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...
You could take a look at Onepoint Project. It combines typical aspects of project management with resource management, e.g., Onepoint provides a real-time resource allocation/utilization chart across all projects. There is also a view called a "project pipline" that shows the status of all projects together with some key mertics in a single, easy to read chart.
In addition, projects are easy and fast to set up and the system is quick to learn. We have even PR agencies and advertising companies as customers ;-).
More information can be found on our website (or simply send me a short message):
I would suggest having a look at the Microsoft EPM / Project Server solutions. They are more than capable of handling your requirements as they are highly scalable and are very well supported.
Prasad VelagaExecutive| OptisolCollege Station, Tx, United States
Baz,
He has to manage 400 to 800 active projects in which task durations range from 15 minutes to 50 hours and 30 to 40 resources are to be assigned to tasks as required without overloading. He needs the ability to easily adjust resource schedules and move tasks as needed.
It seems he has not found anything that fits his needs. I would like to know how Microsoft EPM helps automatic and frequent generation of feasible and rational schedules for 30 - 40 resources in this case. I am curious to know which project management packages produce meaningful resource schedules without overloading for multiple simultaneous projects that share resources.
Prasad
www.optisol.biz
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Vladimir LiberzonR&D Director| Spider Project TeamMoscow, Russian Federation
Prasad,
do you remember about Spider Project?
In the presentation at PMI COS conference a case of telecom projects portfolio with more than1600 projects will be discussed. Spider Project is used to calculate portfolio resource and cost constrained schedule, to determine resource critical path, to simulate risks and to define and to manage necessary contingency reserves (time and cost buffers). The number of tasks in the presented portfolio exceeded 170000.
Best Regards,
Vladimir
www.spiderproject.ru Saving Changes...
Prasad VelagaExecutive| OptisolCollege Station, Tx, United States
Hi Vladimir,
I am sorry I forgot about your software. Although I have not used it, I have no doubt about its capability to deal with scheduling on resources of finite capacity.
Regards,
Prasad
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Francisco YagoVp Software Engineering| OdiloYecla, Murcia, Spain
PMI Team Member
