Considering purchase

[Pat]

We are a church looking for project management software to help us coordinate several construction/remodeling projects. Has anyone had experience using Project successfully for smaller organizations?

 

[Gérard Ducouret]

Hello Pat,

Ms Project is well designed for small projects and for beginners in project
management.

Gérard Ducouret

We are a church looking for project management software to help us

coordinate several construction/remodeling projects. Has anyone had
experience using Project successfully for smaller organizations?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Pat --

As a former pastor (14 years), I can tell you from experience that
Microsoft Project could work very well for your church to manage
construction and remodeling projects. My only concern for you is that if
you have never used the software previously, I believe you will find that it
is not intuitive and that you cannot learn how to use it by "playing around"
with it.

For best results with the software, I would recommend that you take a course
from someone who teaches the use of the software based on the project life
cycle (Definition - Planning - Execution - Closure). When you learn how to
use the software in this manner, you will learn things like:

- How to properly define a project in Microsoft Project
- How to do task, resource, and assignment planning for the "real world"
- Why and how to baseline your project
- How to track project progress so that you know what is really "going on"
with your project
- How to track project variance to know where your project is "going off
track"
- How to revise a project to bring it back on schedule
- How to manage change in your project
- How to close a project and save it as a template

To be able to learn these things will take both time and money. Perhaps
some of the other folks in the group could recommend a training center where
you could learn to use the software properly. Be careful to avoid any
training center that teaches "features" of the tool but doesn't teach you
how to actually use it in the real world. Hope this helps! God bless you!!

We are a church looking for project management software to help us

coordinate several construction/remodeling projects. Has anyone had
experience using Project successfully for smaller organizations?

 

[John Beamish]

The simple answer is short: yes, it can help you.

The complex answer is much longer. Do you or your church really want to
be the entity responsible for managing the project schedule?

From the point of view of your church, the real questions you need to ask
are:

Before you start:
1. How long will it take?
2. How much will it cost?

After you've started:
1. Is our project ahead/on time/late? How can we tell? How certain are
we? Is this a trend?
2. Is our project below/on cost/over? How can we tell? How certain are
we? Is this a trend?

I would expect that your work is going to be subcontracted to other
organizations for delivery. If this is a non-trivial set of
construction/remodeling projects then you probably want to put a
professional project manager in charge of the project.

Now the question changes from "what project management software should we
use?" to "what project management process should we use?" The answer to
that question is: insist that the project manager use appropriate tools
for developing and managing the project schedule and reporting on the
progress. One of those tools _might_ be MS Project -- but it might be an
Excel spreadsheet. If you can answer the questions above at every project
review meeting then you are doing the right things with the right tools.

There is one thing I can guarantee you: Using MS Project will not
guarantee on-time, on-budget. MS Project is _a_ way (not the _only_ way)
to running a successful project.

JLB, PMP

We are a church looking for project management software to help us
coordinate several construction/remodeling projects. Has anyone had
experience using Project successfully for smaller organizations?

--