Will Microsoft Project meet our needs?

[Guest]

We are a small (6 people) architecture consulting firm
questioning the need of project management software like
Project 2003. We have 30+ projects on-going at any one
time which require multiple team members within our office
and plenty of travel.

We are currently using Quickbooks Pro 2001 for timesheet
and billing. Our calendaring system is a hodge podge of
individual Outlook accounts and a recently adopted trial
version of a free on-line calendar. A cohesive timesheet,
billing, calendaring, and project management system would
be extremely helpful!

Couple of questions:
1) Would Project 2003 fit out needs? Standard,
Professional, Server?

2) Does Project 2003 have a timesheet and billing
function similar to Quickbooks Pro 2001?

2a) Can the two software packages work together - does
Project 2003 have a timesheet function that can be
exported for use by Quickbooks?

Thanks for any advice!

Mike

 

[Steve House]

IMHO MS Project is ideal for a firm such as yours but absolutely not for
what you seem to be saying you're looking to use it for <grin>. As an
architectural firm it seems that the application of formal project
management disciplines in creating and managing the various projects in
your portfolio would be fundmental and MS Project is software that is a
very effective adjunct to such an approach. But you also need to
realize that Project is neither time management, resource calendaring,
nor time and billing software. First and foremost it is a project
scheduling application dealing with tasks, designed to aid you in
breaking down the work involved in the design and construction of a
project into its discrete component tasks and scheduling them in the
calendar based on their estimated durations, logical relationships, and
resource availability using CPM and PERT methodologies, to make it
possible for you to bring the project in on time. It looks at the
labour costs of the individual resources plus material and other costs
associated with their tasks to help prepare a bottom-up project budget
and then tracks performance against that budget to aid you in bringing
the project in within it. While it does have the ability to track
actual resource hours and other costs, and Project Server has a
timesheet facility aimed at the end, they are intended for progress
monitoring and reporting specific to the project at hand and do not take
into account all the other factors that need to be considered in
billing, accounting, and payroll matters. The costs reported by Project
are your costs of the specific work in that particular project only.
Among other things, billing needs to add overhead and profit for your
firm, factors that Project completely ignores. Payroll needs to take
into account all the things the employee is doing, not just their
activities on the instant project, things again that Project ignores.
Project deals with the schedules and costs of tasks, not people or
clients. It can tell you what Project X is costing your firm and whether
it's on schedule, but not what you should charge the client for the
work.

If you are not already familiar with the formal PM approach to project
management and what functions software such as MS Project can perform
within that context, I recommend a review of the Guide to the Project
Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) published by the Project Management
Institute, www.pmi.org.

Hope this helps ...

--
Steve House
MS Project MVP
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs