More of the same old "best project management software" thing!

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Hello reader(s)!

Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker fame, asked her Twitter Swarm (hey, if you want to follow me for some reason, find "dglumac") the same question I discussed a few months back.
As she actually has a following, where I have a - well, the "dirty dozen" - the answers she got were much more off the beaten track - some surprising even me, and I've seen project management done with notepad.exe and the windows calendar that pops up when you double-slick on the clock in the bottom right corner.

"Out of the 97 replies I did get, 17 said they use 37 Signals’ Basecamp (and gave it an 8 out of 10 average rating), 12 said they used Microsoft Project (it averaged a 6.6 out of 10 rating), and, interestingly, 9 people said they like Things (which averaged a 7.7 rating) and OmniFocus (which got a rating of 9), both for Mac OS X."

Original article (by Zemanta)

• What's the Best Project Management Software? (smarterware.org)

Project Management made easy

D. Keith Robinson has this to say:

"The first thing you should know about project management is that it doesn’t need to be complicated. Don’t be fooled by thick books or year long certification courses. The basics of project management — the important stuff — is pretty easy and mostly common sense."

And I like it :)

More at:
http://www.dkeithrobinson.com/entry/project_management_made_easy/

ClockingIT

More Lifehacker link goodness:

"The ClockingIT webapp is a hosted, open-source solution to managing team-oriented projects. The robust features in ClockingIT might be overkill for a single worker, but when applied to a team yield a gold mine of management tools and report generation. Projects contain subsets of tasks, which you can filter by various criteria, like "Open Tasks" and "My In Progress Tasks." GANTT charts visualize the project schedule and update with date changes. ClockingIT includes unlimited file storage per project. "

Long time no post!

I know, I' m lazy. But I rather concentrate on my job than this - I'd like to keep it through the recession, thank you very much!

Anyway, Lifehacker (you know them, right?) has a nice new review of Gantter - project management in your browser.

More here: http://lifehacker.com/5222403/gantter-does-project-management-in-your-browser

Free alternatives to MS Project?

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Let's face it, MS Project costs real money. If you're a small company, buying licenses for it will eat up your project margin faster than you can say - well, "margin". However, don't despair - there are free Project Management tools around!







One: OpenProj. Best free PM application ever.

OpenProj by Projity is a desktop replacement of Microsoft Project. OpenProj has equivalent functionality, a familiar user interface an even opens existing MSProject files. It does Gantt Charts, PERT charts etc. Available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows, and it's free - how much better does it get? Review here, Download here.


Second: Zoho Project.

The team at Zoho is one of the coolest "Web 2.0" companies out there. Their online office suite includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, CRM, project management, invoicing and other applications. Being web-native, all Zoho applications are operating system independent. It supports creating tasks, ownership, setting deadlines and tracking milestones; working with calendars, Gantt charts, reports, share supporting files—all the cool features expected in a project management package.

The major difference is that while one can debate the merits of online/offline for individual productivity applications, project management by definition is team-work and as such a natural fit for the Web. Zoho Projects is free for one project, and has a scaled price structure above. 12$ a month gives you 10 projects and 2gigs of file storage. And, even better - if you're running an open-source project - well, it's free. "Beer" free.


Third and last: Ganttproject

Another free alternative - a little less fully featured than the others, but from my experience, the developers take the time to listen to their users (heck, they've incorporated some of my suggestions!). On their website, they claim that "This set is enough for most people (remember that 80% of MSProject customers use 20% of it's numerous features)" - which is probably true, I know I might use 35%, and I'm a heavy user :). Your mileage may vary, of course.

Best news: platform independent(ish), works in Java (so you need a Java Runtime Enviroment if you're running Windows), and free for any kind of use.


More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_project_management_software - but I've tried all of these, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend them!