Well, I guess I should thank you for getting me to do a quick 10 min
google search on what's out there in Scheduling software these days.
Project, of course, has the vast majority of the scheduling software
market (Project Management (PM) software is a misnomer, created by
marketing people with no knowledge of Project Management. The software
we're talking about does the scheduling part of PM, which while
important, is only about 10% of what a Project Manager does.) My
research found that Primavera Project Planner, the granddaddy of
scheduling software, is still out there, as is it's offspring, the much
simpler and more MS Project like version, SureTrak. Workbench has gone
open source, but is still available. And CA SuperProject, much to my
surprise and delight, is also still extant. Artemis, a high end
competitor to Primavera, still exists.
Comparisons? To be honest, it's been years since I've used SureTrak,
SuperProject or Workbench, and I've never invested the time it takes to
learn Primavera. But I do know the their genesis and how they once
compared to MS Project. Basically, they all came about just the
opposite of Project. Expert schedulers hired programmers to develop
software that did what they knew how to do, just made it more graphical
and easier to use. MS, OTH, had the programmers, hired experts (5
consultants, if I remember correctly), then mostly ignored them in
creating Project (this is according to one of them I met back in the
mid-nineties). This is why the early versions of Project were so
horrendously bad - constraints were set if you sneezed, resource
leveling nearly destroyed your schedule, etc. And this is why that
obnoxious, schedule wrecking option, "Autolink inserted or moved tasks"
is still there. The MS people had no understanding of PM, much less the
real ins and outs of scheduling, and thought they could make it easier.
To do so, they made invalid assumptions and built them in.
Over the years, MS has backed off from most of these assumptions and
Project has greatly improved. It became actually useful around version
4, even better since. But some of these issues still linger. OTH, no
one knows GUI like MS, and it shows. Project is the most user friendly
of the bunch, or at least was last time I looked at any of the others,
which has been about 7 or 8 years. Why did I choose to support MS
Project and not all these vastly superior offerings? The market.
Because it had the MS name on it, when people bought scheduling
software, they bought Project. MS quickly had 80% of the market, and I
decided to support the software that sold the best and needed the most
support.
Project has also made huge improvements in the client/server version,
and I don't know how it compares to the others here. As far as I know,
the Dept of Defense, Corps of Engineers, and other government bodies
who do lot's of big projects still require Primavera. Some allow other
software on smaller projects.
I still await the glorious day when "Autolink Tasks" is either turned
off by default, or removed completely. Then I'll be able to say that MS
has finally let go of it's "we invented it and now matter how bad an
idea it was, we're sticking with it" attitude. Nonetheless, Project is
a viable package. It's other great advantage is that there is extensive
training and support for it, albeit a lot of low quality training and
support (many of the books available on Project are still written by
non-Project Managers who don't understand it's application. To quote
Lewis in Project Planning, Scheduling & Control, "Giving a person a
powerful project scheduling program, when he knows nothing about
Project Management, just allows him to document his failures with great
precision!). There are a lot of expert consultants, many of whom
contribute here in this forum. Project has a clear advantage when it
comes to support.
I hope this helps with your project.
. I have to compair it