As many casual readers of the Fozzolog may know, I’m now working for a new company called KnowledgeBlue. Things are done differently at KnowledgeBlue and it’s not unexpeced that one company would do things differently than another, but the way things are done at KnowledgeBlue has been a bit of a shock to my system. I think my Iodynamics colleagues are experiencing similar feelings.

Robb and Chris are veterans of the corporate IT world and I don’t mean the IT department of your standard local business but the IT world of a large corporation listed on the Fortune 500 list. As a result, they bring an amount of discipline and regimen to workflow that I’m not acustomed to working with.

That being said, I’ve been learning a lot and enjoying it immensely. (I’m not just saying that to be a brown-noser.) While the regimented workplace is, without question, overkill for the size of company KnowledgeBlue is right now, the company will be growing significantly in the coming months. Without these policies and procedures in place, it would be easy for things to get out of control.

In all honesty, the structure and rigidity has been frustrating and the amount of work and responsibility piling up on my desk has been putting my confidence through its paces (pacing through the doldrums, perhaps?) That being said, I haven’t been challenged like this in a long time and despite my confidence scraping the bottom of the proverbial barrel, those I’m working for are supporting me and expressing confidence in me. So, there’s that.

Project planning

One thing I’ve been requested to do is do project and resource planning for some of the work that is upcoming. In the “corporate world“ the de facto computer application for such a task would be Microsoft Project. Anyone who knows me knows... that ain’t gonna happen. Fortunately, there are many alternatives to choose from in the immense software catalog of the Open Source universe.

Here’s a preliminary rundown of what I’ve come across.

Kplato was one of the first applications I looked into and I actually used it for a few days before moving on. It does a fair job of generating WBS (Work breakdown structure) codes and tracking who is assigned to what tasks. The one thing that kind of became a dealbreaker for me is that kplato doesn’t seem to be able to associate prerequisite task information. That is, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to say “Task A must be finished before Task B can begin.” You can only specify task starting and ending constraints by date.

Planner, formerly known as MrProject, is a project management app that has been around for a while in various incarnations. Planner has most of the features I’m looking for and, unlike kplato, does support the concept of “predecessor tasks.” Additionally, Planner features the ability to import data from Microsoft Project XML format files. There is a port of Planner for Windows also available. One thing that bugs me about Planner is that it’s a GNOME application and suffers from the UI braindeadness that accompanies most GNOME applications. Otherwise, it’s probably one of the most capable of the applications I’ve looked at.

TaskJuggler is a bizarre entry to this field of applications. It completely deviates from the project management software genre. Users are required to enter information about projects, tasks, resources, etc. using a programming language-like syntax into a text file which is then compiled by the application. The authors of TaskJuggler claim their program is leaps and bounds better than “traditional” project management software. I’m a bit reluctant to go down that road. I should definitely come back to TaskJuggler at some point. For now, I’m sticking with the traditional applications.

OpenProj is the first Java-based desktop app of the mix I’ve looked at. It features nice import/export compatibiliy with Microsoft Project and its cross-platform nature, thanks to Java, also makes it attractive. It also boasts task predecessor support. It’s not very easy to use compared to the others I’ve looked at and it runs slow. It does have a lot of screens and reports, though.

GanttProject is another Java desktop application I looked at. It offers good import/export capabilities for people who are dealing with Microsoft Project data. It doesn’t offer quite as many views as OpenProj, but tries to make up for this with lots of export options (HTML. PDF, CSV, PNG, and JPEG). GanttProject also supports the concept of prerequisite or predecessor tasks. One disappointment, however, is that GanttProject doesn’t seem to let you get any more precise on the length of effort of a task beyond the number of days. For example, you can’t express that a task is only going to take 2 hours to complete. It also doesn’t handle some errors very well.

I’d love to hear about other applications that I haven’t listed above.