Implementation of Project Manager.com

What are the best aspects of this product?

- Easy to use & intuitive interface. We looked at around 20 other products and this was in the top 3 in terms of how easy it was to find & execute what we wanted to
- Dashboard and reports are accessible and give us most of what we need, quickly and easily
- Gantt chart functionality is very good - quick and easy to either import existing plans or create new ones from scratch, with ability to type in values in the columns on the left, or "click and drag" to achieve the same effect in the Gantt chart section.
- PM.com support team has been helpful and responsive
- Resource management functionality gives us what we need to easily see all tasks & availability across the team, and factor this in when scheduling future tasks
- The software license cost is lower than many competitor products

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

- Ability to configure and customise reports is limited. There are a set number of reports available as standard, and some fields and attributes that you can add and remove from each report. However, if there is anything else you want that is not in these then there is no way of creating / developing it in the system
- Linked to the above - financial reporting is limited. There are reports providing a listed breakdown of project costs, and a high level "cost vs budget" bar chart in the dashboard, but not much else. More sophisticated analysis of profitability / margins and trends over time need to be completed outside of the system, which is not the case in some of the competitor products
- There is only one method to apportion time, i.e. the average amount of hours per day that the task is scheduled for. It is not possible to vary this (e.g. front-loading of effort to the start of a task, or accounting for a day of absence in the middle of a task), which again some competitor products provide
- Visibility of future product developments has been limited. We have submitted a number of enhancement / feature requests but have not received any feedback around if / when new functionality will be deployed in the system

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

- Improved reporting functionality - particularly around financials
- Ability to more easily see impact of late-finishing tasks on the plan (i.e. knock-on impact to dependent tasks)
- Improved risk management functionality (the risk register is fairly basic)
- Ability for reports to be scheduled to automatically run at a set frequency
- Ability to schedule recurring meetings in the Gantt chart

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

- (in)Visibility of key project health measures all in one place
- (in)Ability to create more sophisticated project plans, and easily update them when things inevitably change
- (in)Ability to effectively plan & allocate resources to projects - improving utilisation and reducing peaks / troughs in capacity

Essentially - consolidated a number of disparate, disconnected spreadsheets into a single system & database. Improved efficiency & integration of project information.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes