Help! Mac Project Management Software
I need project management software for a small project (20-50ish tasks, 8-10 people come and go and need to be assigned tasks.)
I’d like software that will assign resources to time blocks, handle dependencies, and be easy to use. I’ve spent the morning testing apps, going until I found something either I or the software I couldn’t do. That generally took about 10 minutes. I need:
- Gannt charts
- Resource assignment: Alice can’t do two 1 day tasks on the same day.
- Dependencies and sub-tasks that are auto-managed
- Good UI
Two candidates came close:
- PMX has a very nice UI, but doesn’t automatically re-juggle dates the way I’d like. Alice also gets double booked. If those were fixed, (or if I’m doing something wrong) I’d stop looking.
- Powercard is the most innovative project management app I’ve seen. It uses a card based metaphor (from Xtreme programming) to design tasks. With slightly better assignment (it auto-completes from the AddressBook, which is annoying when you have 50 Alices), and task grouping, this will be very neat. One to watch.
Not coming so close are:
- Intellisys Project Desktop. A Java app that looks nice, but I can’t figure out how to create and assign resources. It has a drop menu, and perhaps that works differently on other OSs.
- Merlin looks powerful, but I can’t figure out how to make tasks depend on each other. It has a nice relationships window, and it says “Connect activities together by dragging them into this area.” However, when I select to drag, Merlin changes the relationship window to be that thing.
- Project Planner, I can’t figure out dependencies
- Concept Draw has no resource management I could find.
What else should I look at?
[Update: The author of Powercard has explained that you can use Address Book groups to control who you see in the resource list. Its in project info.]
I would look at these:
Tufte on PM
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000076&topic_id=1
Danny O’Brien’s talk at Notcon 04
http://quernstone.com/notcon04/
GTD
http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/getting_started.html
-gp
Years ago I used a program called MacProject, http://www.mac512.com/macproje.htm. It did Gantt charts and dependencies and stuff. I guess it doesn’t exist any more.
Some googling turned up http://www.sharedplan.com, it looks pretty nice: http://www.sharedplan.com/screenshots/MacScreenshot.jpg. Has a free download and runs on mac/linux/windows.