I have come across. My main problem with MS Project is that half the time when I click something I am not quite sure what is going to happen. My highest compliment for software is that it adapts to me rather than the other way around, which is what this product does.

In fact, I am a huge devotee of OmniGroup software. If they sold stock I would buy it.

Kevin
 

Hi David,

I've mainly used MS Project with some Primavera in a past life.  Right now I'm running an internal project to roll out MS Project Enterprise Server to fully integrate our Project Planning/Tracking and Resource scheduling functions. 

I quite like MS Project especially the later versions, most especially multi-level undo which has finally appeared in MSP 2007.  Resource levelling can be a bit brain dead and creating hammock tasks is far from obvious but it has good EVA support and intgrates well with other Office suite apps.

One addition I'd ereally like to see would be a true scheduling function rather than basic resource levelling - i.e. get the tool, whilst obeying dependencies, resource availabilities, and milestone constraints try to find the optimum time phasing of tasks based on some preset criteria (e.g. min overall duration, min parallel resource count etc)  A company called iLog used to make a C++ class library called scheduler which was built on another tool they made called solver which did this stuff.

However, at the end of the day though it is just a tool - and regardless of how good any PM tool is it won't make up for a poor ProjMan.

Because the Company doesnt already do any project management we dont have MS Project and I've been experimenting with free or close-to-it software.

 Currently I've been using Project Center's software ( https://www.projectscenter.com/ ) but I'm not very happy with it.

It doesnt have an easy way to answer the main question I (and my boss) want answered. How long did it take us to finish all the current tasks?

Even though it keeps track it doesnt have any good reports that give us simple "Actual Time" tasks. Therefore getting future "Estimated Times" will be a half-day job.

I like the fact that it can keep running "sub-task" logs which makes it easy to keep track of the 'additional' tasks that a single task can take, and keeps a total of the real time of all of a Task and its Sub-Tasks. It just doesnt doesnt have a good report for this information.

Is there a simple program that will simply take in Actual Time Per Task and give back good information on that?

We use a combination of MS Project and Excel. 

One realization that made MS Project easier for us to use was when we separated typical project milestone tasks that occur in every project and kept those in an MS Project template--then made an excel spreadsheet containing the novel subtask items for each individual project's needs.  This has made managing projects easier for the teams and me.  Simple but it works. 

As i stated in another forum, if you have money to spend and are doing agile development, Rally has set the bar that everyone else should be measured against.