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Project Management Lightens Up

FastTrack Schedule 6.01 manages projects without being complicated.

By Dan Littman, PCWorld   

Does the term project management send a chill through your heart? The software used for managing major projects is generally too daunting for anyone but trained professionals. As a result, most people who aren't professional project managers try to get by with to-do lists. But when confronted with more complicated projects, you'll quickly find out that no to-do list can let you keep up with a truly complex task.

The hardest part of tackling a complex project is the planning and tracking of all its stages. You have to figure out how to break down all the elements into subprojects that run in parallel but are ready to rejoin the main project at a given moment. That requires smarts well beyond the level of a to-do list.

I've just looked at a product that's easy enough for a nonprofessional yet powerful enough to handle fairly intricate projects. AEC Software's FastTrack Schedule 6.01, a $199 program that I tested in its shipping form, lets you plan a project and track its progress without holding you to the rigid process-flow logic of higher-end packages.

Easy to Enter, Easy to See

The secret to FastTrack is that it lets you set up and study your project in a Gantt chart, a simple bar chart that uses a time line for the x axis. Every task shows up as a bar spanning a time period, which makes relationships between tasks immediately obvious. If you know Task B can't start until Task A is completed--but Task B has been scheduled first--you'll see your mistake where the bars overlap. That's something no to-do list or calendar program can reveal. To make the dependent relationships between scheduled tasks explicit, you can link the tasks together. Then, as you make your daily status entries, the Gantt chart bars stretch and change colors to highlight laggards and tasks that are running late because other tasks are falling behind.

FastTrack makes all this easy. I entered my project's tasks--with their start dates or their end dates and anticipated duration--directly in cells along the edge of the time line, and the program drew the bars for me; I also tried my hand at drawing bars directly on the chart. I linked some of my tasks to multiple preceding tasks, and saddled some tasks with multiple subsequent tasks; every time I moved one to a later date its dependents moved with it.

My test project didn't involve keeping track of costs, but FastTrack has a database-like view where you can define fields, record data, and perform calculations on that data with functions and operators. For example, if your project involves renting a piece of equipment, you could calculate the cost over time and display it as a running total on the Gantt chart.

Effective Communications Tools

The other key to managing a project well is keeping your colleagues and employees as informed about it as you are. FastTrack's Gantt-chart interface is an effective visual communications device, and the program provides a wealth of tools for highlighting the important details.

For example, you can design the symbols and lines that represent tasks--including the line fragments showing slippage from the original plan. You can arrange the tasks in your project as a multilevel outline according to whatever logic makes sense to you (it won't interfere with the dates and dependencies you've already set up).

Before printing your chart, you can add headers, footers, and a legend, and run a spelling check. You can also design several layouts of the same project chart--for example, an overview for the executives and a detailed chart for the field managers. After designing your charts, you can distribute them as FastTrack templates to help everyone in your organization speak the same visual language.

Of course, there are plenty of project-management functions beyond the reach of any program like FastTrack. For example, full-blown project-management packages can analyze the people and equipment you've assigned to tasks, figure out when those resources will be idle or overloaded, and reassign them to make best use of all the resources. This process is called resource leveling. However, anyone who has the responsibility of dealing with tasks requiring this level of detail should be trained in project-management methodology. For an individual managing a small project with a few people, FastTrack provides all the information needed to see where a project flows smoothly or hangs up.