Small Media Projects

[planetant]

Anyone using anything other than MSProject for managing lots of small media projects?

 

[PDQBach]

PMI publishes a "mainstream" pm magazine and a more serious, scholarly, one. A few years ago one article described a survey of commonly used project software. The most common tool -- by far! -- was Excel.

 

[thedaver]

Excel is people-friendly and portable. MS Project is an honest tool that does the right thing - most of the time. The other products tend to involve a significant cash outlay.

You should also note that there are HUNDREDS of Open Source project management solutions (some tailored to software dev., some generalized)... for instance, a look at the

http://www.freshmeat.net

site (a linux, open source project collection) reveals a number of appealing solutions

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=+project++management&filter=&filter_scope=&orderby=rating_DESC

Dave.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[planetant]

Yeah, I've been looking at smaller solutions to Project mainly because some people like it and other people dont. Some people find the user interface comfortable and some people get freaked. Also, it works great to track people tasks in terms of cost, but not so great tracking deliverable and asset costs (as far as I can see - welcome comments from whomever is using it for that)

So I'm trying to find something which will migrate data back and forth from/into project, with a resource pool, but with a deliverable/asset/third party cost element: ie small media project.

Excel is great. I love Excel, but again no resource pooling capability.

Curious why do you say other solutions are expensive? What have you found?

These are some of the stuff I found, just starting to look

Primavera
Enact
TurboProject
Milestone Project Companion
GroupWise
eGroupWare
Staffware
Other?

 

[thedaver]

Primavera and Planview are Enterprise scale and have a pricetag.

Frankly Lotus Notes or other groupware can be useful if you have a project admin who can stuff the workflow with activities and can monitor their progress.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[planetant]

Can you import/export from Project to these?

 

[thedaver]

Project InVision is another product, I know they facilitate importing from Project to set other metrics.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[planetant]

All good info! Thanks.