Comments on: Microsoft Project is not a project management tool

By: Richard Maybury

Richard Maybury — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:58:07 +0000

Hi Kevin, thanks for bringing this to my attention. We seem to agree that for most people MS Project is not a practical tool for planning, juggling and delivering multiple project deliveries unless one is working with MS Project server and mainly sitting in a PMO.

My own approach to planning, juggling and executing project deliverables is to drive activities through a combination of Outlook Contacts and Outlook Categories.

Your solution appears to be based upon Outlook’s Categories with some additional functionality built in. It looks good. Does the dashboard sync across to Windows smart phones?

I may well download a trial onto a virtual machine to check it out. Thanks again for bringing it to my attention
Richard

By: Kevin Moore

Kevin Moore — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:29:50 +0000

Hi,

You’ve put together a great article with a lot of good points on the problems people often run into with MS Project.

If you or your readers are looking for another solution, I’ve built some project management processes into Microsoft Outlook. You can find more information on our web-site Outlook Project Management

Kevin

By: Richard Maybury

Richard Maybury — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:46:29 +0000

Hi John, thanks for your comments. This looks like another advanced task creation, tracking and reporting system for project related activities. I’d be keen to learn if it does integrate and sync with MS outlook or Lotus Notes or is it a stand alone system?
Thanks

By: John

John — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:57:14 +0000

We took the route of building our own software several years ago. Our project manager is certified in MS Project and found it to be too much for our company. He has been the guiding architect behind Intervals, the web-based project management tool that we built and use. It is intended to be an alternative for those who find MS Project to be too overwhelming for their needs. While it is not PMBOK compliant, it does offer some Gantt-like capabilities that we plan on extending.

By: Richard Maybury

Richard Maybury — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:49:43 +0000

Looks good, Tom, very simple and elegant and probably worth a look at. My only concern, though, is that it is not possible to plan a project to PMBOK standards in a Gant Chart format alone.

That said, I did check out the 3 minute tutorial. All very intuitive. Probably worth investigating for your personal projects. Any plans to have it integrate with programmes like MS Outlook?

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:17:25 +0000

I just launched http://tomsplanner.com a new approach to project planning.

- Web based but save on your own computer
- No learningcurve
- Very time efficient
- The tool gives you control back, instead of controlling you
- Share projects online with your team
- If you need to, export to MS Project

Beta users are welcome!