Home > Project management software

The software industry research company, Gartner (http://www.gartner.com/), periodically publish the "Project Management Software Magic Quadrant Report", a review of major packages (2002 report in pdf here).

1 Problems with project management software

• Few packages are built around a sound project management method. What is even worse, e.g. Microsoft Project encourages counterproductive behavior by inexperienced project managers by offering as the default start-up view the Gantt chart. This encourages too early focus on task identification and scheduling vs. proper formulation of project objectives and final deliverables. So, such packages implicitly force upon an unsuspecting user an unsound project management process.
• To make things worse, many packages offer advanced visual formatting capabilities, which make it possible to produce nicely looking but completely nonsense documents.
• Many packages also offer e-mail integration, which encourages automatic assignment of tasks and due dates. This universally leads to counterproductive, date-driven behavior (see: critical chain) and may contribute to improper setting of team members' performance expectations .

2 Proprietary non-internet packages

2.1 Critical path support

• Microsoft Project -- a part of Microsoft Office, [1]
• Primavera -- a high end solution, [2]
• Artemis -- a high end solution, [3]
• Asta Powerproject -- mid-range solution, [4]
• Projetex - Project management software for expert teams

2.2 Critical chain support

• ProChain (add-on to Microsoft Project), http://www.prochain.com/index.asp
• Sciforma , http://www.realization.com
• CCPM+ (add-on to Microsoft Project), http://www.advanced-projects.com
• Asta Powerproject -- mid-range solution which includes Buffer Management [5]

3 Open sourceNote: "open source" in the intelligence community simply means "any information accessible to the public, possibly after paying a fee". This article is about open source software, a more common meaning for the term "open source". Open source or open sourc software

• GanttPV -- project scheduling software for Windows & Mac, scriptable w/ python. http://www.pureviolet.net/ganttpv/
• PHProjekt -- an open-source, internet-based groupware suite, http://www.phprojekt.com/index.php
• DotProject -- open-source, internet-based, in early development, http://www.dotproject.net/index.php
• MrProject -- was a part of GNOME but MrProject has been renamed as Planner (See next entry). There is no new development on MrProject and all new development is now done on Planner.
• Planner -- a GNOMEGNOME is a computer desktop environment for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. It is the official desktop of the GNU Project. Origin The GNOME G NU N etwork O bject M odel E nvironment) project was started in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico tool for planning, scheduling and tracking projects and is released under a GPL license. This evolved out of the MrProject code. The current developers of Planner include the original developers who now work for Imendio http://www.imendio.com/ . Planner uses an XMLXML eXtensible Markup Language is a W3C recommendation for creating special-purpose markup languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured tex file format or PostgreSQLPostgreSQL is a free software object-relational database server ( database management system), released under the flexible BSD-style license. It offers an alternative to other open-source database systems (such as MySQL and Firebird), as well as to propri database to store the project details and is written in C programming languageThe C Programming Language Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a low-level standardized programming language developed in the early. See http://www.imendio.com/projects/planner/ for more details on where to get the code or how to join mailing lists.
• KPlato -- a project management application KOffice suite (in early stages of development), http://www.koffice.org/kplato/
• Project/Open -- open-source, internet-based "Project-ERP", with an emphasis on project collaboration and financials, http://www.project-open.com/
• Gantt-Project -- written in Java for all OS http://ganttproject.sourceforge.net/