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Microsoft Project Server may be the market leader but NOREX members are evaluating many other third-party project management tools. During the recent Enterprise Project Management WebForum, members discussed several alternatives to Project Server.
Moderator: Let’s talk more about Project Management tools. Does anyone use turnkey solutions for project management outside of Microsoft Project? Jeff, you previously mentioned Sciforma. What were the other ones you knew about?
Jeff F.: Power Steering, Daptive and Instantis. I am looking at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and have researched some of those and was looking for ones that aligned not just with project management but with portfolio management as well, recognizing that our task is to determine how many projects we should be running at once, allocating resources across the organization to certain projects and making sure they all get enough attention. Multiple project managers are involved in various large projects.
Portfolio management is very important here and we want to make sure that any tool we get is going to have a strong portfolio management component to it. We use something called EPM live which is MS project built on SharePoint. It is doing the job for us right now. We use it in a particular facet of IT in the infrastructure part. It hasn’t been adopted across IT yet even. It is hosted. It is doing a pretty good job for us right now. I am not sure; it is in the niche players quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I am not sure that it is the enterprise product for us but it is doing the rick right now.
Moderator: Is it less costly than some of the others that you have mentioned?
Jeff F.: Yes, less costly. It is not that hard to get into. It is about $15 a month per person and very flexible.
Kiel B.: We are in the process of selecting a PPM tool to provide reporting at the project, program and portfolio levels and ultimately expand for use by the enterprise. We are looking at Planview, SciForma and AtTask thus far. This organization is really much more focused on the portfolio management level of the projects than it is at what I will call the bottom level or task oriented reporting. Power Steering seems to really have that niche locked. They tend to be out in front of everybody else from what investigation and conversations I have had with them.
We are going to continue to pursue that as well as this Planview and Sciforma and At Task. AtTask is a very nice interface for that. They call it a social interface. Basically if you haven’t seen it, it has got an interface for the task reporting, issue reporting, that resembles a Facebook like interface where you can do all of your updates in one spot. So that is attractive from that perspective but I don’t know how strong their portfolio level management is. We will get into that as we go through evaluation.
Andrew Z.: I personally have been following AtTask probably for the last seven years just because I have a personal interest in project management. I have always liked that tool a lot, specifically for the task level stuff. I haven’t looked at it recently so I don’t know what they have added to it. I don’t know how much program and portfolio capabilities it has.
As I said we are using Clarity here right now and right now we are really just doing quasi portfolio management. We have Project in there too. It does support going down to the task level within Clarity itself. In version 12 that is not the greatest functionality. There is integration with MS Project or Open Workbench but in version 12 it is a little tricky to use. I know that in version 13 which just came out in December they have made significant improvements to the task component or module. They definitely have program management, portfolio management, all of the financial pieces. It is pretty wide and it seems to be pretty flexible in terms of being able to customize it.
Michael M.: I would like to offer that I was involved recently in an effort to provide a comparison chart on Wikipedia of different project management software. I have passed that link along through our chat on this call. If you want to forward that on to everybody. It actually was an extended effort by a number of different people to try to identify what some of the different project management software packages were that were out there as well as what some of their features were. So if you want to pass that link along.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_project_management_software
Moderator: Thank you Michael. OK, here is a topic from Dave that is related; Looking for free or low cost tools for project portfolio management. Is anybody aware of any free tools? Jeff, that was EPM Live that you mentioned, the Microsoft SharePoint tool, right?
Jeff F.: Yes, that is right.
Moderator: I guess you could probably consider that low cost. It is not free. Is anybody aware of any others, open source tools perhaps?
Michael M.: I just wanted to make sure, the software that you were referencing was that VPMI or CPMI?
Jeff F.: EPM.
Michael M.: OK because there is also a VPMi that I am familiar with, which is something that you might want to look into. It is also a low cost solution.
Moderator: Is that Microsoft?
Michael M.: It is a product that incorporates input from Microsoft but it is actually a VCSonline.com solution.
Moderator: OK, VPMi, thanks for that Michael.
Jeff F.: That is right. VCSonline.com is the one that promotes the product.
Jeanne W.: HP also has a Portfolio Management Tool too.
Ken R.: ChangePoint by Compuware
http://www.instantis.com/index.html
http://www.powersteeringsoftware.com/
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software/software-product.html?compURI=tcm:245-937033
http://www.compuware.com/business-portfolio-management/project-portfolio-management.html
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