Comments (19)

Seems to be very interesting; I represent an advertising agency and we run a number of projects, each project representing phases like: Briefing/assesment/research, creative development and idea generation, presentations to the customer, further developmens, final agreement/descision on activities, agency production and sub contractors production, final approval, delivery from agency. So, to what extent can you tailor specific phases?

To Peter; all phases should apply for each project; and, yes, all projects would be more or less similair, so if one could save Yap plans as templates - it would be great!

Nice!
I would like to reorder tasks. I tried to drag-and-drop, that seems intuitive to do in both views.
(is it supposed to work in FF? doesn't for me).

fast and intuitive user interface but missing key functionality that would enable it to be used as a serious scheduling tool on any more than a simple project.
Basic functions it needs to have are:
linking of tasks to create dependancies
keeps dependancies when adjusting tasks - i.e. extend duration of high level task and lower level tasks that are linked with a specific dependancy move with it.
ability to enter start, duration, and end dates via keyboard.
ability to add a 0 day deliverable / milestone for product based planning approaches.

@Ulrika: please suggest that reordering of tasks from the structure view as an idea of its own. I'm not allowed to vote for it, but the non-Projectplace people here are. Yes, it should work in Firefox. Do you get any error messages?

@Andrew: We're thinking on how to support date and time entries via the keyboard. And we will add milestones too. Task linking is something we're not planning to add, unless we find a really, really simple and intuitive way to do it. But please suggest it as an idea of it's own and try get support for it. We are listening. We are.

@Ulrika - The ability to drag and drop things to restructure (in both views) is definitely on the road map, but not implemented as of the March 31 test drive.

Disappointing to here your not planning to add task dependancies to the tool. For me personally that kills any decision to roll the tool out accross my programme.

For me the power of an interactive tool such as PP is that it combines project plans with actions, issues, risks, and documents in an interactive collaborative environment. This is something that delivers significant business benefits when managing a number of projects accross multiple stakeholders and locations. All good stuff. But if the scheduling tool doesn't support task dependancies, it doesn't have the power to schedule complex WBS's.

Let me give you an example - I currently have 26 projects running (by 3 PM's) , each project has a WBS with between 80 and 300 tasks / deliverables. Some of the deliverables have touch points accross several of the projects. So if the supplier of that deliverable tells me there's going to be a 9 day delay (for arguments sake) and that deliverable is used in several projects, and the deliverable itself has multiple child tasks - the scheduling tool needs to automatically update all down-stream tasks when I change the delivery date of the item in question. If I have to do that manually - a) it is a large overhead in terms ot time, and b) I'm likely to miss something making my schedule invalid.

My point is this: Other systems out there do this at the click of a button, as does MS Project. I don't understand the rationale for a PM tool that doesn't support this. Go look at the competition. "@task" is great for scheduling, but PP is better in some respects and doesn't need a lot of customsing before use. But without the basic scheduling functionality, well . . . . .