Project Management refers to the collective exercise of managing time, resources and scope of a project simultaneously to ensure that the targets laid out in the project are achieved within the stipulated period of time and using the alloted resources. While managing time and resources are primary objectives, a competent project manager will also monitor the scope of the project. The scope of the project refers to the things that a project was supposed to achieve. A change in the scope will affect the other factors and it is the duty of the manager to ensure that that the changes in the project requirements are well reflected.
Usually such changes occur in the form of very small changes, called the scope creep, which by itself are pretty insignificant but when accumulated, they significantly alter the resource and time requirements.
The need for effective project management is further underlined in today's environment where a project manager has to deal with resources and management spread out over a vast geography.
A number of tools exist, both free and open source, that assist in the task of project management. These tools however are only as good as the data entered in it. A tool would be ineffective if project scope changes are not reflected in the documentation.
Some Popular Project Management tools.
The growing demand of project management tools to manage the complex needs to today's projects has resulted in a number of tools being developed. some of these tools are commercially developed by large software organizations while some are built with an open source philosophy.
Any project manager has to control one or many of the following tasks:
Bug and Defect Tracking
Project Accounting
Project Estimation
Project Scheduling
Requirements Management
Resource Planning and Scheduling
We will focus on some Open source project management tools available today, their advantages and limitations.
DotProject
(http://www.dotproject.net)
A freely available project management tool developed in php and requiring the MySQL database, dotProject works on on combination of platforms such as Linux and Windows and also web servers such as IIS and Apache. dotProject also requires a browser as well as a mail server such as sendmail to handle outgoing mail.
phpCollab
(http://www.phpcollab.com)
Defined as an open-source Internet-enabled collaboration workspace, phpCollab allows for the consulting team to share information with each other in one space and publish information for the client in another space. It encompasses the most important aspects of project management such as task scheduling and documents sharing and easily latches on to other open source applications for bug tracking and content management. phpCollab is backed by a highly active and dedicated volunteer team of developers, testers and is constantly enhancing the application to meet user needs.
OpenOffice.org Project Management too
l(http://oopm.openoffice.org)
Is a promising new tool in it's early stages which will integrate with the OpenOffice Suite via the OpenOffice API to be a cross platform tool.
NetOffice
(http://netoffice.sourceforge.net)
a web based project management application written in php/MySQL and allows managing and sharing information about teams, projects, task and deadlines.
phpProjekt
(http://www.phpprojekt.com) is a modular application developed to coordinate a project and the resources involved in the project. It's various components are Group Calendar, Project Management, Time Card System, File Management, Contact Manager, Mail Client, Chat, Forums, Request Trackers, Voting system and other.
A highly versatile application, phpProjekt support many protocols such as SOAP, LDAP, and is available in 36 languages and 6 databases.
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