I work for a medium size company providing e-commerce solutions. Our main business is online store development. We have between 400 and 800 active projects running at any one time. These projects can range from .5 hour jobs with one resource to a hundred hours or more with as many as 5 or 6 resources. We are having an extremely difficult time finding the right project management software. Most of the major SaaS and desktop applications are focused and managing a handful of very large and complex projects and do not fit our needs at all.
We need software that is going to allow us to easily handle and report on as many as 800 projects. We need to track clients who have multiple active projects at a time. We also need the ability to schedule between 30 to 40 resources who work on several projects at once. Tasks will range from 15 minutes to 50 hours or more in rare cases. Most of the tasks are only a few hours.
We need the ability to easily adjust resource schedules and move tasks as needed. So far we haven't found anything that fits these needs. A lot of the major applications become very cumbersome to use when you have this many projects and are working with tasks as short as 15 minutes.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Saving Changes...
Vladimir LiberzonR&D Director| Spider Project TeamMoscow, Russian Federation
Our software is used for managing portfolios that include thousands projects but I am not sure that it is feasible to plan 15 minutes long activities. 5 hour job with one resource shall be considered as a task. We suggest to our users to match activity durartions with the period of project performance analysis. I don't think that you analyze project performance each hour.
So the software can do what you want but I suggest to think about the methodology that will be used. Do you really need the precision that you described? It can make project management too complicated without real improvements that justify this approach.
In case you want to look at the software that can handle resource management in the portfolio of 800 projects (with resource levelling across the portfolio) download Demo from http://www.spiderproject.ru/demo_e.php Demo has 40 activities per project restriction, so it will be hard to try portfolio management. You can create a couple of projects with less than 20 activities and include them into the new portfolio if you will want to try the portfolio levelling.
Write to me if you will have questions or will want to discuss the approaches.
Best Regards,
Vladimir Saving Changes...
Pretti AminIT Project Manger| Aon InsuranceCrawley, West Sussex, United Kingdom
To the person who posted the orginial comment. I have the same issue as we have so many projects on the go and they can range from 1 hour to several days. We have a in house back office tool that we use but there is a lot of room for improvement and need prompts in place to make things easier and notify everyone.
I am trying to look for a software to help manage the number of projects we have on the go will let you know if I find anything and if you do could you please let me know.
Thanks! Saving Changes...
Google JIRA, I think the company that produce are called Atlassian (sp?), it is a ticket tracking system that is very configurable and pretty cheap. We use it for all manner of things.
I think it would fit the bill for you. Saving Changes...
Pretti AminIT Project Manger| Aon InsuranceCrawley, West Sussex, United Kingdom
I think that is is more suited for issues not actual projects. I have worked with JIRA before and is a better tool to deal with issues and tickets. Although in effect the projects could be tickets but my company are looking for a tool with othe features such as emails to be sent when project statuses are updated or a note is added for the requestor to read etc. Still looking for the most suitable one! Saving Changes...
I think you may be better off searching for Work Management Software, as Projects tend to be much much larger items than 15 minutes to 50 hours (you must produce an awful lot of PIDs!). I' have worked at one place where items were not managed as a proect unless they required 6 man months resource, which was very effective.
Saving Changes...
Pretti AminIT Project Manger| Aon InsuranceCrawley, West Sussex, United Kingdom
Hi, yep definately a lot of PIDs. Might have found one but just waiting to see what the limitations are. To be able to adapt the PID to what is required from the business creative, a change request etc. Will also have alook up of work management software. thanks! Saving Changes...
Gabrielle MaherPMO Consultant| IndependentLondon, London, United Kingdom
HI - I agree with the comments below - PPM system software (such as CA Clarity, IBM Rational, Planview, Primavera) are absolutely geared for project and programme management - where a project would definately involve much more than a 15 minutes! or even 100 hour task!!!
The problem - and therefore solution - seems to be more around terminology. Most resource management software tool would help you if you simply want to manage a resource pool and assign tasks. You could also check out the current capability of your time recording system OR helpdesk system (if you have either currently) - both should be able to support your requirements for resource allocation and task management.
As part of the process for your final selection - you should consider how these tasks link to your projects - or not. If these tasks are 'operational' changes (making changes to a 'live' IT environment) you need the software to incorporate production change control / audit trails.
If these tasks are required specifically to support project work (a new product under development - a new client's website) then you should also consider how the software will integrate with other project management tools - and how a project manager will use the new software you select to assign and monitor resources to project related tasks.
Saving Changes...
Anonymous
You may want to check out a simple ppm/alm tool called Lighthouse, www.artifactsoftware.com.
We've used it on projects that range from 1person to 25 members.
Its got some nice features for resource planning across multiple projects as well as all the planning features you'd expect to find in MS project. For the simpler projects we just use the task management tools to keep our billable activities organized. For our more complex projects we take advantage of the integrated requirements, test planning and defects management tools in there too. Saving Changes...
There are more than 80 tools that are referenced ,o) Saving Changes...
Prasad VelagaExecutive| OptisolCollege Station, Tx, United States
Our company Optisol offers a powerful, resource-constrained scheduling software. It can generate a feasible and rational schedule for hundreds of projects on hundreds of resources within a few minutes, if not in seconds. It shows both project schedules and resource schedules graphically and numerically. Being extremely fast, it facilitates extensive what-if analysis of large-scale schedules.
For the last two years, a large machine shop (MIC Group in Texas) has been scheduling the production of about 2,000 orders (with about 20,000 operations) on about 300 machines within seconds using our software. At Wyman Gordon Forgings in Texas, it was successfully tested for scheduling of 500, 000 operations with dependency relations on hundreds of resources within 4 minutes.
The same tool is being used by small project-based production units. It can be easily used for large-scale, resource-constrained, multi-project scheduling that involves hundreds of projects, thousands of tasks and hundreds of shared resources. The resources can be equipment or workers or both. There is no issue with task durations at all. The task durations can range from a minute to years in the same data.
