Project Management Resources for Determining Costs, Effort, Durations

I found an on-line provider of a Gantt chart service called SMARTSHEET. This project management tool resides in the cloud and offers features to manage the simplest to the most complex of projects.  It literally only took the promised 10 seconds to sign up for a free trial with my email and get right to a two minute feature overview video-cast. “Gantt charts can represent different views of the project activity against a calendar”(Russell, 2000, p. 45).  This data sheet allows several different views of the data, uploading of previously created data files or a selection of templates to set up a new file.  This powerful data management tool allows you to easily change, edit, drag and drop and reorder information in a number of ways.  You can set up dual views of your spreadsheet information and associate corresponding files with tasks by attaching them into any row.  This service also lets an unlimited number of users to contribute data to the spreadsheet given the authorized access.  These contributor groups can then also do any uploading of PDFs for matching tasks, etc.  There is also a really neat discussion board feature that maintains a pop-up thread of comments specific to individual rows and cells inside the spreadsheet.
 

I think this is the most powerful tool because analysis of the data or costs or timelines or resources allocated for any project can be collected collaboratively inside these little discussion boardlets.  This would be an extreme time saver since your project “audience list” (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton & Kramer, 2008, p. 275) would have all the information needed to run the project for the entire team.  A close second on the most important tools inside this SMARTSHEET is also the search and filter capabilities.  Every single move made on the document is tracked and can then be mined for administrative reporting.  You can search by key term, by contributor, by date, etc. to produce a myriad of different valuable reports from the project SMARTSHEET.  Plus you can set up automated email alerts of any change to the entire team’s broadcast email list.  It contains intuitive tools on a left bar of the desktop document and numerous short tutorial videos to get started. Lastly, there is a Google App for download of the SMARTSHEET to a mobile device…pretty cool.

Bright Hub, the Hub for Bright Minds is a terrific online community of experts and enthusiasts that blog about a broad range of useful current topics including project management topics.  This LINK directs you to a page within Bright Hub that is dedicated just to providing tips, tricks and other good advice for managing projects, including ID projects.  I like this blog board because it is a collection of advice from numerous credible experts.  It is a searchable site so you can find exactly what topic you want quickly.  But the most useful part of this site is the right scroll box where the most popular articles related to project management appear. I poked around this scroll and learned some very useful basics rapidly including how to do a RACI chart.  The articles are brief but informative.  I added this site to my RSS feed.

I also found THIS review site that lists the top ten project management softwares available for fairly cheap.  I liked it for the feature chart comparison.  It really helped me to orient to all the basic capabilities of most project software tools.  THIS Google site also provides a top ten list of Google Apps for project management tools which are amazing as well.

Hope you find my resources helpful!

References

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008).

Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects.  Hoboken, NJ:

John  Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Russell, L. (2000). Project management for trainers. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.