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Best PIM for project management?
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Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 22, 2012 at 10:18 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Dr Andus, I will second LM7’s support for Achieve Planner, even though I do not use it
>myself (the reason being that nowadays I work with teams, so I need collaborative
>tools; see http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/3328).
>
>There are
>plenty of tutorials to get you through the required steps. Roger, the developer,
>practices what he preaches and offers productivity courses as well
>http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/get-focused-multimedia-course/ though
>you won’t need these to work with the Planner. If you do like the program, make sure to
>enter your email at its Bits du Jour page
>http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/achieve-planner-productivity-suite/
>You may be lucky and save a good deal if the discount appears within your trial
>period.
>
>As a broader reference, I would say that a PPM (Personal Project Management
>tool) essentially needs to have the following:
>
>- Ability to break down work into
>structured individual tasks; any outliner can do this
>- Ability to set date / time
>information for each task and show this on a timeline and/or calendar (possibly via
>syncing with Outlook or Google Calendar)
>- Support for follow-up of the individual
>tasks, i.e. setting completion either as Done/Pending or percentage (I personally
>have never managed to do the latter)
>
>Achieve Planner does all of the above. InfoQube
>too (and much more, but the learning curve is significant) as well as other tools
>mentioned here in the past, like Watership Planner.
>
>I will also second LM7’s
>comment that the project’s information management is something different and
>better suited for PIMs like UltraRecall or MyInfo.
>
>Last but not least, as one
>acquires more tools, it is good to find ways to simplify the actual workflow; I have
>found Leo Babauta’s books and blog http://zenhabits.net/books/ helpful in that
>respect.
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 22, 2012 at 10:27 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>As a broader reference, I would say that a PPM (Personal Project Management
>tool) essentially needs to have the following:
>
>- Ability to break down work into
>structured individual tasks; any outliner can do this
>- Ability to set date / time
>information for each task and show this on a timeline and/or calendar (possibly via
>syncing with Outlook or Google Calendar)
>- Support for follow-up of the individual
>tasks, i.e. setting completion either as Done/Pending or percentage (I personally
>have never managed to do the latter)
Thanks Alexander, a good list of functions. I thought about it a bit more and came up with the following as my ideal project management setup:
?1. A mind map function for doing a work breakdown structure (WBS) to determine main project tasks (sub-projects) visually;
?2. A hierarchical outliner for creating and organising tasks with unlimited sub-tasks with start/due dates, duration etc. with ability to zoom in (hoist), and calculate project duration;
3. A weekly planner view.
4. Multi-week view (same as above but with lots of additional weeks in rows below, up to 15 or more);
5. Gantt chart for viewing the entire project.
Thanks everyone for all the suggestions. I have started downloading them and testing them. I have also looked again at Natara Bonsai and MyLifeOrganized, as they have a lot of PM features that I haven’t fully checked out in the past.
Posted by Hugh
Apr 23, 2012 at 09:21 AM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Hugh wrote:
>>I’ve looked for this
>>extensively and I’ve found several half-there
>alternatives, such as Pagico.
>
>Can you tell me what’s missing from Pagico in that
>regard? I’m quite interested as it is cross-platform.
>
>
To be fair to the software, my experience was mainly with version 4, and I see that it’s now up to version 5.3 (and the website has also been upgraded, which was necessary). I liked its timeline presentation, but for some functions the interface was too busy. Some actions were over-complicated or impossible: for example, as far as I can remember, contacts couldn’t be directly imported from the Apple Address Book (whereas, for example, in Merlin they can). I seem to remember that setting up a project itself was unduly complicated; I imagine that has been improved. Most fundamentally, the application didn’t have quite enough project management features for me; it couldn’t tell me, for example, where the slack would be, or, other than by visual inspection, where “violations” might occur.
Process 3, from Jumsoft, is another “half-there” very simple Mac project management application I also looked at. There’s clearly a perceived market for such tools, but on the Mac I haven’t seen anything as developed as Achieve Planner on the PC (or InfoCube or Watership Planner, neither of which I’ve used).
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 23, 2012 at 04:04 PM
Not that this is the answer you were looking for Dr Andus, but here’s an unorthodox suggestion for a project manager: Scrivener.
I haven’t yet really tried this in practice, I’ve just considered it in principle. I’ve put together a little PDF (using Clarify*) that shows how you might go about creating a project management project in Scrivener:
I think the corkboard, outline views and various ways of including meta-data make Scrivener pretty solid as a project management application. It won’t do calculations for you, as in helping you schedule tasks. And the Mac Version would be better than the Windows versions, since you can create a field for due dates in the Mac version, while you have to put due dates in the synopsis in the Windows version.
That all makes Scrivener an acceptable application for managing a project. What would make you WANT to use it this way is if you like to write a lot about your project, and/or your supervisor requires a comprehensive report afterward (which you can create easily using the compile function in Scriv).
Anyway, this is mostly just food for thought, and perhaps grist for discussion.
Steve Z.
*In truth, the main reason I’m presenting this idea is so that I could try out Clarify.
Posted by Dr Andus
Apr 23, 2012 at 04:49 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Not that this is the answer you were looking for Dr Andus, but here’s an unorthodox
>suggestion for a project manager: Scrivener.
>
>I haven’t yet really tried this in
>practice, I’ve just considered it in principle. I’ve put together a little PDF (using
>Clarify*) that shows how you might go about creating a project management project in
>Scrivener:
Thanks Steve, that is very creative! (What is Clarify, btw?)
Unfortunately my needs are slightly different. It is important for me to add dates, calculate durations, have a weekly view and manage hundreds of tasks, in order to plan and execute a tight 6 month project (the finishing of my PhD).
BTW, re MyInfo, I agree that the custom columns are very nice. However, given that managing long lists and hierarchies of to-dos within various sub-projects fast is important to me, I found the inserting of new tasks and indenting etc. just a bit too fiddly in comparison with MLO, which has become my gold standard in terms of ease of adding and manipulating tasks (and which also has a large selection of columns, though not customisable).
Interestingly MLO can do a lot of what Achieve Planner can do but on a single page, except the weekly planner, which seems to be AP’s major strength. I’m still trialling a few other apps.