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Milestones
Professional 2002
Reviewed
by: Howard
Carson,
send e-mail
Published
by: KIDASA
Software, Inc., go
to the web site
Requires:
Windows 95, 98. 98SE, NT4, Windows 2000, XP
MSRP:
US$229.00 (electronic upgrade $79)
The
original idea for KIDASA's Milestones software came while
founder Susan Butler worked at Lockheed's Austin Division.
She spent more than one late evening helping highly-paid engineers
put together their presentation-ready milestone charts for
their next-day briefings. Since project management software
of the day didn't offer the presentation qualities required,
engineers and manager resorted to using CAD software, graphic
designers and PC-based drawing packages. Tedious and extremely
time-consuming. Big deal. Who cares. Everybody works hard,
right?
Wrong.
Multi-national
companies such as JD Edwards (specialists in project management
solutions) have grown to massive proportions over the past
20 years in particular because assembling the details of a
project while keeping your eye on the big picture is much
like putting together a complex jigsaw puzzle. You need a
guide to know how those pieces should fit together in this
day and age of extreme project costs and risks. A missing
piece or detail spells disaster. Even for the smallest set
of details for the smallest project, some sort of planning
and tracking is needed. Small companies become bigger and
more successful in part because of good project management.
Enter Milestones Professional 2002.
We installed
and tested Milestones Professional 2002 on three computers
including an older PII/350 MHz with 32MB of RAM running Windows
95, a 700MHz AMD Athlon with 96MB of RAM running Windows 98SE,
and a PIII/550 with 352MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Professional.
Milestones installed perfectly and ran quite well on all three
machines, with no apparent differences in speed of operation
while using Milestones. The test projects we used were duplications
of a) an existing 8 month software development project, and
b) an existing, fairly large demolition and construction project.
Both original project schedules had been created in Microsoft
Project 98 and 2000. They were imported into Milestones Professional
2002 using its conversion wizard. We encountered only minor
issues resulting from the manner in which Milestones condenses
MS Project layouts and data. The time required to completely
convert and check both projects amounted to a total of only
90 minutes.
Kidasa
Software has been beavering away to produce a large number
of improvements and enhancements which make Milestones Professional
2002 quite distinct from previous versions: outline task color
shading (in addition to a lot more color control in every
other area), dozens more presentation options, smart status
indicators which can be customized in each area of any project,
a lot more value categories per graph (up to 8 value sets
per graph), up to 20 outline levels, and dozens and dozens
of new and updated templates.
Users
will find joy in the presentation-ready schedule maker, the
ability to share schedules using a freely distributable viewer,
generation of Internet-ready web pages, project cost tracking,
new indicators for easy reporting, the ability to add schedules
to PowerPoint and Word, and the ability to create charts from
Project which can be updated when your Project plan changes.
Nice -
but is Milestones Professional 2002 a worthy alternative to
Microsoft Project 2000 or 2002? We say yes, for most typical
applications and for most small to large size projects. The
only downside we've ever encountered is some hesitation on
the part of people who fear Milestones Professional may not
meet a reasonable standard. That fear is a tribute to the
fact that Microsoft has done a pre-eminently superb job of
making MS Project ubiquitous. Personally speaking, Milestones
Pro has always been more stable and easier to use than MS
Project.
Cons:
Milestones Professional can't do task risk or project risk
analysis. Note that while Microsoft Project 2002 does risk
analysis, it's not particularly complex. For that you really
need one of the many (expensive) risk analysis programs currently
available. We recommend using good project management software
as a powerful guide however, not a final risk decision maker.
In all project management, common sense and informed judgments
should rule. Always.
Pros:
We really like the smart status indicators. You can set them
to automatically update and show the current percentage completed
for any task - excellent for quick or at-a-glance reviews.
The MS Project to Milestones Pro conversion wizard works well.
Resource tracking is now more robust - certainly up to MS
Project standards - and as is typical of Kidasa products,
easier to use. Milestones Professional 2002 is highly recommended
for hands-on managers and planners who want to plan, create,
manage, track and assess projects of any size.
ADDENDUM:
Project
management through best practices (or at least a vague swipe
at best practices) along with decent PM software, continues
to command a lot of corporate and small business interest.
There are good reasons for all the interest. Herewith, a few
tasty links to some comprehensive project management resources:
PM
links resources
PM
research & information links
Project
Mgmt Institute
FatBrain's
PM resource center
Letters
to the Editor are welcome and occasionally abused in public.
Send e-mail to: whine@kickstartnews.com
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