Project Smart

Hi All,

Need help. I'm one of those who got into PM by accident. Currently, work for an engineering services company which has a fairly young or almost non-existing PMO setup. I'm trying to get hold of any existing off the shelf tool to help us with manage resources (schedules, leaves and timesheets). Any tool that can capture capabilities of the people will be an added advantage. Currently all are managed via traditional method, Excel, MSP, paper leave forms, etc.

Appreciate any suggestions.

Hi,

Based on the fact you use MSP and are looking for something else, I'm thinking MSP isn't something you want to continue to use?

Reason I ask is that based on your requirements MSP would tick all the boxes, as you can setup Resource Pools, Resource Specific Calendars for Leave (non-working time), etc. Only shortfall would be the timesheets, but it would be possible to create a custom column for entering Actual Hours totals for each resource in the Resource Sheet.

There are also ways you can automatically extract MSP data into Excel and merge with data from other spreadsheets and collate both planned data and actuals data - although would be some work to set this sort of system up initially.

From experience most companies seem to work in a way where planned data is in one system, actuals are captured in another, and the two are brought together in some sort of Business Intelligence tool like Oracle BI.

If your organisation is small, I would certainly avoid any huge ERP or Planning Systems like SAP, Primavera, etc. as this would just be way too cumbersome to maintain.

Sorry no recommendation of off the shelf toolset (other than MS Office based), but hopefully useful info.

Best Regards,

Keith_Harrison