Project management software for developing plans and guides for projects.
Description
Project management software aims to help end users oversee the execution of entire projects. It usually includes tools for assigning and organizing tasks, scheduling, reporting, charting, tracking progress, resource allocation and collaboration.
How to choose
The price for a sophisticated project management solution may be as high $20,000. Almost all the applications are able to produce Grantt or PERT charts so if that's what you're looking for, you might find a cheap or even free tool that's perfect for your needs.
The fist thing you should think about is the size of your project and the budget you are willing to spend on licenses and training when you begin your quest for a project management solution.
You might realize that you don't need a PM solution at all as other software products like Visio or Sharepoint can effectively manage projects thanks to their collaboration and scheduling features. Who knows, maybe even Google Docs and SpreadSheets might do the trick for you.
| - For users with lower expectations, products like Quick Gantt and Milestone Simplicity will do the trick.
- If scheduling and tracking software are needed, Microsoft Project and Suretrak may be better choices.
- Enterprise solutions are designed for managing multiple projects simultaneously. They come packed with tools for resources management, risk assessment, performance tracking and budget planning. They are usually very expensive and pretty hard to get used to. But if you need detailed reports, you have to be financially prepared. There are plenty software products that fit in this category, like Artemis, Open Plan and Micro Planner X-Pert.
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Important features for project management software
- Task management
- Possibility of assigning and reassign tasks
- Progress tracking (achievements)
- Feedback on completed tasks (for measuring effectiveness)
- Deadlines (expected dates for project completion)
- Task dependencies (task completion based on time, resources etc)
- Recurring tasks (such as weekly maintenance)
- Scheduling (start times, running projects)
- Calendars
- Time lines
- Events
- Gantt charts (charts that display activities over time as blocks)
- Reporting
- General Stats
- Work load reports (estimated resource usage)
- Financial reports
- Custom reports
- Document management
- Budget (planning and scheduling of financial activity)
- Critical paths (sequences of work and required time for each task)
- Project templates
- Scope
- Milestones (important for long-term projects)
- Baselines (predefined or custom values for comparisons)
- Risks and benefits analyzers
- Resource management
- Materials
- Supplies
- Notes
- Capacity planners
- Collaboration
- Bug tracking
- Forums
- Timelines
- Dashboard
Market Statistics
- Project management tools are very popular among software companies. Only 5% of organizations never used such an application when working on a new task while almost 50 percent use them on a regular basis.
- The most widely spread solution seems to be the commercial Microsoft Project but open source alternatives are catching up really fast.
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Top Products
| This year, the 6 nominees for the Project Management 18th Annual Jolt Awards were Easy Projects .NET by Logic Software Inc., Rally Enterprise by the vendor with the same name, ResultSpace by Sapient, Software Planner by Pragmatic Software Co. Inc., TargetProcess On-Demand and TeamCity by JetBrains. The winner will be announced on March 5, 2008 at the Software Development Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA. |
Products
Open source downlodable project management solutions
| Aiming to be a completely free alternative to Microsoft Project, OpenProj has become a very popular product with more than 250,000 downloads all over the world. |
| Trac is a cross platform open source project management tool written in Python that's suitable for mid-size projects. Trac has an integrated wiki and SVN and requires a project administrator to assign permissions to users | 
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| Open Workbench is a sophisticated project management solution used mainly for scheduling and management. It is open source, therefor free, but can be upgraded to CA's Clarity system. It has an user friendly interface is is very intuitive |
| TaskJuggler is one of the most popular project management systems on the market. It supports CSV data export and can generate XML and HTML reports | 
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| Planner was released under the GNU GPL license and is part of the GNOME Desktop. This is also a cross platform project management tool with basic features like resources management, tasks assignment and multi scenario management. Unfortunately it doesn't support multiple projects |
| GranttProject - GranttProject is continuously evolving (like any other open source product) based on the users' needs. What separates it from the other solutions is the user friendly interface and the large supporting community. | 
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Open source web based project management solutions
| DotProject is one of the few project management solutions implemented in PHP. It is highly customizable and flexible, it uses Apache and MySQL and since it's web based, it can be accessed from anywhere. | 
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| Project.net is a sophisticated project execution tool that helps teams maximize their project performance, reduce costs and improve worker productivity. It allows employees at different levels of a corporation to collaborate on multiple projects using both internal and external resources |
| ProjectPier is a web based project management solution with an user friendly interface and the feel of Web 2.0. ProjectPier is all about tasks, milestones and files and it helps you gather all the data in one place that's accessible for the whole team | 
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| TestLink is not really a project management tool, but an open source (licensed under the GNU GPL) test management solution. Using PHP and MySQL (or Postgres), TestLink make report generation, prioritizing and assigning tasks easy |
Commercial desktop solutions
| Microsoft Project is a "best seller" in project management software with more than 20 million licenses sold so far. Thanks to the integration with other Microsoft popular products like Excel and Outlook, Microsoft Project it's spreading faster and faster even if the license is pretty expensive ($1000 per client) and the documentation can only be obtained for an extra fee. |
| OmniPlan is free to use as long as you don't need more than 20 items for your document. Its interface is user friendly so it helps reduce training costs. It contains tools for resource allocation, task management, scheduling, violations, timelines, critical paths and collaboration | 
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| Primavera Project Planner is one of the most complex (and expensive) project management solutions. It provides full integration with Microsoft Project Server 2007 and was positioned by Gartner in the leader quadrant in June 2007 |
| Collanos Workplace is a commercial project management application that allows team members to receive alerts for latest changes to files, create unlimited ongoing projects, insert any type of content into folders, organize files and invite colleagues to join, communicate and discuss | 
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| Contactizer Pro works on Mac OS X (Tiger and Leopard too) and provides a single solution for managing, sharing and organizing information. It suits individuals and businesses too and has an elegant and user friendly interface. It syncs with iCal and can automatically link emails with contacts |
| RiskyProject is used for evaluating risk and uncertainties that might occur. It will help project managers determine moments and relationships between risks, identify crucial tasks and compute project success rates. A 30 day trial version is available on RiskyProject's official homepage | 
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| Sophocles is a project management tool for screenwriters. It has numerous features for story creation, scheduling, budgeting and reporting. Thanks to the relations viewer users can generate social graphs from the scripts they wrote |
| Merlin is a simple, fun yet powerful network based collaborative project manager that was designed for Mac OS X. The latest version, Merlin 2.5 (beta), also runs on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It can synchronize with iCal or other specific resources in a separate calendar. So far Merlin won two awards: the IT Enquirer Garden Cube Award (2007) and the 23rd Annual Editors? Choice Award | 
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Commercial web based project management solutions
| Mingle is the perfect project management and collaboration solution for companies that need to manage Agile IT projects. Mingle is one of the 5 finalists of the 18th annual Project Management Software Jolt Awards | 
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| @tasks aims to help companies get the work done effectively and successfully. Industry leaders like Adobe, AT&T, Apple and Samsung are already using it. It's intuitive and user friendly and it allows project managers to use their own platforms instead of specific databases. |
| 24SevenOffice helps project managers stabilize the relations with customers. It's a relatively cheap solution as it costs less than 50$ per user (price per month) and was translated in 6 languages. It helps companies obtain a higher level of productivity, control, security and profitability | 
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| Basecamp is an elegant project management solution that allows team members to collaborate on both internal and client projects. It includes a customizable interface, dashboards, TO-Do lists, file sharing, message boards, milestones, time tracking, comments and many more |
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Project Management (76 products)
