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© Fallon Project Management Pty Ltd and Thekrasoft Software GmbH (English translation) 2002

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Techniques to combat Chaos

A comparative review of Project Management software

Project Management Software Tests

Tight deadlines and limited resources are a fea-ture of everyday life for those handling projects.It is all the more important, then, to coordinatethe deployment of staff members and resourceseffectively and to recognize at an early stagewhen things are not going to plan. Project man-agement programs should help optimize the flowof work.

In our test we compared six programs that offerthe automatic levelling of resources.

Levelling becomes necessary whenever an over-load occurs: that is, when a resource is pro-grammed to be used at a higher capacity than isavailable. At the beginning of the project allactivities, together with restrictions and the re-sources required, are fed into the software as ifall of the resources have unlimited availability.Later on these requirements will have to be anadjusted: eg, if two activities are programmedfor the same time but can only be performed bythe one, specially qualified expert, an overloadis created for that expert.

c’t magazin fur computer technik - July 2002. Translated and reproduced with permission of the publishers Heise.

THEKRASOFT Software GmbH Tel: +49 89 99 27 89 0_

Johanneskirchner Str. 162 Fax +49 89 99 27 89 11

81929 Munich, Email [email protected]

Germany WWW www.acos.com


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The overload can be resolved in several ways:either an external specialist is engaged to takeover one of the activities or one of the activitieshas to wait until the expert is available. Theproject leader, of course, knows better than thesoftware which approach is correct. He decidesto what extent he is going to trust the software toresolve the problem. The software’s automaticlevelling processes can, however, save a lot ofroutine work if variations to the schedule causedby unexpected events lead to new overloads.

We also expected the test software to be usableon a single workstation. Whether they can beused in network as well is shown in the check-list. These requirements were met by: ACOS

Plus.1 from ACOS GmbH, CS Project Profes-sional 3.0 from Crest GmbH, the Scitor ProjectScheduler, Microsoft’s Project 2000, Sure TrakProject Manager 3.0 from Primavera Systems,and TurboProject 4.0 from Imsi GmbH. Up untilnow Superproject 5.0 from Computer Associatesalso belonged to this group; according to themanufacturers this program is no longer on themarket.

Project definition

A project has limited time and its starting pointand final result are clearly defined. Thus, run-ning a training course on a routine basis wouldnot usually be regarded as a project. On the other

Project management methods are now based on

decades of experience and may be regarded as

relatively mature. The use of appropriate software

helps give them a concrete application. A vast range

of programs are available. As distinct from tools for

brainstorming, analysis or visualisation that are

intended for individual phases of a project, classic

project management software can support the whole

course of the project, from its planning to its control

phase right through to its final documentation.

Companies in the services sector, working

predominantly in a project context, use systems with

so-called Professional Services Automation (PSA),

provide details of the skills and qualifications of

workers as well as the usual information on project

status and capacity planning.

In practice projects are characterised by being

unique, novel and complex. They need special forms

of organization [1]. Professional project management

requires organizational structure, governing roles

and competences, and an overall project structure,

with a defined time span, distinct phases, work

packages, milestones and dependencies. For the

effective oversight and control of the project, the

project culture, including the laying down of

compulsory guidelines for all involved, ought not be

neglected.

At the beginning of the project unambiguous

objectives should be defined. Creativity techniques,

requirements manuals, network charts and bar charts

are all suited to this initial important task. The Gantt

diagram, named after its inventor, illustrates with

coloured bars the intervals for which a resource has

already been assigned. Network charts take various

forms, including Precedence Diagrams (PERT

Charts) and Activity-on-Arrow networks. Common

to them all is the object of demonstrating the logical

structure and dependencies between individual

tasks.

As soon as the project plan is completed and

approved, the realization of its content begins. To

maintain control, it will be necessary to use tools,

such as milestone trend analyses, earned-value

analyses, and regular update meetings with minutes

recorded. Incentives have to be fixed for leaders of

the project teams and agreement reached on

performance goals. Ideally, any of those involved in

the project should at any given moment be able to

answer questions on the current status of the project.

Demands on project management software have

escalated because of technical developments such

as the internet and intranets. Most programs now

make it possible to send project data by e-mail direct

from the application and to make information on

project progress available as a web document to

everyone involved. Suitable software can

substantially assist project management just in

documentation area alone.

The techniques mentioned above are equally

suitable for the undertaking of a building, IT or

organizational change project, as well as for use in

multidisciplinary projects. In-house support units

often back up their use in large companies, whereas

comparable undertakings in small and medium

businesses frequently only manage to get there

“somehow”. The use of consistent methods of

professional project management might make

projects in small and medium businesses even more

successful.

Dr Andreas Daum

[1] DIN 69901: Projektwirtschaft - Projektmanagement,

Begriffe, Berlin 1987

Managing projects professionally


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hand, the development of an ad-ditional course could be regardedas a project. An important aspectwould be the conceptual frame-work that defines the course con-tent and timetable. Promotionalmeasures to draw the new train-ing course to the attention of po-tential students could constitute asub-project in this example. Run-ning parallel to that perhaps is therefurbishing of a new classroom,including installation work, afresh coat of paint and new car-pet.

It is sensible to divide a projectup into smaller units. In this waya structure develops that can berepresented by means of a WorkBreakdown Structure (WBS) and/or a logic network. In the ex-ample mentioned above, theframework may be subdividedinto the course proposal, the pro-motional activities and the refur-bishing work. By contrast, theOrganizational Breakdown Struc-ture (OBS) describes the hierar-chical relationships of depart-ments and people, which by wayof example shows that Dr Muellerleads the pedagogical team, towhich a Mr Gross and a Mr Kleinalso belong, and that Mrs Wild,who is responsible for public re-lations, has an assistant, MsPfiffig, to help her.

In the jargon of planning toolsthese staff members are some ofthe project resources. Their in-volvement generates salary coststhat are calculated as the product of an hourlyrate and the period of their involvement. Eachparticipant is assigned an hourly rate, the periodof involvement is a function of each activitiesduration. Other resources may include (physi-cal) materials such as paint and carpet, confer-ence rooms and overhead projectors, rentalequipment and the services of external suppli-ers. Material costs are calculated on the rate of

consumption, and some activities generate costs,such as fixed charges, quite independent of theduration of the activity. Programs that allow coststo be allocated at the activity level allow a morereliable estimate of costs to be calculated.

Almost every activity in a project is dependenton the others. There is little sense in awardingthe contract for printing a promotional brochure

Appropriate software supports the project leader in all phases

of the project from planning to final documentation.

Pro

ject

His

tory

Controlling the Project with PM Software

Project Documentation

Pro

ject

Rep

ort

sTa

rget

Dat

a O

utp

ut

Act

ual

Dat

a O

utp

ut

Pro

ject

Pla

nn

ing

Pro

ject

Tra

ckin

g

Pla

n D

ata

Planning Data Actual Data

Planning Data Actual Data

Start PointPlanning data:

Details of processes, costs and resources

WBS and OBS

Calendar

Expected Deadlines and Sequence of events

Materiel PlanCost Plan

Actual data:

Completion dates and costs

Resource availability

Percent complete

Quality of Work

Planned deadlines and sequence of events

Bar chart

Logic Network

Milestone Plan

Cost Plan

Resource utilisation plan

Material usage plan

Actual timings and achievement dates

Cost Data

Resources used

Project status

Material usage data

Target -v- Actual Comparison

Deadlines and Costs

Resources

Milestone TrendAnalysis

Project Status Report

Project Cost Report

Deadlines Report

Resource Utilisation

Interim Reports

Project Organisation

Materiel Report

Liquidity Report

Evaluation of:

Deadlines

Costs

Materiel

Contractors

Suppliers

Completion

Quality


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before its content has been worked out. DoesMs Pfiffig have to stand by waiting for Mrs Wildto come up with a suitable promotional text? Notentirely, she could right at the start call for quotesfor the printing. Generally, however, quotes arevalid only for a limited period, so the intervalbetween “calling for quotes” and “awarding theprinting contract” must not exceed that time span.

Dependencies between activities are representedby relationships. The most usual form is the Fin-ish-Start relationship. Other variations that thetest software offer are shown in the check-list.With all of the packages, durations (lags) maybe assigned to relationships with positive or nega-tive values – the latter denotes an overlapping ofthe activites.

Not all activities need to be finished as early aspossible. A new release of the Training Coursesoftware may be available shortly but the hard-ware may only be available from a much laterdate. So-called activity restrictions (imposeddates, etc) help to depict these situations in theproject schedule.

Administration and Progress Control

The best of plans cannot prevent delays andbreakdowns occurring in real life. If Dr Muelleris a little too heavy-handed as boss, the peda-gogical team will need extra time for discussionsto clear the air. All variations to the original planhave to be entered into the program if it is toreflect the project’s current status. If an activitytakes longer than expected, the schedule has tobe corrected. Functions that allow activity split-

ting and rescheduling make the task of regularupdating easier for the project leader.

After carpet glue has been applied, a ventilationperiod of perhaps 24 hours is necessary. Thisexample explains why project managers workwith different calendars. Activities involving staffmembers usually take place only from Mondayto Friday. A calendar that takes public holidaysand commercial shutdowns into account makesresource planning easier. The activity “roomventilation” can be scheduled for a weekend andentered on a calendar that includes weekends andholidays. All of the packages tested offer stan-dard calendars that the user can modify individu-ally.

If unforeseen overtime or weekend work shouldoccur, salary costs are going to increase.

Most programs differentiate between normalhourly rates and overtime payments; some evenoffer the possibility of storing up to eight differ-ent rates for each resource. As soon as hours falloutside regular periods because of postpone-ments in the work schedule, these programs re-calculate the costs of the activity.

Resource Levelling

On our test bench we thoroughly examined theautomatic levelling results produced by the testsoftware utilising a standard test project. In re-ality, part of the levelling process would normallybe tackled by hand. Some programs offer theoption of excluding individual resources or pe-riods of time from the automatic levelling pro-

PROJECT

Pla

nnin

g D

ata

P.M.Software

Actual Data

Planned Actions

After the project’s start, actual data must be regularly entered into the software


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cess. The readings provide information as to howreliably the programs work if they are entrustedwith the rest of the laborious routine work.

The test schedule used (see below) consists ofactivities of a prescribed duration that cannot beinterrupted during their execution. Normal Fin-ish-Start relationships were established betweenthe activities. During its execution each activitycalls for renewable resources, for example staffor machines, whose capacity at each moment isavailable regardless of utilization to date (in con-trast to consumable stores). The task for the testsoftware consisted of fixing the start points ofthe individual activities in such a way that therelationships were preserved in their entirety, theavailable capacity of a resource was not exceededat any point and the project finished as early aspossible. The project start was fixed.

Finding some kind of acceptable solution is rela-tively easy, establishing the optimum solution onthe other hand is difficult [2]; for this you wouldhave to investigate every theoretically possiblesequence and this would cause the calculationeffort to increase exponentially with the numberof activities. Project Management programsshorten the search by using heuristic techniquesbased on prioritisation. By applying prioritiesthe software decides which activity gets prece-dence if several activities are capable of beingscheduled for the same time.

For the tests we used a Pentium 111 PC with a500 MHz processor and 128 MB RAM underWindows 2000. We converted the test data intoMPX format. According to the manufacturers’claims all test software ought to have been ca-pable of working with this data format. Obvi-ously each manufacturer has a different under-standing of what MPX is as we had to produceour own MPX data files for each software pack-age. TurboProject had to be excluded from thetest altogether as it was unable to import anyvariation of MPX data without creating errors.

For the actual test keyboard combinations werewritten into the keyboard buffer with the help ofthe ‘sendkeys’ command, to execute the follow-ing processes while the Project Managementapplication was in use: opening the project, se-lecting options for resource levelling, carryingout the resource levelling, and copying the projectfinish into the clipboard. As SureTrak did notrespond to this “remote control” through the“sendkeys” function, we were unable to estab-lish any values for this program. Whilst, regret-tably, we were unable to measure the quality ofresource levelling with two of the packages, inprinciple both of them are able to perform thefunction (resource levelling) and are useable asa project planning tool.

With ACOS Plus. 1, CS Project Professional,Microsoft Project and Scitor Project Scheduler

we allowed 60 seconds for the ca-pacity adjustment in each trial, andthis was adequate for all of the testsoftware. Where a software packageoffered several variations for the re-source levelling, we tested all the al-ternatives and evaluated the best re-sult for each package.

Forms of Reporting

To keep everyone involved up todate, accurate reports are importantduring the performance of the

Mean deviation from the optimum solution in 600 trials (a low value indicates more consistent {better} results) :

ACOS Plus.1

CS Project Professional 3.0

Microsoft Project 2000

Scitor Project Scheduler 8

9.7

13.9

14.3

11.4

The mean variation as a percentage shows how much longer

than necessary the project would take if the calculations were left

to the software being tested.

In most cases the test software’s solution did not achieve the

optimum solution and envisaged a lengthier project duration.

[2] Rainer Kolisch: Optimierungs-strategien

für Projektplaner.

c’t 4/98. S. 142

(Optimization strategies for project

planners. c’t 4/98. page 142)

The number of times the test results achieved the optimum solution in 600 trials:

ACOS Plus.1


Microsoft Project 2000

Scitor Project Scheduler 8

117

57

23

98


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project. Web documents, which most of the testedprograms can call up from within the applica-tion, are ideal for use on a company’s intranet.Even after the project’s completion these docu-ments contain valuable information. What did

development of the training course draft finallycost? Which part of the refurbishing works wasparticularly drawn out? This information canhelp avoid mistakes with the next project andcan be used as a basis for new planning.

How we tested the automatic resource levelling function

The test problem that we used is known in the

literature as the Resource Constrained Project

Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) [3]. In our test we

examined the resource allocation that the test

software came up with in 600 tests of the same

problem with (on each occasion) 120 activities and

four resources. The data are part of a test set that

was developed at the University of Kiel in the 90s

[4]. The test set and the solution now accepted as

best can be downloaded and are available from the

University of Kiel’s website [5].

The test data for the software efforts can be

characterized using three parameters: resource

strength (RS), resource factor (RF) and network

complexity (NC). The resource strength shows the

degree of scarcity of a resource. RS=0 shows that

at least one activity is claiming the whole capacity of

at least one resource. RS=1 means that a solution

in which each activity starts as early as possible and

respects the Finish–Start relationships is acceptable

in terms of resources and is consequently optimal.

We carried out our measurements with RS of {0.1,

0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5}.

The resource factor details the average number of

resources drawn upon. RF=1 shows that each

process draws on all resources. RF=0 means that

no activity draws on any resource. In the test set

the RF was selected from {0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0}.

Finally, the network complexity details the average

number of Finish-Start relationships per activity. If

the NC is large, the network contains a great deal of

relationships. In the test set the NC was selected

from {1.5, 1.8, 2.1}. In total there are 5 x 4 x 3 = 60

combinations of parameters, for which ten problem

tests were created in each case, using the problem

generator ProGen [4].

In each case we compared the project duration

calculated by the test software with the solution

regarded as optimum, which was established by

using Operations-Research-Techniques for project

planning. None of the programs under examination

succeeded in bettering the optimum solution in any

trial. In the worst case a project length was calculated

that was 45 per cent longer than necessary.

An analysis of other statistical factors highlighted the

variable that influenced resource levelling quality the

most. It was uniformly established with all of the

programs that the calculated results deteriorated in

quality as the resources became scarcer. Analysis

of the resource factor was very interesting. The mean

variation doubled as soon as two or more resources

were called upon for each process. By contrast, the

number of hierarchical relationships hardly had any

effect on planning quality.

[3] Christoph Mellentin, Norbert Trautmann: Resource

allocation with project management software, OR

Spektrum, Jg.23, Issue 3, Pages 383-94

[4] Rainer Kolisch, Arno Sprecher, Andreas Drexl:

Characterization and generation of a general class of

resource-constrained project scheduling problems,

Management Science Jg. 41, Pages 1693-1704

[5] www.bwl.uni-kiel.de/Prod/psplib/datasm.html

Mean variation (%) with

Resource Strength RS


Resource Factor RF


Network Complexity (NC)30

25

20

15

10

5

00.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1

ACOS Plus.1Scitor Project SchedulerMicrosoft Project 2000CS Project Professional

20

18

16

14

12

10

8

6

4

2

00.25 0.50 0.75 1.0


16

14

12

10

8

6

4

2

01.5 1.8 2.1


As resources become scarcer

optimising resource levelled schedules

becomes increasingly difficult.

As soon as two or more resources are

required, the quality of the analysis

drops.

The number of hierarchical relat-

ionships has little effect on the way

schedules are calculated.

Vertical scale, all graphs = Standard Deviation as a Percentage (Lower values are better)


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ACOS Plus 1 Version 8.3

Newcomers to ACOS receive an introduction tousing the program through the ten lesson tuto-rial. Although anyone who is a project manage-ment software novice will probably need furthertuition. Structured codes can be assigned to re-sources as well as to activities to bundle togetherinformation on qualifications, group membershipand costs. In addition to the usual relationships,there is the relationship type “approximation”,as well as the option for defining capacity rela-tionships. In calculating activity costs the soft-ware takes into account different accountingrates, conditions and comparative values.

The program’s screen-views can be customized.The standard menus can be removed or they canbe enlarged with user-defined selection lists. Anovelty for the traditional Windows user: proce-dures such as formatting the time-axis (per-formed in other project management softwarewith a mouse) can be changed only through adialogue box. Information as to which input isactually being modified is sometimes missingfrom the “Undo” function.

In addition to the activities priority code for lev-elling resources, ACOS offers a selection fromnumber of predecessors, number of successors,number of predecessors and successors, shortestduration, longest duration, smallest free float,smallest total float and compliance with the criti-cal path. In our test this program gained the bestresult. If we look at the mean divergence fromthe model solution, this program is way aheadof its competitors with a result of 9.7 per cent.

ACOS does not provide pre-packaged standardreports. Print-outs of the two-line tables show-ing a direct contrast of target and actual data are,however, well-suited for documenting projectprogress. The manufacturer also offers, as a“compact” version, a smaller edition that is lim-ited to 500 activities. The supplementary prod-uct “ACOS Web” provides on-line time report-ing via intranet and a database option exists foradministering users and roles.


Almost all of the views are divided into a activ-ity window and a resource window in the soft-ware from the South African manufacturer Crest.After every modification the program automati-cally updates the information in the other win-dow. There are several different ways to achievealmost every input, but with differing levels ofconvenience. Double-clicking on a activityopens a window into which you can enter rel-evant resources. However, in this case the namesmust be typed in correctly and in full. If insteadyou use the “add resources” function, you canselect from a drop-down field.

Because Mr Klein goes on a training course, task 13

has to wait: after feedback from the workers ACOS

Plus.1 updates the project tasks to the status date.

Mr Praktisch does overtime: in the workgroup window

CS Project details how the workers are overloaded.

Final reports should be in hard copy. Most pro-grams include standard reports that the user canmodify. In some cases, however, the possibili-ties (for adaptation) are limited to headers andfooters, and even the addition of a company logois not possible. Printing the screen image is there-fore often just as effective for documentationpurposes, especially if the software allows indi-vidual screen views to be modified.


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A whole range of small, well thought out specialfeatures make using CS Project easier for theproject leader. For example there is a functionfor switching two related activities, as well as avariety of filtering options. For the time lag be-tween two activities the software also accepts theentry of “delay” starting from a specific day.Unfortunately, the somewhat sloppily translated(German) online help does not mention many ofthese special features.

Before the automatic resource levelling you canenter the priority of activities on four levels,choosing here between total float, free float, du-ration, earliest start and latest finish. In addi-tion, CS Project offers a cost-and-resource-lev-elling-optimization logarithm (CARLO), whichaccording to the manual finds the optimum com-bination for the prioritisation options. In manycases in our tests, however, a shorter period ofproject duration was suggested through ourchoice of the prioritisation options.

In the form generated by the program the finaldocumentation are hardly usable. Cash injectionsappear in the standard reports without any cur-rency details, even if a particular currency wasspecified in the setting-up stage. The programgenerates HTML data only in tabular form, notin graphics. Transmitting data by e-mail is avail-able in theory but it did not work in our test.

Microsoft Project 2000 SR 1

The market leader Project 2000 allows you toselect various tabular views for speedy data in-put. Just as with Excel, the user can dispensewith the mouse. Thanks to keyboard commandsmore experienced and deeper level users cancarry out the structuring of data largely withoutusing a mouse.

For resource planning, Project 2000 differenti-ates between material and labour. Like most ofthe test software, MS Project supports a manualselection of activity priorities. However, the userhas no influence on the priorities that the soft-ware generates during automatic resource level-ling, in which Project 2000 evaluates the prede-cessor relationships, the floats and the latest startdates, in order to decide which activities have to

start as early as possible and which will have towait.

The program offers many options for entering,controlling and presenting the data. Such flex-ibility comes at a price. You should reckon on atleast a few days of familiarization before beingable to work competently with MS Project. Themanual that is provided and its extensive indexare rather more helpful in this respect than thetutorial that is intended as an introduction but isessentially little more than a compilation of helpmessages.

In version 2000 MS Project contains for the firsttime a client/server component. The Project Cen-tral Server is intended to enable team communi-cations and resource management regardless oflocation. Nevertheless, the software representsone workgroup solution at most and, just as be-fore, is well suited for individual projects. Itssuccessor, Project 2002 (already announced bythe manufacturer but not expected to be avail-able before summer) will have two different ver-sions for prospective clients to choose from astandard version and a professional version. Thesuccessor to the Central Server will be an addi-tional charge in the future.

Scitor Project Scheduler 8.1.4

The manufacturer Scitor, claims as a special high-light that from version 8 onwards Project Sched-uler facilitates project planning by using the criti-cal chain method. By this they mean an exten-sion of the concept of critical path which as-

Ms Wild is on the critical path: in the bar chart view of

Microsoft 2000 you can sort any way you like; in this

example, by critical and non-critical activities.


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sembles the float of individual activities into asingle “buffer” at the end of each activity chain.In reality, however, users are probably going tovalue other functions more highly. An activitycan be defined with up to four calendars. Infla-tion tables enable costs to be calculated indepen-dently of any time-frame. On the lower edge ofthe screen the user can insert “forms” that offeractivity information as well as space for noteson seven index tabs.

When using the network (PERT) view for thefirst time the user is greeted with a gaping space.The activities that are itemized in the left-handtable only appear graphically in the right-handwindow after the option “redraw network chart”is used. To update the view after some modifi-cations the user has to specifically call for a re-drawing. The user has freedom of choice in se-lecting the information displayed in the boxesand the form and colour of the boxes can be ad-justed to suit personal taste.

There are no options for selecting process pri-orities for the automatic levelling of resources.Nevertheless, with a mean deviation of 11.4 percent from the ideal solution, the programachieved the second-best test result. Thanks toa large choice of standard reports, informationcan be quickly compiled. Users can, if they wish,incorporate company logos into the reports andconstruct reports as lucid, correctly sequencedHTML pages.

Project Scheduler 8 is one of three componentsin the Scitor PS Suite, which also includes amodule for team communication by internet orintranet and an interface for SAP R/3.

SureTrak 3.0

Starting to use SureTrak is made easier by anon-screen tutorial. The screen elements and theiroperation are explained, using examples, in eightlessons of about 40 steps each. When you startyour first project you can also take advantage ofthe “Kick-start wizard”. Both help tools are thor-oughly recommended for newcomers to projectmanagement.

In this program the network view is called PERT.In fact, it has very little to do with the planningtechnique of the same name but offers the usualview of activities represented by boxes linked toone another by means of arrows and optionallyarranged with a time scale on the upper edge ofthe screen based on the start dates. Even withthe activities the terminology is different fromthat of other programs. SureTrak recognizesseven types of activities but these include mile-stones.

The program could not perform the automaticresource levelling test as it did not respond to“sendkeys”. This type of levelling is possible inprinciple and the user can enter up to ten priori-ties affecting the way the adjustment is run.

As the smallest Project Management producedby Primavera, SureTrak is restricted to 1000 ac-tivities. Its bigger brother Project Planner (P3)uses a similar data format. A link betweenSureTrak and Enterprise-solution (P3e) is alsopossible. This should not only facilitate switch-ing from one to another but also enable paralleloperation if, say, a project is being controlled by

In the network chart view Scitor Project Scheduler

represents critical events in red as a default setting.

When looking at extensive network charts, SureTrak’s

“cosmic view” helps project managers keep an

overview.


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one of the large programs while a smaller ancil-lary company uses SureTrak to collect its data.SureTrak is equipped with a mail-dispatcher fordirect transmission of project data but it regu-larly crashed during the test.

TurboProject 4.0

To facilitate creating projects the English-lan-guage software of the US manufacturer, Imsi,provides twelve so-called templates that can beimported complete or in selected segments andthen modified. However, anyone who is not in-terested in working with one of those formatswill soon feel at home with a screen of six menusand two toolbars of symbols. It is a nuisance,however, that there is no standard way of item-izing time inputs.

Graphical views of project progress are limitedto three variations of the bar chart. Links withsub-projects are represented by the so-called“project tree”. On the other hand, TurboProjectcannot display data in the form of a predecessornetwork chart. There are some 50 ready-madetables for tabular representation of data, and youcan quickly design others to suit your own pur-poses.

In handling resources the software does not dis-tinguish between manpower and materials whichmakes it rather difficult to assign firm costs toactivities. As the salary costs of workers are en-tered per diem, there is no distinction betweenhourly rates and overtime rates. We were un-able to test the automatic adjustment of resources.According to online help it is possible to import

and export MPX data, but importing is not er-ror-free even with MPX data that the softwarehas generated itself beforehand.

The software provides standard reports for docu-mentation in five thematic groups. They cannotbe modified, which leaves something to be de-sired, as the (German) umlaut symbol is not re-produced correctly and some of the English col-umn headings seem very weird. Anyone want-ing to print data in a particular format of his ownchoice eg, in the standard company format, willreally appreciate the smooth-functioning featurefor exporting specific data to Excel.

Conclusions

The reviewed programs all make it difficult, dif-fering only in degree of difficulty, for newcom-ers to experience the joy of being in total controlof the tool during their first attempts at settingup a project. However, even the smaller pack-ages offer good help tools. The tutorial inSureTrak Project Manager is exemplary andTurboProject provides good support for the firststeps in loading a project. On the other hand,the facilities of these two packages are limitedand they clearly have fewer functions for costcontrol than do the other software packages. Bycontrast, CS Project Professional offers a wholerange of additional functions and, notwithstand-ing, is uncomplicated to operate. Project Sched-uler, Project 2000 and, in particular, ACOS Plus1require substantially more effort to learn beforethey can be effectively put to use.

The automatic resource levelling test providedenlightening information. The test software weregenerally unsuccessful in finding the optimalmeans of removing resource overloads. If welook at the mean deviation of project durationrelative to the optimum solution, ACOS Plus 1is way ahead of the competition, with onlyScitor’s Project Scheduler able to come close.

With its many views for target/actual compari-sons, ACOS Plus 1 provides particularly flex-ible opportunities for effective progress control.SureTrak, by contrast, offers views that barelydiffer from one another, and with TurboProjectyou have to do without a network view altogether.If you value good documentation of a project’s

A lot has to happen before the training course

computers can be installed: TurboProject’s Trace

function traces back the dependencies.


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development, you should take a close look at MS Project, Project Scheduler and ACOS Plus 1. Inthis respect TurboProject and CS Project Professional have the least to offer. (dwi)


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Glossary

Bar Chart/ GANTT Chart: Graphical representation that helps with the visualisation of the timesequence, but not the logical sequence of activities. Events such as milestonesare represented as a point, activities as a bar along a time-axis.

Critical Path: All activities that control the project completion lie on the critical path, as theycannot be rescheduled without the project’s completion date also being resched-uled.

Earned Value Analysis: A method to determine the progress of a project.

Free Float: The free float of an activity is the maximum time that this activity can be de-layed without delaying any other activity.

Milestone: Each milestone defines an important interim result that must be concluded be-fore the project can move into the next phase.

Milestone Trend Analysis (MTA): Comparing the originally planned point in time when a mile-stone is supposed to be reached and the actual situation. Depending on whethermilestones are being reached earlier or later than planned, the trend is describedas being positive or negative.

Multiproject Planning: Planning, coordination and monitoring of several contemporaneous projectswithin the one enterprise.

Network Diagram: Graphical representation of activities and their dependencies. Rectangularboxes represent individual activities and contain details such as the activity ID,its duration, resources, dates and costs; they are linked by arrows depicting therelationships.

Organization Breakdown Structure (OBS): Representation of all people, departments and workgroups involved in a project, including their hierarchical relationships,competences and responsibilities.

Relationships: The link between two activities. The most frequent form is the Finish-Startrelationship (FS) or normal sequence: an activity can start only when the pre-ceding activity (predecessor) has been completed. Other possible relationshipsare: Start-Start sequence (SS), Finish-Finish sequence (FF) or (less frequently)Start-Finish (SF), in which the finish of activity B (successor) is dependent ofthe start of activity A (predecessor).

Target / Baseline Plan: Some project management programs apply this term to a snapshot of thewhole project file; the snapshot is archived as a reference for comparison atsome later point in time.

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): Graphical representation of the project, in which it is hier-archically subdivided into progressively more detailed elements down to the(work packages/activities) level. It registers all of the work packages necessaryto reach the project objective and clarifies their logical hierarchy.

Work Package: Smallest unit in the project Work Breakdown Structure, frequently also calledtask or of activity. In order to reach the project’s objective, all work packagesmust be completed. The responsibility for each work package is laid downunambiguously.

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