Project Management for Beginners

Dan Littman, special to PCWorld.com

Ever wonder how skyscrapers can be built in six months, or how consumer products are created seemingly in the blink of an eye? Rigorous project-management techniques, enabled by project-management software, contribute significantly to seeing many large-scale projects through to completion.

But it takes a lot of training--and a lot of patience--to reap the rewards of hard-core project-management software. And many projects simply don't require the complicated resource- and time-tracking tools found in such programs. Often all you need is to set out clear goals, identify necessary tasks, predict obstacles you're likely to encounter, and think your way around them. Yet for tracking small projects and mapping out larger ones, you may find Experience in Software's Project KickStart useful.

The Easy Way In

Experience in Software claims that the $130 version 3 of Project KickStart is too simple to need a manual, but the real secret is that the program holds your hand and walks you through each planning step so that you can't get lost. Project KickStart's name illustrates its approach: Its objective is to help you get your project off the ground (and increase the odds that it will be successful) by providing a structured way to divide the project into manageable chunks.

To start a new project, you describe its key phases; as soon as you finish that, Project KickStart asks you to list the tasks required to complete each phase. In the next step it asks you to list the goals you want the project to achieve--something other project-management software packages never step back to consider--and then it asks for any additional tasks required to achieve each goal.

And here's the key to Project KickStart: As you flesh out your project in this way, the program directs you to assign the new tasks to their appropriate places in the list of phases you've already established. In other words, it makes sure you fit the details into the big picture at every stage. Later in the planning process you list obstacles and then brainstorm for tasks required to surmount them--and once again, you integrate the new tasks into your project phases.

Project KickStart also encourages you to recycle work whenever you can, a savvy time-saving trick. While you are identifying phases, tasks, or obstacles, you can pull in examples from "libraries." The Similar button that's always available on the left side of the screen also helps you reuse phases, tasks, and obstacles from projects you've planned before, or from the examples that come with the program.

After you've recorded all the tasks, as well as assigned people to carry them out, Project KickStart shows you the whole thing in a row-and-column view. You can of course back up and enter additional goals, tasks, or people if you see a need for them; a project can involve as many as 1000 tasks and 100 people.

About Time

Another overview, in the form of a Gantt chart, provides you with a place to schedule dates for tasks, but the Gantt chart feature seems tacked on. For one thing, Project KickStart can't create dependencies between tasks, so when you change a task's start or finish date, for example, its subtasks remain blithely unaware of their new constraints, and their bars on the Gantt chart don't change. Still, if you set all the dates carefully by hand, the Gantt chart gives you a clear look at your plan's time line.

Project KickStart also supplies a helpful report generator that is nothing more than a table showing the fields you select, such as the task name, the people assigned to it, and the task's dates. With no filtering capability and no numbers to perform calculations on, it's fabulously easy to use, yet the reports still provide enough information for your colleagues to glean what they're supposed to do when.

You can also export Project KickStart data to most project-management packages, including Kidasa Software's Milestones 2000 Professional, Microsoft Project 98 and 2000, Primavera's SureTrak Project Manager 3, and Scitor's Project Scheduler 7 and 8. That gives you a little head start if you need to migrate to more full-featured software. You can also export to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, or HTML, for distributing information as a report or presentation.

Project KickStart doesn't require you to understand project-management methodology or terminology, or even to think like a project manager. It doesn't provide a systematic way to track your progress during a project. But it can definitely take the pain out of wrapping your head around a new endeavor.