FastTrack Schedule Now Tracks Resources

AEC Software's FastTrack Schedule has always made project planning simple. With it you could slap down tasks, make a few guesses about deadlines, and knock out graphs and reports without sweating over detailed project-management procedures. But with version 7.0, the freewheeling, let's-try-it personality of previous versions now takes a back seat to powerful new capabilities.

New Face, New Features, New Price

Version 7.0 has a new price--$100 more than before. FastTrack Schedule is now $299 for Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, and NT 4.0, and for Mac OS 8.6 or later. That price strikes me as a little steep. (A version for Palm OS 3.0 or later costs $99; you can also use it to sync schedules with the desktop version.)

However, when I first launched FastTrack for Windows, I had to blink. The program displayed so many palettes and toolbars, all laden with mysterious icons, that the window didn't fit on my 800-by-600 display. I jumped into the new Organize Palettes controls, similar to Microsoft Word's Customize feature, to rearrange and remove menu commands and other functions.

With the interface under control, I created a quick schedule. In the time line view (called a Gantt chart), I typed the task names in rows, arranged tasks and subtasks in the collapsible outline, and clicked on each task's row in the time line to drag a bar that indicated the task's estimated start and finish dates. That's enough to provide a rough picture of whether a project can adhere to its schedule.

To pinpoint which project phases could become bottlenecks, I created dependency links between bars to constrain tasks, preventing them from starting before the completion of tasks that logically precede them. While project-management pros work with constraints that only a logician can understand, FastTrack provides just three simple ones. For example, a "start-to-finish" constraint would remind you that you can't start bulldozing a construction site until your bank disburses the cash you need to rent a bulldozer.

I asked FastTrack to identify my project's critical path, a new feature that outlines the sequence of tasks whose delay would cause the most problems. The critical path becomes essential when a project reaches a certain size. In a small project, you should be able to figure out by yourself which tasks are potential bottlenecks. And by entering actual dates beside the estimates, you can quickly see if a bottleneck is approaching.