Hi Folks,



My first post here on this forum. I am looking for some advice and I hope I can get it here.

I work in a small but busy inhouse design department. We use a simple excel sheet to record and assign a Job ID number to design jobs that come from within our organisation. Of late we have found that the excel method is very limited. I have researched 'Project Management' software and the same names keeping popping up like 'Daylite' 'Studiometery' and Microsoft Project.

Would other forums users recomend this product to use in a busy design department? Can it be customised so that each individual job that comes in would get an id number (eg. 0001) abd be able to add detail to that job like Criticla path, client etc.

Would project be able to generate reports based on which client / department has booked in the most jobs etc.

Really sorry if these questions are basic, but I think that project could be the best for us because of cost etc.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Hi mcdseven,

A couple of things -- there is no version of Project for the Mac -- you'd need to run Project in the Windows environment. I'm not a Mac user, but I do know at least one former Project MVP who successfully ran Project on a Mac using the OS X parallels (?) program.

Microsoft Project is a very powerful project scheduling product allowing you to:
Create tasks (with IDs)
Create predecessor/successor relationships between tasks to create a dynamic schedule. (Should a predecessor task take longer, successor task adjusts)
Assign resources to tasks to allow calculation of work required (or you may specify work and let Project calculate duration)
Review resource work loads and determine if resources are overallocated.
Calculate critical path.

That being said, Project can be quite non-intuitive. Investing time in taking a good 2-3 day hands on class taught by an experienced MS Project instructor is key. An instructor can show you tips and tricks and save you hours of frustration with the product.

Please fee free to post back with any further questions.

I hope this helps.
Julie