I recently advised a friend and former colleague who was asked by her boss to find a project management software solution for their group or company.  Since her question lacked important details, I suggested that she ask her boss for his or her expectations for this tool.  Are they looking for a pretty Gantt chart to display a static plan that is updated once per year, or are they looking for a dynamic tool that would help them create, manage, and collaborate around a living plan?  Maybe they are looking to start with one and scale to the other.  To help her sort this out, I sent her this link.

The fact that she thought Microsoft Project was overkill suggested to me that they wanted to start small.  Even though a lot of features go unused, I seldom think of MS products overkill, but at ~$1000 per license MS Project is not cheap either.   According to the Wikipedia table linked above, MS Project covers only resource management, but it is my understanding that companies adopting MS Project can easily grow into MS Office Project Server which covers the other aspects. I view the major advantages to MS products as: the familiarity and ease of use and the network of partners.  Open-source products can often be acquired for a lot less cost but the tradeoff in my experience is more of a learning curve.

Of course, ease of use is not limited to Microsoft.  I have experience using AtTask through a third-party host/provider. External business factors caused us to drop the product, but the team piloting the software found it very robust and easy to use.   The option to use this tool as a service helped us implement with little upfront investment at a time that IT resources were spread very thin.  I encouraged my friend to look for such options if that met their objectives.

I hope I was able to impress upon my friend the importance of defining business objectives as the first step to selecting software.  Think it through, but don’t get bogged down in analysis.  Consider different phases that will allow you to start small, simple, and/or inexpensive but not lose ground if you have to upgrade later.

Overview
Nate Bowler, CTO of @task, becomes our first in-studio guest on the Bungee Line. @task provides project management, Gantt chart, workflow, and time tracking software through both traditional host-your-own and Software-as-a-Service models. As with so many companies in the providing web-based software, they provide an API.
36:25, 16.7 MB

Related Links
Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in this episode.

• @task
• Project Daily (@task blog)
  
• @task Developer Center
• @task for the iPhone

• Alex & Ted’s Cool Web Tips
  • Google search gets social (Alex’s Tip)
  • OSCON (O’Reilley Open Source conference Ted attends in Portland, OR this week)