Project Management Tools Meenakshi Lakshmikanthan 02/22/2010

Project Management Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. There are a number of approaches to managing project activities including agile, interactive, incremental, and phased approaches. Managing multiple projects can be cumbersome and chaotic if you don’t have some kind of system in place to keep track of everything.

Goals Survey the current, most widely used software project management tools. Provide comparison studies between the different tools (minimum 9 tools).

Tools Identification Process Performed an extensive search in the internet so as to determine the most commonly used tools. Also, inputs from various project managers from different companies were collected and comprehensively analyzed.

Findings General Requirements were to have a system which drives data collection, tracking tasks and the actuals and facilitating collaboration with all the people that are part of the project. Tools facilitating visual data like charts, graphs were also preferred. Tools that blended well in all environments and the ones that integrated with other products were more preferred. Cost was a big factor in determining the tools. Finally, the way each person works is unique to them, so finding the right tool may take some individual search.

The Tools 1. Microsoft Project  Developed by Microsoft designed to assist in developing plans, assigning resources, tracking progress etc. 2. Scrum  Iterative incremental framework for managing complex work commonly used with agile software development. 3. Open Office  Open source application available for a number of different computer operating systems.

The Tools (Cont’) 4. Basecamp  Web based project management tool. 5. Kforge  Provides project frameworks with mechanisms to plan and track work. 6. Central Desktop  Wiki based software service that supports small group collaboration features.

The Tools (Cont’) 7. Fogbugz  Offers issue tracking, discussion forum, wikis, customer relationship management and scheduling. 8. Lighthouse  Bug and issue tracking app for easy use and startup companies. 9. Iwork  Office suite of applications created by Apple for Mac OS and iPhone operating systems.

Milestones TasksDue Dates Phase 1Tools Identification02/19/2010 Phase 2Research and explore the tools identified. 03/25/2010 Phase 3Come up with the results of the analysis and comparison study and present it in a report. 04/10/2010

Things to Do (In Detail) Install each one of the identified tools and analyze them in detail and learn how to use them efficiently. Identify the strengths and weakness of the each one of the tools. Perform a comparison study between the identified tools. Finally, prepare a report based on the findings in the research.

Tracking Via Lighthouse Tool

Difficulties Encountered Since there were a very large number of tools, it took a while to analyze each of them and identify the most commonly used ones. Also, the installation and set up proved to be difficult and time consuming in some of the tools.

Questions and Suggestions!!!!!