Hey Everyone - Some background - we provide closure systems to multiple brands/products. A few of our parts go into our partners' products. We provide prototyping and design assistance, and then help integrate our products into their manufacturing process for each individual product.
I'm looking to track the same 15 tasks at a high level for each brand/product. Basically I'd like to track each product we are integrating with from Proof of Concept, prototyping, design, tooling, sales samples, etc, up to product introduction. I think I can create a template with the 15 tasks and then replicate it for each product (over 50 right now) where we are in development. Since I don't have to track tasks under each phase (each task in design for instance) MS Project is just overkill for this process. In addition to templates, I'd love the following functionality:
- Ability to link predecessor/successor tasks and automate/update all linked tasks when a date is changed on a specific product.
- A roll up function to show a status view of all the products/projects
- Web based would be good, especially if I can have multiple accounts access the project
thanks in advance for your counsel! doug Saving Changes...
Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
I'm interested to hear what others say about this. I've reviewed a number of software tools over the years on my blog (you can read the reviews here, if you are interested) and most of the products I have tried do not have the automatic update feature when you change the date on a predecessor/successor task. In fact, dependency management in web based 'light' tools seems to be very poor overall. I think it's because most of the cheap/free/low use tools are aimed at people who don't do dependency management in the way you do in MS Project. They are the graphical representation of task lists, not proper scheduling tools.
Anyway, that's just my view. I hope other people have some tools to suggest - and maybe some of the products I've reviewed have updated the way they manage dependent tasks since I looked at them, so please don't just take my word for it! Saving Changes...
