Hey all, I was wondering if anyone knew of any project prioritization tools that are free/low-cost and allow for some sort of dynamic project and resource allocation.
Here's the use-case/ description of what I'm looking for: There are 10 projects in the pipeline. Using some interface, we assign an owner to each one, estimated time to complete, and any dependencies for each of them. Added bonus: we also have some sort of interface that allows us to assign a cost to each project, and benefit as well. Next, a manager comes along, and can reorder the projects, preferably through a simple drag-and-drop style interface. As they get reordered, it would dynamically update an estimated completion date, based on the resources assigned, dependencies, and time to complete. This way, a manager could see very quickly what impact introducing new work or reprioritizing old work would have. I'm sure we've all had managers who wanted everything to be a top priority, and who didn't always understand the repercussions of this strategy (or more accurately, lack thereof). It'd be great if we could sit down and visually reorder things and add work and show how it impacted delivery dates. Obviously, all of this can be done manually, and realistically big decisions shouldn't always be made this way - but for day to day prioritization of projects or tasks it seems like it could be a very useful tool to have. I've heard of tools like these, but haven't been able to find anything like it. There are a lot of drag-and-drop task managers, but they don't seem to understand the concept of resources or time. There are some drag-and-drop project management tools, but they don't (seem to) understand the concept of multiple projects and limited resources and the prioritization of said projects, at least not in any easy way. (If it takes 30 minutes to rearrange dependencies and update gantt charts to see the results, you lose the benefit of being able to do it.) Anyone know of anything like this, or use anything like it? We were thinking of potentially building a front-end like this into something like RT, if we can't find anything that does it already, but we'd rather not devote the resources. (See above re: limited resources and a lot of top priorities.) We do the upwards-management of priorities manually now, on the spur of the moment, and it'd be great if we could manage it more effectively and easily through a shared tool. Thanks, Nicholas _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
