Gallery

A bit of planning

Posted on 11 May 2007 at 11:47

Ian Wrigley and Simon Brock look at some open-source project planning and management applications to scrutinise their capabilities in the real world.

There are various extensions available for GanttProject that allow you to produce web pages and PDFs from your plans, available to everyone who's going to be working on it. This is where the program comes into its own by integrating with a web-based project-management and delivery tool called project-open. You can find project-open at www.project-open.org and, like GanttProject, it's also available for Linux and Windows (but not for the Mac). If you're going to look at project-open, we strongly recommend you read the installation documents. Installing on Windows may be easier than installing onto your local Linux box, since you may discover that some of the prerequisites are the wrong versions.

Before we go further, it does need to be said that project-open isn't your typical Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) web application: it doesn't use Apache, MySQL or PHP, but is instead based around the open-source AOL web server, uses Postgres SQL and is written in a language called TCL. There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of these platforms or with the resulting application and, as we discovered, you can pretty much treat your installation of it as a black box. We installed project-open onto a Centos 4 (a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4) machine that was also running Apache and MySQL without any problems.

Once you've installed project-open, you'll need to connect to the application with a web browser, and you'll then be taken through a configuration dialog that sets up the system with demo data. At that point, depending on how you've decided to configure it, you'll need to spend a few hours/days/weeks trying to work out how to get the best out of it, because it's a huge application.

project-open is designed to provide a complete web-based solution to all aspects of project management, and by all aspects we mean virtually everything we could think of, plus quite a few useful things we hadn't. If you really search for missing features you could probably find a few - it doesn't manage diaries that well and it can't make decent coffee, but these are relatively minor problems.

The core of project-open is the project, as you create projects and plan out everything via the web interface. Importantly for us, you can upload files from GanttProject directly into this web interface. Once you've set up a project and added people to it, this sets up their timesheet reporting, so that when they've worked time on a task it updates the appropriate project, which allows the manager and staff of that project to track its progress. You can take this further by associating charge rates with individual staff members, meaning projects can also be calculated and even billed by exporting into an accounting package.

This application's facilities don't stop at classic project management: there's a file manager through which files can be associated with each project, and documentation can be created in an integrated wiki system and a forum system that allows internal conversations to be held on a project.

This isn't just a tool for a group of people working in the same office, but can be used to manage projects that span many offices or distributed office environments that involve teams of home workers. It's also possible to include external workers, such as contractors and consultants, by giving them sufficient access to the system so they can report on what they're doing. There's an integrated bug- tracking system that can be used to monitor bugs in software developments and log the appropriate patches. Finally, there's an extensive set of reporting tools, which enable you to create internal and external reports. If you decide to use project-open, some of these tools probably won't be needed in certain projects, but the fact they're there means you never have to look any further when you do need them.