I asked this back in 2011, but I’m at a new company now and my previous company ended up writing their own.
I need something REALLY simple. Barely more than an Excel spreadsheet, I think. Here’s the “What” before getting into the how.
We have a lab of chemists. We have product development projects, e.g. “Modify A-3104 to meet OTC2 requirements” or “Develop a version of XZ-34 that can be used outside down to 35 degrees Fahrenheit.” Usually one chemist per project, sometimes more than one.
When I look at project management software, it is usually designed to manage a single big project, such as the development of a new piece of software. So a lot of focus on breaking the project into pieces, dependencies of the pieces to each other, Gant charts of all of the pieces, etc.
I want to have something where I can have an overview of each project - Name, date started, description of the project, target completion date, current status. Then the ability to click on a project and bring up the page(s) for that specific project, where the chemist can update the status, attach documentation, etc. It would be nice to be able to pull up a calendar that shows all of the projects together on the calendar. (one spreadsheet type manager I looked at could do that for pieces of the same project but not multiple projects.)
If I was at all proficient in Excel I might could design this myself; I’m not, so I can’t. But maybe there’s a better simple approach that’s not Excel based. Also I recently decided to move from the big global companies I have worked for in the past to a quite small, family owned company, so cost is a factor.
I’ve used smartsheet (and hated it, but that might have been more related to how the team was using it than the tool itself). Basecamp has a relatively inexpensive tier that might be appropriate too, but I think in general the teams I’ve worked with have preferred Trello’s minimalist approach over Basecamp’s more classic project management approach.
I’d try Asana’s table view first. Trello’s table view is less flexible as far as showing columns of custom fields and it sounds like you might need that. But Trello is certainly fine software and you might find the default kanban view and calendar powerup gets the job done.
Looking at all of these, this one looks like it handles overall project portfolio management fairly well (though I’m struggling to figure out some basics without reading any tutorials, etc. LOL)
