Item: Microsoft Project
Rating: 6
Author: Daniel Blazquez

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Project

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization relies at many levels on the Microsoft platform, from desktop operating systems, to productivity (Microsoft Office 365), and additional services such as storage (One Drive, etc). So we do use Microsoft Project on certain occasions. The main need is resource coordination and project planning. Most users use the desktop app, we haven't deployed many on mobile devices so far.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Generic, classic projects with well defined constraints
Gantt-based planning
Waterfall methodologies

Cons

Agile project planning
Vague requirements
Domain-specific applications

Return on Investment

Good piece to have in our toolbox, but should not be the only option
Harder to compute ROI as we are a large corporate account, comes bundled
We see it as a "feature" of Office, as opposed to a "destination"

Alternatives Considered

JIRA Software

Each project has different needs and we switch back and forth. We often find Microsoft Office to be too generic for specific purposes, in which case we gravitate towards domain-specific tools, such as JIRA for software project management.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox Business, Skype for Business

Likelihood to Recommend

As mentioned above, when the project is well understood, and the main goal is coordinate people, tasks, and resources around dependencies and dates, Microsoft Project is powerful. Not so much in software development projects, or when requirements change often (in that case I would recommend a Kansan-Based environment, as opposed to Gantt-based environment).

Microsoft Project Feature Ratings

Comments

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General purpose power tool --for good and for bad