All Designers Must Have This
posted in Entrepreneurship, Project Management
About a week ago, I began to feel overwhelmed with the amount of work we were receiving from both current clients and new clients, and Microsoft Project Pro 2007 just wasn’t cutting it for me anymore when trying to organize it all.
So, I went on the hunt for a better project management system, and found a review of the top systems out there.
I have had previous experience with Celoxis and more recently Microsoft Project 2007. I still felt like I wanted something better.
Celoxis is an extremely slow application and as each update of the program is released, it becomes more and more difficult to do the things you want to do, as fast as you want to do them.
Microsoft Project 2007 is a local pc application, and it is a good program, yet it just bores me a little too much and makes me feel like I am working in Excel…which is not too much fun for a designer.
So I decided to take a test drive of “@Task”, http://attask.com, the number one project management software from the review noted above. So far, I am extremely happy with how it works, and to make it even better, I received a phone call from a tech at the company today asking if I would like to set up my free 30 minute training session.
The application is all online, and also has an ASP download to host it on your own servers if you like. It is about $32.00 a month, per user. This works out to be a little bit pricey when you start adding a number of programmers and designers, but it is definately worth it. Clients spend a lot of money with my company and it is only right that I invest in the best resources for my company to be able to provide them with the best service. If you start cheaping out on your own company, how can you expect clients to not cheap out on you also.
So, @task is currently keeping all of our current and ongoing project in order, and making it easy for my programmers and designers to login in and update their time each day.
This project management system “@Task” is a must for busy designers and it will also give you a clear idea of how profitable your projects are.
Do you use a project management system for your projects? Tell us a little about your experience with them, which one did you choose?
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A bit pricey for a freelancer but perfect for a company. Thanks for the info.
Jacob Cass’s last blog post..All about Jacob Cass (me) – Things you didn’t know
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Celoxis question says:
Regarding your comment:
“Celoxis is an extremely slow application and as each update of the program is released, it becomes more and more difficult to do the things you want to do, as fast as you want to do them.”How long ago did you use it, and did you use their hosting? (I assume you probably did). We are looking at it, but with an eye towards putting it on our own server. I liked @Task, but the thing is we need to collaborate, and often some of us are on the road, and only have a pda that gets email. I like the fact that you can email a response into the discussions, which unfortunately @Task wasn’t able to do.
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I used it for about a year and a half. It was hosted on their servers.
@task does allow you to add discussion to projects, and allows you to email those parties listed on the project or task. I presume you mean you would like your responses sent to show up in the project management system, rather than simply going to the person’s email address.
I haven’t seen this in @task either. The best part about @task is their use of Ajax and how fast it is to us, along with the level of customization to all interfaces. I really like the custom data functions in @task over celoxis.
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Also, by “each update” on the celoxis comment, I mainly meant that each version they releasesd, they would remove pieces of usability from the system …making it hugely frustrating to create and update tasks.
Small example….when creating multiple tasks….you have to edit each task’s deadline date individually….using a calendar function. It doesn’t even allow you to copy and paste in the date from the previous task! This is one small example of what I was talking about.
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Thanks Brian.. how long ago was that when you were using it?
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partly cloudy says:
We use Daptiv. We looked at attask and thought it was pretty nice for smaller groups, but we loved Daptiv’s flexibility. We now use it in about 4 different areas of my company including marketing and IT web development and finance.
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We had almost exactly this experience at hutchhouse and found it intensely frustrating. We therefore built our own web app (over a number of years and umpteen odd iterations) – which we have just released to the public.
I’m not sure if it’s the right place to talk about it (I don’t want to appear to spam this article) but go and check it out. The name of the web app is allworkedup – you can find out more at allworkeduphq.com. Any feedback is most welcome!
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Rowan Gates says:
Although @task is awesome for companies that are larger or have decent budget – for freelancers and small firms – try the project management software that was created with designers in mind – Projecturf 2.0. In fact, Projecturf was created by a design company.
With Projecturf designers can present work to clients and let them review, comment on, rate, and approve designs all in one place.
Also has unlimited file storage space on all business plans with no cap on users, project managers or features. Share and upload large numbers of files without storage restrictions, constraints or additional charges.
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Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing a little research on that. And he actually bought me lunch because I found it for him smile
