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Project Management

SUMMARY

FastTrack Schedule 6.01 PRO: Very easy to use, excellent reporting tools. CON: No style sheets. VALUE: Features justify the cost. $199; upgrades $99 (from version 4 or 5) or $129 AEC Software 800/346-9413 www.aecsoft.com

Sometimes, the hardest part of managing a complex project is breaking it down into small tasks that unfold in parallel. AEC Software's $199 FastTrack Schedule 6.01 lets you visualize the parts of your project's schedule without having to spell out the relationships, an onerous requirement in more industrial-strength project-management packages. I tested a shipping copy.

I entered my project's tasks, with duration and start or end dates, directly into rows on FastTrack's Gantt bar chart, with a time line for the x-axis--and FastTrack drew the bars for me. Then I linked a few task bars with dependency lines, signifying jobs that can't start until others are completed. As my project progressed and I entered completion dates for some tasks, the program highlighted bars for other work whose completion dates were slipping.

FastTrack also supplies a database-like window where each task appears as a record. You can define new fields, enter data in them, and perform calculations on your data--for example, to figure out rental expenditures over time and display them as a running total on your graph.

Reporting tools help inform others of a project's status, and you can generate reports that show different information, such as overviews for execs and detailed schedules for managers. You have to make format changes manually, but you can create FastTrack templates so that all your organization's charts speak the same visual dialect.

FastTrack can't identify idle or overloaded resources, as most project managers can. But for small projects involving a few people, FastTrack provides all the data you'll need to see where your plan hangs up--and how to fix it.