Productivity & Utility »

Project Management

Project management software has the capacity to help plan, organize, and manage resource pools and develop resource estimates. Depending on the sophistication of the software, it can manage estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, decision-making, quality management and documentation or administration systems. This section also includes applications to help display projects progress.

GanttProject

April 10, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Productivity & UtilityProject Management

ganttproject

Availability: Free Download
Comparable: Project, Trello

GanttProject is open source Java based, project management software that runs under the Windows,Linux and Mac OS X operating systems.  It features most basic project management functions like a Gantt chart for project scheduling of tasks, and doing resource management using resource load charts. It does not have advanced features like cost accounting, message and document control. It has a number of reporting options (MS Project, HTML, PDF, spreadsheets).

Tags: ganttproject

Google Sites

April 02, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Design & VisualizationProject Management
google_sites_2Availability: UNCC Community
Part of: Google Apps
Comparable: Drupal, Project, WordPress
 Google Sites is a structured wiki- and Web page-creation tool offered by Google as part of the Google Apps suite. The goal of Google Sites is for anyone to be able to create a team-oriented site where multiple people can collaborate and share files.  Google Apps can be very useful for project management to collaborate between team members or to publicly display the progress of a project.
Tags: cloudweb design

Project

February 24, 2015 by Andy Voelker
Categories: Productivity & UtilityProject Management
project logoAvailability: Available at discount
Comparable: OpenOffice
Microsoft Project is a project management software program that is designed to assist a project manager in developing a plan, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget, and analyzing workloads.  Project can be used as a stand-alone application on an individual computer or used in conjunction with a Project Server for synchronization between multiple project managers or project participants.
Project creates budgets based on assignment work and resource rates. As resources are assigned to tasks and assignment work estimated, the program calculates the cost, equal to the work times the rate, which rolls up to the task level and then to any summary tasks and finally to the project level. Resource definitions (people, equipment and materials) can be shared between projects using a shared resource pool. Each resource can have its own calendar, which defines what days and shifts a resource is available. Resource rates are used to calculate resource assignment costs which are rolled up and summarized at the resource level. Each resource can be assigned to multiple tasks in multiple plans and each task can be assigned multiple resources, and the application schedules task work based on the resource availability as defined in the resource calendars. All resources can be defined in label without limit.
While Project is considered to be part of the Microsoft Office Suite, it is licensed separately on an individual basis.  For more information look at Microsoft’s Project page.