Project Manager

[ShiftZZ]

I'm involved with a local "men in sheds" startup, I'm a trustee and in the early stages of setting it up. we dont have any funding at the moment, still working on a Charitable incorporated organisation (CIO).
As you can well imagine, we need to plan ahead, the thought is that we may need a project management tool such as the one within the Microsoft Office package, but as we dont have any money can anyone suggest a 'free' alternative?

 

[meanders]

You only need Project for complex things with many tasks, independencies and resources. You really need training on how to use it and have the team tracking their utilisation. A proper understanding of 'critical path' is essential as Project invariably gets it wrong.

In your position, and with approaching 40 years of using it and similar tools, I suggest Excel will do everything you need, and is much simpler to use and more importantly, to understand.

There are several Gantt chart tools out there, some free, but that's only a tiny part of managing a project and allows visualisation of tasks with dependencies over time.

 

[Mike123]

You can use “sheets” on Google to create a plan, others in the group may not be used to project plans and using a simple colour scheme for set tasks in rows and dates in columns you can break up into weeks, days, months etc and create a plan within mins.

Hope this helps….

 

[ShiftZZ]

You only need Project for complex things with many tasks, independencies and resources. You really need training on how to use it and have the team tracking their utilisation. A proper understanding of 'critical path' is essential as Project invariably gets it wrong.

In your position, and with approaching 40 years of using it and similar tools, I suggest Excel will do everything you need, and is much simpler to use and more importantly, to understand.

There are several Gantt chart tools out there, some free, but that's only a tiny part of managing a project and allows visualisation of tasks with dependencies over time.

Its going to be a shared project, new building, utilities, funding, equipment, training H&S, registration of legal status etc etc,, I may have a look at Excel..

I did use PM in a past life, but that was years ago...

 

[Mike123]

Stick with excel / sheets IMO.

More than capable for what you need and easy to update and share progress made to all.

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[meanders]

I always preferred PMW (Project Manager Workbench) from Hoskyns but it disappeared years ago.

I vaguely remember seeing a multi sheet template in Excel that does most of the work. Might be worth looking at.

 

[Gromett]

I'm involved with a local "men in sheds" startup, I'm a trustee and in the early stages of setting it up. we dont have any funding at the moment, still working on a Charitable incorporated organisation (CIO).
As you can well imagine, we need to plan ahead, the thought is that we may need a project management tool such as the one within the Microsoft Office package, but as we dont have any money can anyone suggest a 'free' alternative?

I have never used any Project Management software before. But a quick look and I found 3 free option. However only one stood out as a realistic option without spending money.

#1 Alternative to Microsoft Project Open Source | Projectlibre

www.projectlibre.com

 

[meanders]

I haven't needed it for a decade or so, but used Excel rather than Project when getting the new village hall built 12 years ago. Most of committee can understand a spreadsheet and a simple chart. We had different small local contractors in for groundwork, foundations and build and none of them used Project, but had various task management solutions so it would have been pointless.

When I was PM for the build of a multi million EPOS system with teams in three companies across both sides of the Atlantic, all using Project, it was a boon, but even will all with skilled users we still hit some issues. There was no Teams then so we were running three plans into one overall picture with a time shift.