Reviews of Mac Project Management Software
Project management is important for individuals as well as companies. I am planning a major medical research project, which I am the primary stakeholder in, and I have discovered that formal project planning is a great advantage, even for minor players like myself. This post forms part of a series on personal project planning.
This post covers reviews of stand-alone project management programs for macs. Coming posts will look at online planning solutions, luddite planning solutions as well as some tips for setting up a personal project plan.
My project
Just to get some context, I have tested all these programs on my personal PhD project plan. The remainder of my project is 14 months long and contains more than 200 discrete outcomes. I am the main resource, as I participate in every experiment. I need a project plan that doesn’t have me doing 7 tasks at once.
GANTT chart 2.07
This is a very basic GANTT chart system, but open source and free. The interface is a bit slow, but it is easy enough to use. I could easily use this program, except that it doesn’t have automatic levelling. As far as I can sort out, I would have to manually shift around tasks to take into account my abilities to only exist in one plane of reality.
Omniplan
This is a lovely project planner - intuitive, easy interface, and it feels nice. It is ten times faster to set up your project with this rather than GANTT. Beautiful. And it also has automatic levelling. The resource section is also very intuitive and easily adaptable to a single person project with equipment being the main resources. I would definitely consider this project management solution. It costs $90 for an educational license, and $149 for a base license. You can get a free single day demo license, which is a great way to get a feel for the product.
Operation
This is promoted as a simple project management solution, and it is simple. It is very simple. There is no support for a timeline at all. Basically, it is a big bunch of linked index cards. That is not what I am looking for in a project planner.
xTimeProject
This one is bizarre. It looks really slick, but it is not at all intuitive. Entering tasks is not simple, with a full dialog box for each task. After five mintues I couldn’t figure out how to promote or demote a task in a heiarchy or how to set dependencies. I have no use for a program that I can’t figure out how to use in a few minutes. Especially not if I have to pay $100 for it!
Intellisys Project Desktop
This is quite functional, but pretty unattractive. It is not very “mac”, but it is pretty usable. I was able to create heirarchial project outlines pretty quickly. It has options to sync over a network, and seems to be set up well for collaborative input - where many project members change what they are working on to update the project. It is free to try, but purchasing costs $160. It just doesn’t work well enough to justify that for a personal project.
PowerCard
This is quite different from the other systems I tested. You brainstorm tasks onto a series of task cards and then link them by dropping them on each other. You rearrange the cards according to your priorities, and the system works out a timeline and GANTT chart for you. This seems an excellent way to plan. However, I found it difficult to link tasks within one milestone with others in another milestone. I have a pretty structured head, and I need to group a bit more than the program allows. I think it lends itself well to an “overall-general-theme” project-plan rather than a “granualr-specific-nitty-gritty” project plan. This isn’t quite right for me. If it works for you, you are in luck, as it only costs $60.
Merlin2
Merlin is lovely. It has all the advantages of Omniplan, and an even better interface. It even has neat little animations to the Gantt chart when you add tasks or change dependencies. However, it is a little more expensive. You can have a good try of this, but you can’t save projects with more than 20 tasks unless you buy a license. It costs $225 for a single license.
Educational planners
I thought that educational solutions might work for me, so I tried Task List 5.2 and Schoolhouse. Both are set up to manage concrete assignments, and would be best used at secondary school level. Task List can manage small projects with a number of steps, and integrates with iCal. I think Task List would be a perfect daily task manager for those studying, even at tertiary level.
Summary
I really liked both Omniplan and Merlin2. Both have excellent interfaces, and are scalable. If I chose to pay for one of these, I could continue to use it for bigger scale projects in the future. In fact, they may be total overkill for a single-person, no-budget project like mine. But I can choose not to use those extra features. And on mac, you are looking at shelling out in the region of $100, which is not a huge commitment if it means you will save days of project planning work, and stress over a 12 month plus time period.
But I still have to look at online planners. More about that next post.
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