Rookie here, and I hope I'm not posing questions that have been addressed a bazillion times (I've searched a bit and don't immediately see them in history).
I'm trying to choose a software platform to track progress of tasks across 25+ similar projects, with a pool of 20+/- resources (people). I don't need detailed time or expense tracking, and my crew won't respond well to a complicated platform, so MS Project Professional may be more than we need. But I do want to give it a good chance before going elsewhere. Two critical features I'm not immediately seeing in that platform are:
- the ability of resources to input their own progress or % complete on tasks (perhaps from a stripped-down version of the platform)
- user collaboration (discussion, file uploads, etc.) tied to tasks
Feature #1 is important to us for a number of reasons, one of which is I don't want to become a bottleneck as the dedicated progress-updater-guy. Feature #2 matters because we're pretty team oriented. Even though one person is responsible for a task, others may need to offer input.
I'm also evaluating TeamGantt (www.teamgantt.com) as a potential platform. It does these two things well, but not as robust as MS Project in other areas like reporting, task relationships, and automatic rescheduling.
So my questions are:
- Am I missing MS Project capabilities in these two critical areas?
- Any input on other platforms (TeamGantt or otherwise)?
Many Thanks!
Vladimir,
Thank you for your comments. Two follow-up questions:
My goal is to implement a project scheduling platform that integrates discussion about tasks such as "If I finish this two days late, canothers absorb the delay without causing issues?" in the platform itself. That keeps everything in one place, visible to all, and keeps people from having to use multiple platforms, emails, etc.
Thanks again for your input.
LD
Hi Lehmon,
I agree that resources shall be able to enter actual data on their jobs directly but do not understand why do you want to have discussions in the scheduling tool.
There are a lot of tools facilitating forums and discussions that may be linked or not linked to the specific tasks but still linked to the project. If the software can include references to these discussions to project tasks it would be sufficient. It does not make sense to create special tool for project collaboration if there are tools for people collaboration that may include project specific topics.
Let me know if I missed something.