SOCIAL: PM software (free) recomms?

[Brian Rice]

<soapbox>

In my humble opinion, the choice of project-management software is not nearly as important as the project-management methodology. Project-management tools are great for MANAGING projects, but they are terrible for designing and scoping projects.  The best tool for the latter task is… the sticky note. I am serious. Here is my project-management approach:

1. Get everybody who will be contributing (work, requirements, or expectations) into a room.
2. Give each person a stack of sticky notes.
3. Everybody brainstorms all the tasks they can think of and puts them on the whiteboard. One task per sticky.  Should be total chaos.
4. Everybody winnows the tasks, consolidating duplicates and roughly organizing them into general phases.
5. People with an interest in each phase identify dependencies (especially, finish-to-start dependencies).  These get marked on the whiteboard with an arrow between stickies.
6. People who will be doing the work write rough estimates of effort and duration on each sticky.
7. A walkthrough review occurs (in which everybody can SEE the long pole).
8. People take lots of cellphone camera pictures of the whiteboard.
9. Pizza and beer are consumed.

NOW, at last, one is ready to type stuff into a project-management tool and track the tasks' completion.

It is commonplace to bash Microsoft Project, but frankly the people I know who most hate it are those who tried to do their project design in it. However, designing a project in any software tool* risks the one worst thing that can happen to any project: lack of buy-in. Getting everybody into a room as I suggest above gets the human beings on board with the project from the get-go.  "Yes, we are gonna finish this by September 8, because I helped write that plan."

*Any software tool, that is, that's less interactive than sticky notes and a whiteboard.

</sorry for the rant>

Brian

On May 21, 2012, at 2:16 PM, Ellisa Feinstein wrote:

> Thanks, Mike.  And this is the problem - so many choices! Hard to tell which ones are good. 
> 
> 
> From: Mike Kosim <mike.kosim at mac.com>
> To: Ellisa Feinstein <ellisafeinstein at yahoo.com> 
> Cc: Social Social <social at deeptrouble.com> 
> Sent: Monday, May 21, 2012 12:58 PM
> Subject: Re: SOCIAL: PM software (free) recomms?
> 
> I just saw this page with a bunch of them -- looks like there's an immense choice of free/ donation based project management software.
> http://mastersinprojectmanagement.org/top-25-open-source-project-management-apps.html
> 
> Let me know what you end up going with.  I'd like to use one myself.
> mike
> 
> 
> 
> On May 21, 2012, at 12:48 PM, Ellisa Feinstein <ellisafeinstein at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi - Does anyone have recommendations for free project management software or online app?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Ellisa
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> 
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