Best Free Project Manager

Project Management software can be a minefield; every user has a different view of what makes a program “project management” material rather than a good organizing tool or time manager. While Microsoft lead the way in desktop project management tools with MS Project, not everyone wanted the complexity that came with all of its capabilities.

For our review, we have concentrated on those programs which offer standard project management features such as task and resource scheduling and tracking, charting, project and task breakdown into sub-projects, sub-tasks and dependencies.

Topping our list here is the Open Source project management tool Open Workbench, which is a free tool so feature-rich and powerful that it should at least be considered before any decision is made to purchase a commercial project management package. Like the commercial products of the same ilk, it takes time to get your head around and if you have been using Microsoft Project or another task-based manager you'll have to re-orient your thinking because Open Workbench is resource-driven not task-driven.

According to the developers, "an Open Workbench plan is built up from estimates for the tasks of work. Estimates are tied to the resource assigned to the tasks. Duration is then driven by the number of hours each resource will work per week to cover the total number of hours required for the tasks. Open Workbench is best suited to groups that estimate total work effort based on the estimates for all the tasks associated with a project and then create a staffing plan and schedule for those estimates."

The key features of the application include project planning, scheduling, resource management, project review and more.

The program can also read Microsoft project files and this possibly makes Open Workbench the most appealing. Many products–even the commercial offerings–are great project management tools but sooner or later someone is going to want to view or edit your plan with the ubiquitous MS Project and without compatibility, the best you are going to be able to offer is an exported spreadsheet or graphical equivalent.

Open Workbench is the real thing, not some amateurish, half baked effort. Like Microsoft Project, it is best suited to large scale projects that can justify the considerable time it takes to learn the product.

Users with smaller projects or more simple needs might want to consider some of the less feature-rich project managers, such as GanttProject or ToDoList.

GanttProject is a very good project management tool, with a surprisingly good depth of features and accessories for a free product. It is distributed under a GNU General Public License, which means you can download it for free.

There is also a java based version of the program, which means that you don't even have to download the software to use it. As its name suggest, GanttProject is excellent for making Gantt charts, which are great  for making logical and easy to understand development plans.

On of the features I particularly liked was the ability to put in a percentage complete bar inside the timeline of that particular stage. This makes it easy to see how far along everything is without a lot of hassle. The program, if you use the downloadable version is very simple and easy to use. You can add as many tasks as you need, as well as then being able to assign personnel and resources to each task.  In particular the features for the personnel section are very good. You can add team members for a project and assign them to tasks when you set them up, you can also input e-mail addresses as well as phone numbers for each person and assign them a role in the group. GanttProject also includes a Milestone feature which is very useful, giving an end goal to aim for with a fixed time. Many other project management tools do not support these.

On the technical side, GanttProject can save files as .xml files, which means that they are viewable over the internet as well as transferable to other programs, such as Microsoft Project. The installation is very quick and the program is actually very small, being under 10mb. There are very few problems with this tool, my only criticism is that you can't associate files with particular tasks, allowing other team members to get the files they need.

Overall GanttProject is a very good project management tool, perhaps not suitable for very large projects, but very usable for small to medium size projects.

While not a traditional Project Management tool in that it does not come with the mandatory Gantt charting, ToDoList is a sound choice for those wanting to get started straight away in managing a simple project.

ReqMan is a free web-based project management tool, developed by RequirementsOne based in Sunnyvale, CA. 

Now being well versed in the traditional Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process, I expected to see something on the order of planning, analysis, design, implementation and maintenance. In fact a key point for Reqman is that it does not conform to a certain SDLC. You can view ReqMan as a bunch of “legos” that can be put together to fit your specific needs. With ReqMan, flexibility is the key. Even if you are used to traditional methods, ReqMan can handle your needs.

Projects typically start with either a project charter or statement. In ReqMan, this is done as part of one of the specifications in the Requirements Module. This is not hard coded in the application but instead are part of one of the templates that you can choose. You can, for example, pick the IEEE-830 Software Requirement specification from the Wiki Requirements library and fill these details in using the table of contents. Once this was explained to me, the true power of ReqMan began to show itself.

Producing good requirements are very important. Too many times business clients have approached IT departments asking for one thing and when the project is done the clients do not get what they asked for. With ReqMan you can create the specifications you require in the Requirements Module e.g. Business Requirements and Functional Requirements and establish links between the requirements in the respective specifications. You can then use the traceability matrix to see coverage. You can for example also create a test specification and link the tests to the requirements in the Functional specification.

Implementation is controlled by defining a project plan and associating the relevant requirements and issues. You would add a custom field called “Lifecycle” for your requirements in the Functional specification, and add fields named (e.g. Assigned to developer, Ready for test, Write release notes, Released to production). This is in turn reflected in the searches you do and the dashboards you configure, so you can see exactly where you project is headed and what the load is. As you can see, ReqMan can handle the case where requirements fall out during implementation. This capability is crucial.

Change requests are added to the business requirements specification where you might have user defined custom fields with custom values. This will give you a crystal clear picture of where you are with your change requests. In turn you then add the functional requirements for the change requests when they have been approved and assign them to a developer.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the review, ReqMan is extremely flexible and configurable. There are other power features which I haven't pointed out such as a Questionnaire Module, a Planning and Time Module, and a Reporting Module.

Summary: 

I enjoyed using this online project management tool and I like the direction RequirementOne has taken.  ReqMan is a good choice for businesses and organizations that need a tool that can be used to fit your specific need

dotProject is a robust Web-based project management framework written in PHP that allows users to schedule, plan, and staff projects. It's not a perfect application, but its extensive functionality and ease of use make its shortcomings easy to overlook.
 
The dotProject application is an open source GNU GPL-licensed project management application that was started in December 2000 and is actively developed and maintained. By way of an intuitive browser-based interface, dotProject offers project task management (task description, duration, scheduling, and assignment), multi-user support, granular user permissions, Gantt charts, discussion forums, file checkout, contact list, trouble tickets, reporting, calendar, and user-based to-do capabilities. If that's not enough built-in functionality, you can extend dotProject from a well-trafficked SourceForge project full of additional add-on modules.
 
A simple tabbed user menu drives the application. The fundamental units of the dotProject system are companies, projects, tasks, and users. The first step in using dotProject is to create companies for which projects are to be completed. Users, projects, and tasks are all related to a company. The next step should be to add users to both your client company listings and to your own resource allocation. You need users so that you have someone to assign tasks to; otherwise the administrator gets to do all the work! You can assign users varying degrees of permissions that can be matched to specific companies and/or projects.

After you've set up your company and initial users it's time to create project details that need to be managed and input tasks. Tasks can be linked and labeled as predecessor tasks and/or milestones and assigned to user resources. Users are notified of their task assignments by email, which is a neat feature. Users can also simply log in to the system and examine their own task lists.

Task management is the critical component of any project management application, and it's something that dotProject does reasonably well. Users can log time against a task directly in the system, giving a project manager a good synopsis of progress to date. From a scheduling point of view, dotProject helps users to calculate when tasks should start and when they should be completed based on time duration allocated and start task dependencies.
 
DotProject also allows users to create something called dynamic tasks, which takes their start, completion, and duration from the child tasks that are related to them. The newly updated and thorough dotProject documentation has some excellent explanation of how dotProject handles tasks, dynamic tasks, and dependencies.

Love them or hate them, Gantt charts are a mainstay of many project management packages. DotProject, rather than making the Gantt chart the focus of project management as they are in GanttProject, simply includes the chart as one of its tabs. DotProject offers no default export or print functionality for Gantt charts.

Project managers tend to love their reports. DotProject can generate a number of project reports, including task log, user performance, allocated user hours, tasks sorted by user, tasks overdue, completed, upcoming, overall report, and project statistics.
Overall, dotProject offers a staggering amount of useful functionality. By virtue of it being a Web-based multi-user application, you can quickly put it to work for either individual or distributed team project development. Its online documentation and support forums help when you need to figure something out or have hit a snag. Certainly dotProject is not without issues; the developers maintain a list of documented bugs that need to be dealt with in upcoming releases. Items like the Gantt project bug are annoying but are easily fixed with a small code tweak.

On the whole, dotProject is a solid multi-user project management tool that stands on its own merits.

project manager, gantt chart, work bench, to do list, free software, freeware