DesktopBSD day 21 – Planning and Project Management (II)

Yesterday I was enchanted with GanttProject and with that experience in mind I started playing with the three other project management applications.

Planner a.k.a. Project Management

The Planner website isn’t a treasure chest of information.

Planner is the GNOME project management tool.

That’s about all you can find about the application. It’s a typical GNOME application with a pretty straightforward interface. The taks bar to the right gives quick access to the Gantt chart, the tasks, the resources and the resources in use. It’s use is quite similar to GanttProject. You can add tasks and resources and they will appear as a single line in the list. Under the right mouse button you can access the window to edit the rest of the information.

It was kind of weird to add various single day tasks and then to see three task bars of varying lengths

Then I realized that the first day had been cut short because the day had already started and the third day took the whole weekend along with it. The weekend is defined as a no working days, which makes this kind of representation confusing.

KPlato

KPlato is the project management application for the KDE desktop. It’s relatively young. If memory serves me right, it was included in KOffice earlier this year. KPlato is short for K PLAnning Tool.

KPlato is a project management application. In this first public release we focus on planning and scheduling of projects.

As expected KPlato is somewhat richer in it’s interface than Planner. You can fine tune the settings for working hours per day, per week, per month and per year. This is very useful if you have a team of people that work parttime on varying days per week or freelancers that work a specified amount of hours.

When creating new tasks agan you find options not available (at least this visible) in the other programs. You can add scheduling to the task and add some risk settings.

It wasn’t a problem to enter all the information and create a new project with tasks and resources. Once that is done, you can change the view options, giving you various scenarios for the project.

TaskJuggler

TaskJuggler began it’s life as a commandline program and had the graphical interface added to it later. When I checked the website my interest rose. Just read the lingo yourself:

TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful project management tool. Its new approach to project planning and tracking is far superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks.

TaskJuggler is Open Source project management software for serious project managers. It covers the complete spectrum of project management tasks from the first idea to the completion of the project. It assists you during project scoping, resource assignment, cost and revenue planing, risk and communication management.

TaskJuggler provides an optimizing scheduler that computes your project time lines and resource assignments based on the project outline and the constrains that you have provided. The build-in resource balancer and consistency checker offload you from having to worry about irrelevant details and ring the alarm if the project gets out of hand. The flexible “as many details as necessary”-approach allows you to still plan your project as you go, making it also ideal for new management strategies such as Extreme Programming and Agile Project Management.

I had to install TaskJuggler via ports and while I waited I kept reading the information from the website. The sentence: “It usually takes no more than 2 to 3 hours to get productive with TaksJuggler” became an ominous sign. Two to three hours? It took minutes to get started with the other three programs.

Well, TaksJuggler isn’t like the other programs. It does have one of the nicer graphical interfaces.

However, there are no icons, wizards or even windows to add new projects, tasks or resources. It’s all taken care of by a text file:

To be honest, I stared at it for a couple of minutes and decided it wasn’t worth the time right now.

Conclusions

GanttProject, Planner and KPlato are very similar in how you work with them. KPlato is the youngest program, but already gives the most flexibility. I must admit that I have my own needs and will readily agree when experienced Microsoft Project users say they miss feature X or Y. GanttProject stood out as a fast and responsive Java application. Planner the program is okay, but it’s website was a complete turn-off. The maintainers should really have a look at the site of the other programs.

The good thing is that all of these programs run very well on the DesktopBSD platform, so it were two good days of work.

DesktopBSD day 20 – Planning and Project Management (I)

I have been involved in project management since the early days of my working career. I love the project management method and the way it helps me to organize complex tasks. All of the projects I have been involved in were of a non-technical, non-linear and -let’s say- chaotic nature. Deadlines? Yes. Milestone? Sure. Logical breakdown of work? Not really. Careful planning of resources? Well, the paper the planning was written on was more endurable than the actual execution of the plan. The way the projects could progress was highly influenced by outside and unstable factors. Over the years I have looked at more that one program to ease project planning, but all of them were way too rigid to be of use.

Basically, I was curious as to the current set of programs for project management for the open source desktop and since I am working with DesktopBSD it fits nicely in this series of articles. I will look into four programs. Planner (GNOME), KPlato (KDE) , TaskJuggler (KDE) and GanttProject (Java).

GanttProject: an enormous surprise

I started with GanttProject, but -in all honesty- I didn’t expect much from it. I don’t really like Java-based applications. Too often I find them slow, sluggish, eating too many system resources, lacking functionalities and plain ugly with horrible font-rendering. GanttProject is none of that.

GanttProject is a free and easy to use Gantt chart based project scheduling and management tool.

This program doesn´t try to be the software to beat all other project management software. There are two main views: your resources and the tasks in the project as a Gantt Chart. You can download GanttProject in various formats. One package has various launchers for UNIX/Linux, Windows and MacOSX with which you can run without installing it. The main requirement is JRE. I downloaded the package, unzipped it, cd-ed into the ganttproject directory and launched the application with #sh ganttproject.sh . It takes a while for the program to be ready for use.

You can then create a new project (Project -> New) via a simple wizard. First you give the project a name and some additional information. Then you select the roleset and the calendar. You don’t have a lot of options here, but that’s just fine with me.

Adding resources should be the next logical step. Again, this reveal a simple screen where you can add some general information about the resource like name, the e-mail adress, the phone-number and the default role the person has. The default role is that of project manager. You can change that by going to Edit -> Preferences -> Resource role. There you can add the roles you have in your project. All resources can be seen in the resource tab.

From here it is a matter of adding the tasks. When you click on the icon New Task you enter the basic information on the first line in the Gantt chart: name, starting and finishing date. After that you double-click on the bar in the chart and a new window pops up. This window has an easily understandable layout (though -of course – you need to have some background knowledge in project management). There are five tabs. The first one holds the task specific information. You can’t enter a lot of information (name, priority, progress, milestone yes/no, starting and finishing dates and duration), with the benefit of not being overly complicated.

In the second tab you determine whether it is a isolated task or one that is related to a previous task. The tab Resources gives you the possibility to add one or more persons to that task. The fourth tab is meant for some notes and with the fourth tab you can set the columns for the Gantt chart, allowing some customization of each task line.

With this basic set I could design a first project within minutes without being stonewalled. When looking a bit further I noticed that GanttProject also create Pertt charts for you project and that you can import and export Microsoft Project XML files. The program is responsive and attractive to look at. Really, it was fun to work with it and for that reason GanttProject also found it’s way to my Portable Applications collection on the mobile hard drive.

]project-open[

One final element to add to the appeal of GanttProject is the integration with an open source webbased ERP/Project Management package, ]project-open[ . You can create, change and upload GanttProject files to ]project-open[. That alone would be interesting, but the online demo revealed a rounded out online hub for CRM, Finance, project management, some HRM. Add a wiki, forum and some document management to the mix and you could have a small organization migration to a complete open source solution for project management. I absolutely love the dashboard and the indicators tabs that give graphical representations. ]project-open[ wasn’t part of today’s plan, but it will be on the list soon.

Conclusions

GanttProject got me sidetracked today and I love it when open source software does that to me. It did leave me with insufficient time for the other three programs, so that will have to wait until tomorrow.