Recommendations for Project Planning tool

Recommendations for Project Planning tool

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StevieBee

Original Poster:

14,175 posts

270 months

Friday 11th April
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I'm finding I'm increasingly getting involved with more complex projects.

My standard approach when bidding for work is to use Excel to plan out the schedule and then use this as the basis of the project plan but this is becoming a little clumsy and seems there are some handy tools that might be better. But there are a great many of them.

Business is marketing / comms so need to plan things like design, production, filming, advertising, etc....

Would be grateful for any recommendations on something that might fit the bill!

TIA

Mr Pointy

12,520 posts

174 months

Friday 11th April
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LooneyTunes

8,243 posts

173 months

Friday 11th April
quotequote all
Which project management methodology do you use?

Something Gantt based tends to be the default for waterfall (which is what most people assume project planning is/looks like) but it's not going to be the right thing to use if it doesn't align with how you work.

If it does, MS Project is the default choice but it's not necessarily the best if project management isn't really what you're doing.

Recently I've been weighing up options for something I am working on with a couple of people for whom formal project management is an entirely alien concept. Have yet to make a final decision but it's coming down to either Gantt Pro or Team Gantt.


StevieBee

Original Poster:

14,175 posts

270 months

Friday 11th April
quotequote all
Thanks chaps.

LooneyTunes said:
Which project management methodology do you use?
At the moment, it starts with a project schedule which simply lists the activities, time period, key dates and milestones. I do this in Excel as a giant chart and forms part of the bid for a project.

If we win it, that schedule becomes the project management tool which is really just a case of referencing where things are and tweaking as we go if needed.

Not all clients want or need to have sight of this but where they do, I stick it on a shared Google drive.

Works OK but as I mentioned, I feel that with some complex incoming projects that are going to require a more expansive set of collaborators and client involvement, something a bit less clunky would be in order.

I'll check out MS Project.

chrisch77

838 posts

90 months

Friday 11th April
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Have a look at Smartsheet too, this is a great cloud based tool that you can use for project planning as well as list based task management and general database functions.

LooneyTunes

8,243 posts

173 months

Friday 11th April
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Very much a traditional approach (and nothing wrong with that).

MS Project isn’t the best if you want to mix internal/external collaborators. In any event, be careful what you show to clients… the more pragmatic will understand, but some will beat you constantly and sap your time (to the detriment of the project itself!) if you give them too much granular detail…

classicaholic

2,011 posts

85 months

Wednesday 16th April
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I use MS Project but I use a Mac and its a pain to use parallels to run it, anyone know if there is a good equivalent for a mac?

w1bbles

1,145 posts

151 months

Wednesday 16th April
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classicaholic said:
I use MS Project but I use a Mac and its a pain to use parallels to run it, anyone know if there is a good equivalent for a mac?
Have a look at Merlin. It used to be good but I haven’t used it for about 10 years.