Orangescrum vs. Projector PSA vs. RationalPlan

This is a good thing for medium/large companies for inside the company and/or for interacting with remote employees/freelancers. As the program facilitates the interaction between employees and managers it speeds up the distribution of tasks and allows managers to identify possible problems on the fly. For indie developers - it's a little expensive.

Incentivized

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

Appropriate as a great alternative to MS Project. RationalPlan provides most of the features needed to develop and maintain mid-level complex schedules. Less Appropriate for large complex schedules of long duration. These can be a challenge due to Duration at top-level. It is also a challenge to generate reports for management - reporting feature is limited.

• We tested the free version of the program. It improved communication within the team.
• Allowed to trace performance and time spent on tasks. Each team member was aware of the status of the tasks and could plan their work.
• Simplified interaction with managers, as it could present the results in the form of Gantt charts.

Incentivized

• Projector is a very well designed tool for project management. It has allowed us to eliminate a number of auxiliary tools for project timelines and WBS for the vast majority of our projects.
• Time and expense entry is intuitive and quick for our staff.
• Our forecasting and resource management capability has improved greatly with Projector and allows us to grow our team efficiently with minimal additional administrative burden.
• Reporting is extremely robust. It does require some time to really get a handle on the full functionality of the reporting tool, but once you do, you can get almost any kind of report you want out of the system!

• Portfolio view is great to get a feel for how your programme is running at a glance and which areas possibly might require attention. The fact that you can customise your view by adding your own columns is another plus.
• All project information in one tool is a big plus for me considering the amount of projects we run with. This really improves efficiency and saves me time. You have the ability to add documents to tasks, manage risks, email resources tasks due for projects they are assigned to(might need some refinement depending on your requirements), material db with costing etc.

• The program interface is overloaded. Especially when there is little time for a detailed description of the tasks.
• I would like a faster way to publish the result at the completion of the task.
• Projects and tasks are two different workspaces/pages. Personally, it would be more convenient to combine these things.

Incentivized

• Release management process needs to be improved. Currently no facility is provided to test the impact of new releases in a sand-box. This introduces business risk if there are interfaces into Projector PSA as part of it's use in the business.

• Milestones should be a primary option instead of 0h to create one.

Incentivized

We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

I had to ask for support once and got a response immediately.

Trello was excellent, but we did not choose it because of the price and relatively positive feedback from employees using Orangescrum who wanted the easiest and fastest way to create reports so as not to be distracted from work (as a two-click report).

Incentivized

We did pursue Quick Arrow another tool that was similar. We found that be in inflexible in use. Projector allows a lot of flexibility in setup. Our organization has very specific business processes and we were able to set up Projector to work with those processes. Several other systems we tried were not as flexible in allowing set up to our needs.

RationalPlan is cost-effective and allows most users to prepare and manage their schedule. The software lacks comprehensive reporting and duration changes at the top level of a project.

• It accelerated the work of the team, but the mastering of the program interface was slow.
• The interface is not intuitive. It proved to be quite complicated.
• For managers, the program has facilitated reporting and streamlined team tracking.

Incentivized

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized

• Helps explain the target schedule and resource estimates for cost of the project

Incentivized