I was hunting for a Project Management tool last week. I really wanted a software as a service” (SaaS) tool for a couple reasons:

1. I wanted a more Web 2.0 collaborative approach to planning and coordinating project activity than what you get with a thick-client like MS Project;
2. I want to get more experience with a wide variety of SaaS tools.

I gave myself one day to search and select a product because if I took more than that, the other project team members would have killed me! The process was rather frustrating and my one-day cap turned into one of those 12-hour days from hell. But it turned out happily enough in the end, so if you don't give a damn about the tools I rejected and only want to know what I settled on, skip to the last paragraph. I started by looking into some of the tools listed on blogs of respected Web 2.0 gurus. I actually signed up for several free trials and made several attempts to set up a project plan. There were many others that I didn’t even bother with if there was no free trial or the cost was too much or the web site was too difficult to find anything or the feature list did not sound promising. I’ll just discuss the ones I experimented with in this post.

The first one I ran across was ProjectPlace. This tool is robust, kind of a MS Project replacement. It has a lot of functionality and the user interface is reasonably laid out. But it seems to be laid out more like a thick-client and as a result, I found the performance to be sluggish and most activities have a second or two of latency time which starts off as an annoyance and grows worse the more you use it. I like that it includes issue tracking. If you can deal with the sluggish performance, you'll like it. I couldn't.

Next on the hit list was Basecamp. It was unfair to look at Basecamp right after ProjectPlace because they are apples and oranges. Whereas ProjectPlace is a MS Project alternative, Basecamp is more of a shared task list. It certainly is easy enough to get non-tech-savvy people involved in a shared effort (like a church or community project). But I found it a little too simple, especially after looking at ProjectPlace. Somehow I felt like my project team (who are tech-savvy) would laugh at me if I recommended Basecamp. So with time left in my one-day search, I kept looking.

Looking for more project management robustness, I next evaluated Project-on-Demand. This is another MS Project alternative. It has an interesting twist: It is offered as a SaaS or a thick client (OpenProj) using some of the same Java code base and the thick client is free. Project-on-Demand has a ton of functionality and as a result is rather complex. Unfortunately, the documentation is severely lacking. The best source of information right now is over on SourceForge. The focus on this tool seems to be on functionality, not usability. For example, I was surprised to discover that I had to type the name of resources assigned to tasks as opposed to selecting them from a list. After trying to get the tool to auto-schedule the plan since it claims to be the industry’s most advanced scheduling engine, I was shocked to find out it does not do any auto-scheduling yet. Again, you had to learn that bit of bad news from another distressed person in a Forum on SourceForge. That limitation and the lack of documentation put this one on the back-burner for me. Plus, it was so complex that it is unlikely to ever be a collaborative tool but rather a tool designed for project managers doing project management as we have traditionally known it.

Moving on from Project-on-Demand, I discovered yet another free thick-client MS Project replacement tool: OpenWorkbench. If I understand the ecosystem on this one, it looks like CA put this thing in the open source space to give users a reason to consider their higher end enterprise portfolio management and IT governance tools which OpenWorkbench is integrated with. I did install the free client and it seems extremely robust and easily a MS Project alternative. But I was looking for a SaaS solution so I didn't play with it very long. FYI - I exported the project I created in Project-on-Demand in XML and successfully imported it into OpenWorkbench - a credit to both tools and standards!

Disturbed by the lack of auto-scheduling in Project-on-Demand, I next tested another SaaS tool called LiquidPlanner. This one is getting some great reviews because it uses date ranges to auto-schedule and provides estimated completion dates in probabilities instead of specifics. I must admit there is much elegance in this thinking and the tool has promise. But, loaded with less than 50 tasks made performance absolutely unbearable. It seems like it tries to recalculate a schedule anytime you do anything so trying to set up a plan was just painfully slow. I kept trying to find a way to turn the auto-scheduling feature off so I could get the basic plan entered first, but couldn't figure out how and had to give it up.

I was about ready to just accept Basecamp as my least-worse alternative, when I came across TeamWork Live. Ten minutes later, I realized I had found it. Their tag-line is easy and effective project collaboration and that is not false advertising. The user interface is so simple, it requires practically no training. The performance is good enough and even great for some functions. I wish they had an import function, but adding tasks was reasonably fast. There is a special feature for changing the owner or target date for all tasks at one time. My project team loves it so far. It s easy to see what you need to do and what others are doing. There are a couple of other limitations: It doesn't have issue tracking and doesn’t allow for sub-tasks or multiple resources per task. You can organize tasks within milestones which gives the effect of a two-level WBS capability (good enough for my needs right now). The email alerts are excellent. In fact, you can reply to the email alert and do most things without actually signing into the tool (a handy feature to us Blackberry users).

The thing I like most about TeamWork is that they didn't just try to replace MS Project in the SaaS space. Instead, they appear to have given a lot of thought about what kind of tool would help a group of professional people who are trying to work together to achieve a common objective. It doesn't try to give some sort of project manager authoritarian the ability to determine the most efficient work load of subordinates. Instead, it allows a team to divide-and-conquer work with clear accountability, clear visibility, and assumes that professional people will manage their time effectively as long as they have a shared perception of what the priorities are. This is a great example of how collaboration and Web 2.0 changes things.

Are the days of the large monolithic project plan as the key management device of a single user called a Project Manager over? Maybe not for all projects, but I tend to think so for projects that are a real collaboration of professional people who are capable and empowered to manage their time effectively.