Tuesday, December 13, 2016

PM Tools


Think about a restaurant where people can choose what they want from the menu. How would you organize 8 workers in the kitchen to prepare 27 meals in the shortest time? Project management tools are meant to support resolving this kind of problems.

A company can have 2-3 projects...or dozens of projects to work on at the same time. Each project can be taken off in processes (some of them must be done sequentially, others can be done in parallel), and each process can be taken off in activities.

Both processes and activities can be prioritized and re-prioritized as needed.

Gantt charts are classic tools used for a reduced number of slowly moving projects with well-known outcome - in construction you have the design and you can do good estimates for processes and activities.

Kanban tables are newer tools used in agile project management, and they are good for visualizing processes of projects with many unknown aspects - in service-based companies you have to redistribute workers and machines in function of the incoming commands and technical incidents; the IT&C industry is dealing with the most rapidly changing aspects like traffic on the wire/air and user requests.

There are many dozens of PM tools out here, I'm going to list three of them.

Trello for 2-3 small projects: https://trello.com/

KanbanTool for bigger projects - it has "swimlanes" (projects and processes can be kept together and handled easily), "sub-tables" (for complex projects) and in general it scales well as a company is growing: http://kanbantool.com/

Microsoft's Project - although I've never evaluated the costs for adopting Office 365 with additional goodies: https://products.office.com/en-us/project/compare-microsoft-project-management-software