Item: Microsoft Project
Rating: 8
Author: Juan Felipe Patarroyo Montenegro

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I work as a coordinator of a laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico. In this role, I have to supervise graduate students to complete their research, thesis work or any particular project. Also, when we are writing proposals for research we need to provide a detailed plan of our research project. MS Project helps me manage the time these kinds of project take. In addition, it helps to elaborate on Gantt charts using task dependencies in case something unexpected occurs and the project gets delayed.

Pros and Cons

The Gantt chart tool has many options to manage costs and time in an organized way.
The file created in MS Project may be exported to be used in another MS Office software.
Customer support coming from Microsoft is great. There is always an article or forum to help me.

I would like MS Project to be more user-friendly. There are some functionalities that keep being hard to use like the time organization.
It should have a way of exporting a nice and well presented PDF document to be shared. Today is very hard to create a nice image showing the goals.
I think it should have integration with internet and social networks in order to engage other people to work together in an easy way.

Return on Investment

It helped to organize some expenses in a research proposal in order to save around $15,000 dollars in time
It helped graduate students to have a deep understand of the time management of their thesis work
It helped to organize people to develop research projects

Alternatives Considered

Asana

MS project stands up over Asana because it is more formal. When you realize that you need to submit a proposal to a huge company or federal organization, you must use the most complete software to do that. In addition, MS Project helps to integrate costs and human resources in a time schedule to have a time and money estimate of the project.

Other Software Used

Asana, Evernote, Google Cloud Spanner

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft Project is well suited for creating formal documents to manage a specific project. It provides a lot of calculations that help to create a detailed plan for a project. I think that Microsoft Project is not suited for non-formal organizations like a group of friends or students because it is very rigid to be used for huge projects with costs and that kind of things. I think that it will be better if it gets easier to use with more simple projects. At least, it should have the option to select templates for different kinds of projects.

It's an excellent tool for developing detailed project planning

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Project