MS Project 2016 Really Delivers a Easier User Experience
July 14, 2015
MS Project 2016 Really Delivers a Easier User Experience
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
2016
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Project
We use Microsoft Project to help do estimating, bidding, work planning and resource capacity forecasting for all internal and external projects.
This product has a rich Business Intelligence and an easy to use interface (with a little training) that provides us with unparalleled task and resource/workload management.
With the information we use for managing and planning projects, we are able to do not only project management, but program and portfolio selection and planning with this tool.
- Resource Management and Task/Demand Management planning, tracking and reporting.
- Pivot Table and Business Intelligence Reporting with the enterprise or local data in the Project Schedule
- Cost and Resource work forecasting for what if scenarios and active to planning workload tracking. This is done with a drag and drop Outlook/Calendar interface called the Team Planner View. The enterprise version allows us to quickly manage and track/forecast resource work across the entire company.
- There is a little training needed since this will act like a spreadsheet, but really has a full relational database behind the scenes.
- Many people think this has just a waterfall scheduling approach, but we found this to be very effective with Agile and SCRUM. Again a little knowledge on the tool's capabilities pay dividends for end user productivity
- Microsoft project has allowed us to better create estimates and proposals, while also helping track and manage the work in the same tool we developed our estimates with.
- We use Project Server for all of our document management and integrate it with our accounting software and CRM system via workflows to update and synchronize information.
- Our employees have found the integration with SharePoint, Visio and Office365 to be very straight forward and more of a powerful experience for a holistic solution to managing projects.
We find that while MicroSoft Project appears to have a higher learning curve, the short investment in training provides a much richer and much more long lasting solution vs. some of the other web only scheduling tools. These are easy to get started, but quickly lack the depth for business intelligence, reporting, tracking and the what-if scenarios and baselines that you use for medium to complex projects.