Project Management tool - A Review

I came across an opportunity to review a project management tool from http://www.projectmanagement.com/.

Project management has evolved over the years, these days a good project management tool would play a vital role in success of the project. I particularly feel, these tool should be easy to use and further project management tool should not be make the project manager to unlearn what he has learnt and re-learn a new tool. Most of the project managers are comfortable with Microsoft products like project & office, hence to be successful, PM tools should offer easy integration to MS products.

Now coming to this product, this software is offered as SaaS( Software as a service), Gartner has predicted 9% of total software sales would be SaaS by 2012, hence the product should be scalable in terms of nil installation requirement and effective global support.

Any software tool, require some kind of hand holding or a training and hence when I wanted to try it out, I was looking for a manual to assist me. However, I went ahead with registration process (free for 30 days!). Finally when I logged in, my experience was different.

The most impressive part was the task scheduling and more importantly its compatible with MS projects. If you are having your plan in MS projects then you can very easily import into the http://projectmanager.com website and same is the case of export.

Project managers always faces challenges in showing the MS project plan to team member for any discussion, particularly when team members are distributed across multiple locations and normally the project members would not have MS projects license. With http://projectmanagement.com you can effective overcome the same and more interestingly the looks and feel of task scheduling is almost similar to MS project, so as a project manager one would not miss out MS projects comfort. Project team member can log on into the site and look out for task scheduling and the task assigned to them.

The project related parameters are placed in a easily understandable GUI form as menu on the top. If a Project manager has the choice and if effectively used, this tool can be used as single source of truth for all Project manager needs. On top of it, project dashboard feature adds value to the product.

I felt some improvement on the product would make it top class and I understand from their product support team, that they are on their way towards adding some of the features.

Altogether the product looked promising to me!