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Project Management Program

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landdev2018

Civil/Environmental
May 9, 2018
6
My firm is looking for software to better manage the status of our civil engineering projects. We are wondering what others use for such tasks?

We are in need of software to track initial contact through different phases of the project. It would also be nice to be able to see a listing of the status of all active projects.

Any ideas of what you use?
 
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I know that the Microsoft Project is a software for the project management. I had seen some project plan by Project.
For myself, I use Excel for the project management but need some more time.
 
I do a frequent use of Excel for project management, but as KEVINZY said, Project is a good tool and do the job more fast. But if your company don't like to spend on acquiring a new software atm do excel can do the job and there's a lot of spreadsheets models that must help you a lot.
 
Project works pretty well for single programs; we've built integrated master schedules (IMS') with over 3000 schedule items. Anything beyond that would require some programming to pull key schedule items from each standalone project.

Note that the biggest problem isn't the program, per se, it's the discipline required to maintain the schedule with meaningful updates. There are companies with full-time schedulers than do nothing but update and maintain the program schedules on a weekly basis, but they're helpless if the data sources don't take such an activity seriously.

I haven't used or run across Primavera for over 20 years, but they're still around, so they must be doing something reasonably well. And, they tout construction as an application They're roughly 2x the cost of Project.

Other alternatives:
TTFN (ta ta for now)
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As a victim of misused Primavera, I can say that for any non-trivial project there needs to be at least one expert user/developer who can adjust the schedule in the face of unpredicted changes. Otherwise the entire organization ends up having to build a parallel schedule in Excel with fake deltas being fed to Primavera to keep management happy. In addition, don't lie to the scheduler with any "management challenge" where all the tasks are cut by 20% from estimates to produce a "cushion," aka giving corporate a bonus of cash bought with uncompensated overtime from salaried workers.
 
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