Title says it all; looks like I’m going to be ‘asked’ to project manage some big rollout. Went to the store and MS-Project 2003 (the most recent one now available, apparently) is 400 pounds, + VAT. That’s nearly 500 quid!!!. There’s a ‘pro’ version available (the guy behind the till just laughed when I asked him how much it was, which to be fair I was only doing because I quite enjoy the frisson of the shiver I inevitably get as I wonder how anyone has the brass balls to charge quite that much for a piece of software.
And so to… my point.
Anyone know any windows-platform alternatives which work? Ideally I’d want file-level interoperability (in case I send it to someone rich enough to have bought the original) and some reasonable percentage of the functionality, but as a relative newbie to large-ish scale PM I’m not kidding myself that I’m going to be using anything more than about 10% of the fancy doodads these things come with.
MS Project is pricey because it is a corporate standard and a product of a monopoly. If your company is paying, consider this as a cost of doing business. Most folks only reap about 25% of the total functionality of MS Project and nobody enjoys using it.
That being said, you can always use Excel. There are tricks to program the spreadsheet to allocate resources, and track time and project deliverables.
There are many shareware project management applications out there. Go to Versiontracker, click on the Windows tab and search on project management.
I suggest you make a list of specific technical and functional requirements you desire from a PM tool, download demos, and score each application on the fit.
Thanks; as it turns out, because the tender is due early tomorrow morning we sprang for ms-project (upper management were [sub]rightly[/sub] frightened that we weren’t going to make it). I’ll definitely check out those other two though, if only to find out what extras we got for the money… thanks…