Project Planning and Tracking Tools

Simple to use project management tool

Does anyone know of a simple-to-use project planning and tracking tool that enables project team leaders to plan their team's tasks and track progress against that plan?

The tool would be able to do things like this:

• Handle tasks that are estimated in hours
• Let you say how many hours per week each team member will be available
• Enable holidays and other non-project activities to be planned
• Enable actual hours worked on each project task to be recorded
• Produce reports that show (per week and project to date):
  • Planned vs actual hours
  • Planned vs actual tasks started
  • Planned vs actual tasks completed
• Produce numerical reports that are actually useful to team leaders as opposed to pretty charts that impress corporate buyers.

I run project management training courses and am often asked if I know of such a tool. If you do know of one please let me know.

Microsoft Project MSP

Microsoft Project (MSP) is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut for smallish (2 to 30 people) IT projects. MSP is great at drawing plans, but getting useful plan vs actual statistics out of MSP isn't so easy. And with sophisticated tools like MSP, novice planners can end up spending more time arm wrestling the tool than planning their project.

At the other end of the spectrum simple spread sheets can enable plan vs actual tracking but don't supply the metrics that one needs if there are more than a few people in the project team.

A tool that enables plans to be built like this and produces reports a bit like this is what I'd like to find.

  

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