Hi,
Though I haven't worked on any of these, based on whatever I have heard from experienced people, Primevera is much better than MS Project.
MS Project is a very basic tool, where as Primevera is much more professional, versatile and more accepted in European states.
This is just a rough opinion, so please confirm with some Project Managers you may know.
Project can do some of the very same analysis as Primavera, but the interfaces are night and day differences.
Project is very user friendly whereas Primavera is not.
I've been in the business for along time and can say that from a design standpoint, Project is all that I ever needed. That is not, however, what I got. Management decided to make Primavera standard company software due to our involvement in the construction management industry. So now each project, even the simplest, must be programed into the montrous Primavera.
To its credit, Primevera will handle multiple projects with thousands and thousands of tasks.
I have used both products for years, and I would choose Project if I were dealing with 1 project per schedule. If you intend to have multiple projects on one schedule you should use Primavera. Other than that, for most applications either product will work fine. I agree with the others that Primavera is a bit less friendly, it is not terrible.
Primevera makes Sure Track which is a scaled down P3. Primevera lets me do more than Project, but Project does most of what SureTrack does. We used to use SureTrack almost exclusively about 2 years ago. Now I say we do 80% with Project. We schedule for $1-5 million heavy construction
This is the question of the ages. In fact, it is an interview question when I interview prospective project mangers. (not that we have been doing much hiring in '03). If you think you are a PM, you can prove it by taking about the differences in these two tools.
Primavera is very entrenched in the construction and EPC industries, although the recent upheaval in the EPC business will soon lay waste to any entrenched ideas and tools. I have not been able to sit an engineer down and get him to pick up Primavera and run with it, despite (or because of) its limitless flexibility. Professional schedulers an dsome PM's have no problem with it, and may have taken formal classes in Primavera.
On the other hand, even senior engineers (the slowest learners) can pick up MS project and document what their schedules look like. Soon they can baseline a project and track changes, as well as assign blame for delays (they love this) using the tracking Gant and notes features.
My vote goes to MS Project, not becuase of power or features, but due to its sucess in getting used on actual projects.
My experience is that Primavera is a more robust tool when trying to run and manage a project including resource planning and trend analysis. We need tools that help us evaluate progress, raise warnings when project run over schedule and budgets, helps you look at ways to get back on schedule etc.
Project is less complex and works well for small projects and simple controls/reporting.
There is a new product/service on the market called MOCA Systems. Take a look at their web site
I'm sure the makers of Fasttrack appreciate the mention of their software. They'd probably appreciate it even more if their correct name and address were given. It's AEC Software at
