Session 3 - Time Management and Project Management tools

When it comes to project management, there are heaps of tools that you can use - many of them free.

Microsoft Project is the first commercial one that comes to mind, but it is not part of the standard Microsoft Office suite.

Free/Cheap Project Management tools

Download and Install - Open Source solutions

• ProjectLibre
• Open Project
• LibrePlan (web based)
• Task Juggler
• Gantt Project

Online Solutions

The main advantage of looking at an online solution is that it is available anywhere you have internet and usually have collaboration tools built in.

Here is a list of some of the free online project management tools (in no particular order):

• Teamwork - free for 2 projects, 10mb
• Wrike - free for 5 users, 2gb
• Freedcamp - free
• Zoho Projects - free for 1 project, 10mb
• Ace Project - free for 5 users, 50 tasks, 2 projects
• Gantter - free - seems to be similar and compatible with MS Project
• Trello - free
• Podio - free for up to 5 people; Citrix is a respected company
• Asana - free for up to 15 team members, unlimited projects
• Producteev - free for unlimited users, unlimited projects

Here is an overview of some of these tools

BUT!!!

Before we go ahead and use one of these tools, lets do a recap on the steps involved in time management and scheduling. Time management involves the following:

• Activity definition
• Activity Sequencing
• Activity Duration estimation
• Schedule development
• Schedule Control

I like to use the Bottom-up approach to defining the activities.

Class Activity

Scenario: Mysty River Regional Library Services new home has been completed and the old library needs to be relocated into the new premises. New shelving has been delivered, but the old shelving needs to be dismantled so that it can be reused by the local secondary college and 2 primary schools. It has been agreed, for OHS reasons, that the library will close during the transition. It is anticipated that the process will take 2 weeks, but the library will only be closed for 1 week.  There is a budget that allows for employment of extra staff, volunteers, and outside contractors.

• Using the Bottom up approach, list all of the activities that need to take place to complete the move.

• Sequence these activities

• Estimate duration of each activity

• Look at any dependencies and relationships between activities to develop a schedule

Once we have the list of activities and sequence, they can be put into the schedule. You could start by using Excel, or you could put them straight into a project management tool. For this exercise, we will start with Excel and then put the tasks into one of the project management tools.

Online Project Management

SO many tools to choose from so I don't think it matters which of the list above we use. They all have lots of features and suitable for the purposes of this exercise. I have decided to use Gantter for this exercise as it is the most MS Project like and imports and exports MS Project file format. Like MS Project, it also starts in Gantt Chart mode. We will have a look at a couple of others later on in the semester.

http://www.gantter.com/

Once you have loader Gantter, click on Project / New and go through the Properties for the projects, setting things like starting date and date formats.

You can then add your activities.

Add the Durations - how long each activity will take - the default time measure is days, but you can enter the duration in hours. The default settings are 8 hours make up a day.

Then add the predecessors. Which activities rely on another activity to finish before it can start?

You should be able to see how your Gantt chart is starting to build up.

Add all of the activities, durations and predecessors. What is the estimated end date? Will it get done in the week?