Project Management Software
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John Hattan
The Code Zone
Sweet software for a saturnine world
(my byline from the Gamedev Collection series, which I co-edited) John Hattan has been working steadily in the casual game-space since the TRS-80 days and professionally since 1990. After seeing his small-format games turned down for what turned out to be Tandy's last PC release, he took them independent, eventually releasing them as several discount game-packs through a couple of publishers. The packs are actually still available on store-shelves, although you'll need a keen eye to find them nowadays. He continues to work in the casual game-space as an independent developer, largely working on games in Flash for his website, The Code Zone (www.thecodezone.com). His current scheme is to distribute his games virally on various web-portals and widget platforms. In addition, John writes weekly product reviews and blogs (over ten years old) for www.gamedev.net from his home office where he lives with his wife and daughter in their home in the woods near Lake Grapevine in Texas.
Primavera was always considered to be a "higher end" product than MS Project, but that was a long time ago and MS has likely caught up. Still, it might be worth a look.
---
John Hattan
The Code Zone
Sweet software for a saturnine world
(my byline from the Gamedev Collection series, which I co-edited) John Hattan has been working steadily in the casual game-space since the TRS-80 days and professionally since 1990. After seeing his small-format games turned down for what turned out to be Tandy's last PC release, he took them independent, eventually releasing them as several discount game-packs through a couple of publishers. The packs are actually still available on store-shelves, although you'll need a keen eye to find them nowadays. He continues to work in the casual game-space as an independent developer, largely working on games in Flash for his website, The Code Zone (www.thecodezone.com). His current scheme is to distribute his games virally on various web-portals and widget platforms. In addition, John writes weekly product reviews and blogs (over ten years old) for www.gamedev.net from his home office where he lives with his wife and daughter in their home in the woods near Lake Grapevine in Texas.
There are a multiple of inbuilt templates, or you can take the typical PM approach and build your own.
But as a previous poster said. DO you know Project Management. If not, then I humbly suggest that you want to stay right away from software like MS-Project except for reporting.
PM software doesnt perform PM, it is a tool used by a PM. If you dont know Project Management, MS-Project will be useless. In this case I would suggest something more along the lines of an excel spreadsheet or something more schedule based such as Timetrac or Scheduling software.
---
John Hattan
The Code Zone
Sweet software for a saturnine world
(my byline from the Gamedev Collection series, which I co-edited) John Hattan has been working steadily in the casual game-space since the TRS-80 days and professionally since 1990. After seeing his small-format games turned down for what turned out to be Tandy's last PC release, he took them independent, eventually releasing them as several discount game-packs through a couple of publishers. The packs are actually still available on store-shelves, although you'll need a keen eye to find them nowadays. He continues to work in the casual game-space as an independent developer, largely working on games in Flash for his website, The Code Zone (www.thecodezone.com). His current scheme is to distribute his games virally on various web-portals and widget platforms. In addition, John writes weekly product reviews and blogs (over ten years old) for www.gamedev.net from his home office where he lives with his wife and daughter in their home in the woods near Lake Grapevine in Texas.
I think they got a demo you can download.
http://www.nxn-software.com/
Power to the suits!
Not really relevant in a PM way though. I''ve seen $100 mill projects with hundreds of staff spread across the world finish before $50,000 projects with only a couple of guys in the same office.
"and if your like most suits with no real game development experience just a HR degree and rich connections you''ll need all the help you can get. Most of the top players use alienbrain bud, be wise."
Get a project manager or Production Manager. If you have noone with Project Management experience you may as well take the money and start drinking you way around Europe. It would produce far more output than the team you mention without a Project experience lead.
My current project involves 258 engineers alone and the product is currently utilised by all the fortune 500 companies. I consider this small to medium in size in what I usually deal with. So yes, I am familiar this type of PM.
However, in terms of complexity your project sounds relatively minor in terms of real world PM. You said,
"I need to be able to do this so I can see when people are coming off projects so as to plan for future projects."
This is not project management but resource management. I subset of Project Management for sure, but different enough, so you may want to look for software in that area.
BTW: Never let the scope, size or complexity overwhelm you. I''ve seen projects with $250mill budgets with over 1000 staff finish ahead of $50,000
I would have thought that resource management would have been included with Microsoft Project. I''m not too sure that AlienBrain will meet my needs either. Thats more of an asset managememtn system isn''t it?
What I ended up doing was creating a new project plan with every member of staff in it (under tasks), The project they are working on (under resources) and start/finish dates. This seems to work ok for now, but its not going to be a permanent solution.
