Martin BittnerIT Project Manager| R3D ConsultingQuebec, Quebec, Canada
I’ve used quite a few tool suites, such as MS Project, Artemis, MS Excel and Niku/CA Clarity which are clearly targeted at larger organizations and a bit, well, clunky. I believe we are making some progress towards a more open working environment, and more people are collaborating online and sharing documents and projects.
I believe the biggest thing current PM software companies don’t do is make it easy for project managers to work with. Such as a simple user interface, easier to find the features I use without five clicks to get to one thing.
I’ve spent hours upon hours jacking around with changing WBS, timelines, resources, and versioning of documents and it seems like I could do the work in half the time if I had tools built by people that actually had to use them a lot. You?
Oh, and if you want to chime in even more, I found a survey that dives a little deeper into this question: http://bit.ly/bvdqHa Saving Changes...
I have been working with quite a few Project Management Systems, but felt as you - everything took too much time :(.
Since the project members felt it took too much time to fill in things, they chose not to do it. This made the information in the system very unreliable.
Lately I started using a software called VisionProject. It is not perfect, but the company creating it is extremely customer focused and put in change requests to their backlog for changes to be made in the near future.
What I found was that it had so much and was so user friendly, that even though I looked through more than 100 systems during the spring, nothing was even close to compete to this software.
We bought it in May, and they have already made 2 releases with changes that were requested by us. One was a smaller thing, but the other one was quite a large change.
Anyway - I know you can find it by searching, but since they are a Swedish company and don't have a .com-address, here is a link to their website: www.visionproject.se
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Martin BittnerIT Project Manager| R3D ConsultingQuebec, Quebec, Canada
I have to admit that it looks great!
I've worked in the past with the UI library they're using and it is really nice!
It is a bit expensive though, but I will try out their trial!
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Everything is relative, isn't it :)
We used to have a system from one of the bigger players. We reduced our annual costs by 60% by changing. Now, that didn't include the amount of money we made by becoming more efficient .....
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Martin BittnerIT Project Manager| R3D ConsultingQuebec, Quebec, Canada
What did you have and what did you change for? Saving Changes...
We used to have @Task. It is a great system, but not for us......
The benefit with @Task is the time sheet. It is really easy to use and works fine. However, working in projects, with prioritizing tasks, etc is not very easy. Also, it takes ages to configure if you want to do it easy to use.
We have come that far in the Information Age that the software should support us and help us to be more efficient. Sometimes I believe that the people who create the softwares have never worked in the real world. A lot of systems don't really help out so much.
So, what we wanted to have was something that everyone could work with, regardless of how much computer experience they have. Also, we wanted it to have quite a few features, but still having an easy to use GUI even though the system could do a lot.
This is also a common problem (I believe). It seems that the more functionality a system has, the less sense the UI "should" make. If it is really hard to understand, it must be really good, right ??? It seems that a lot of companies get caught up in creating more functionality, so much that they forget about the users.
