Agile project management
To write something less stuffy, I recently spent an inordinate amount of time testing project management tools.
From a distance they all look the same – Gantt charts.
Up close the differences are striking. Every tool has one special feature they concentrate on, but most manage to ignore the basic usability aspects.
Some special features are really awesome – LiquidPlanner.com has implemented time ranges (PERT fans check it out – it is the next generation).
Some were web based for east concurrent access for multiple people. Their AJAX web interfaces were almost fast enough to be usable, but just slow enough to keep me frustrated.
Some had unbelievably clever capacity forecasting – one tool calculated productivity rates of people at different points of their learning curves!
But all I wanted was a fast little tool that had resource leveling and snapshots. Resource leveling spreads out multiple projects over multiple people so noone has to work overtime. Snapshots allow me to overlap an old gantt chart over the actual one to see how much it slipped.
I read about 150 tools, I visited about fifty vendors and test driven about 15 tools.
Long story short: OmniPlan won. This $150 app that only runs on Mac beat the pants off everybody else when my needs were concerned.
OnmiPlan is not multiuser. It is not agile-focused. It does not do critical chain or PERT. But I can enter and shuffle tasks several times faster and easier than an other tool let me, and I can simulate different scenarios WHILE I am discussing them.
Imagine your boss asking if you can deliver three month earlier if you get more people. With OmniPlan I can show them the difference that adding people makes instead of trying to convince them with vague statements.
Pictures are worth a thousand words, and with OmniPlan I can produce an authoritative project plan comparison in a minute. No wonder I feel so strongly about it.
