Finding the Perfect Online Project Management Tool Day 94

I managed to come up with a requirements list for our company’s additional needs in project management software. If I could find some sort of software, online or offline, with all these requirements then it would be the best-case scenario. If I’m unable to find something to meet our needs, I’ll have to start out with a paper form based management structure. That’s no way for a Web 2.0 software company to act!

At any rate, here are the requirements:

1. Track projects in Gantt Chart format with dependencies
2. Track work progress, completion estimates
3. Track meeting, business trip, vacation, class schedules (some employees are also professors)
4. Track bugs better than current, inadequate bug-tracker software
5. Contain Wiki for information storage
6. Not location-based, able to support international contractors
7. Saves time rather than eats time
8. Does not contain useless bloated features.

I tried out Wrike on Friday. It was a pretty interesting and novel way to track tasks and projects. For a company that already uses email to communicate primarily and needs a way to organize these emails into a nice ordered list then it would be a godsend. Projects are divided into tasks. Task deadlines are organized and notifications are sent out by wrike.com when a project is getting close to being due. Additionally, a pseudo-Gantt chart is organized on the fly to show task durations and end dates, and total project durations and end dates as well. I say pseudo-Gantt because tasks are not linked and the dependencies cannot be determined.

If your company only needs to keep better track of projects and tasks that you assign by email then Wrike could be exactly what you need. However, it lacks the ability to track bugs, schedules, or dependencies between tasks. So I think I’ll keep looking.

I also checked out JointContact briefly.  It has the ability to subscribe to task and project schedules using the iCalendar standard, which would be useful.  Also, you can invite other people to JointContact and assign them to tasks without teaching them anything, which means that the usage of the JointContact service can grow organically.  JointContact also has the ability to send email to other project members using the Joint Contact interface.  However, JointContact does not do scheduling or gantt charts at all.  It focuses on project/task creation, permissions for each user on who can view what tasks, and communication.  Like Wrike, it is only a partial solution.  My search continues.