A better Project Manager tool than MS Project?

Question

I regularly use MS project on 6-12 month duration programming projects with several hundred steps and half a dozen engineers.

Its ...ok... in that I can define lots of project steps, dependencies, task size estimates and resource assignments.

Ignoring that any project plan is actually a bad model of the real truth, MS project fails me on several fronts:

• I can't provide a optional "prefer task1 over task2 to complete". This would be just like a task precedence link, except it could be broken by the task scheduler.
• I can't assign a resource part time (say 25%) to one task, and part time (75%) to another, and get a sensible schedule with these overlapping.
• During construction of the project, I'd like the tool to continuously relevel and reschedule. I'm forced to do this by hand and it gets really tiring to repeat this hundreds of time during a day of project construction.
• I apparantly can't say, "This task takes X amount of work", and have the work held constant while I add/subtract multiple resources. It is difficult to get a work estimate for a task, esp. when you have several hundred; having MS Project damage that information as you play with resource assignments is worse than annoying, its dangerous to good planning.
• I can't say, resource X is N time faster than resource Y (or better yet, is equivalent to N unit-skilled programmers). Yet it is true of the developors in my organization (yours too!) and I'd like the scheduler to take that into account when I assign resources.

Are there other project planning tools out there used by people on software projects? Are they better than MS project? In any of the ways above?

Answer 1

Check out planview

Answer 2

It is only natural to mention FogBugz on this site. They have a nifty feature called evidence based scheduling that is really cool.

Answer 3

We're currently using Zen for project planning. You'll find this very different from MS Project - simpler, more freeform, and it won't have many of the features you're expecting. It's a different way of looking at project management based on Lean methodologies. Along the lines of Kanban in Action, we supplement this with MS Team Foundation Server (TFS) to track detailed information and lower-priority backlog items.

Lean, similar to Agile, is a different way of thinking. It may seem alien at first, but IMHO it's worth investigating. It may not be appropriate for every class of project, though.

Answer 4

Try Open Workbench. It is free. But I personally use dotProject because it is web-based solution.

Answer 5

List of alternative solution for MS project

AtTask, Inc.

Aras Corp

Artifact Software

Assembla

CAMeLEAN/PM

Clarizen

Daptiv

Easy Projects .NET

ProjectInsight

Basecamp

ProjektronBCS

Answer 6

My team is using Rational Team Concert for our current project. It seems tilted towards the "agile" development methodology, but the product itself is rather good.

Answer 7

I'd seriously consider hand cranking it in Excel.

Your team and project size is small enough that what you're really looking for is something which allows you to assess feasibility and monitor what's happening at any given time.

Many of the things you're asking it to do are, when it comes down to it, going to require manual intervention and understanding which mean that any automation is at best a guide. Personally I find these are the sort of things where project planning tools will spit out an answer which is either (a) wrong but convincing looking enough that you buy it and don't find out it's wrong until it's too late or (b) wrong enough that you want to double check it but the tool has either hidden it's working or doesn't allow you to correct the incorrect assumptions when you do find them.

Seriously, Excel is the way forward - I use it for teams of 16 - 20 running multiple projects and find it so much more useful that Project has ever been.

Answer 8

Hi Now Microsoft has launched all new Microsoft project 2010 with many advanced features. Hope this new version can solve most of your queries. You should check features available in different editions like project server, project professional and project standard 2010 for more details.