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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.

Compare and contrast

In the Microsoft world, there are two products: Microsoft Project and Project Server. Outside of Microsoft Project, there are some other planning tools, but they don't really have the features and the server package. However, GanttProject and project-open make a compelling combination. project-open offers much more than Microsoft Project Server, although there are other products you can buy to add similar functionality to Project Server. However, project-open does have many more useful facilities, and it's more user-friendly than the Microsoft offering. While project-open does more than Project Server, GanttProject does rather less than Microsoft Project, but that matters rather less - what GanttProject lacks in facilities, it makes up for with its smaller and easier-to-use interface. Even if you don't actually know how to create Gantt charts "properly", you can quickly start producing useful projects plans, and we've always believed that any plan is better than no plan at all.

We do have to ask whether the combination of GanttProject and project-open represent the "A team" or the "B team" of project-management tools, which isn't a fair question, since there may be all sorts of reasons why you choose one planning tool over another; for example, in some business areas, projects must be planned using Microsoft Project and the plans have to be submitted in electronic form. But if you just want to see whether project-planning software could help with your projects, the combination of GanttProject and project-open would be a good place to start. And we deserve some congratulation for resisting the temptation to say "we love it when a plan comes together" for the whole of the column so far.

Mind mapping

We think it would be fair to say that the world is divided between those people who think mind mapping is one of the greatest tools for conceptual thinking ever conceived, and those who think it's just a bunch of lines and random words on a piece of paper. For our own part, we tend to steer a difficult middle line on this subject: mind mapping can definitely be useful for some people as a means of getting their thoughts together, but like any form of brainstorming it can become completely impenetrable to anyone but the person who drew the mind map (and sometimes even to them).

So what exactly is mind mapping? Put simply, it's about taking some core idea and then expanding on it via a diagram. Typically, you write down the core idea at the centre of a piece of paper and then expand from that centre outwards, adding more and more information as it occurs to you. As you build up the mind map, you can annotate the links appropriately and build up more complex relationships. As you might imagine, drawing a mind map on a piece of paper is quite difficult and will often require a fair amount of erasure and revision, which makes it the perfect candidate for a computer application.

Various open-source mind-mapping applications are available, but one of note is FreeMind. Like GanttProject, it's a platform-independent Java application with a very simple installer. Once you've started the application, you're presented with a blank page onto which you can start your mind map: simply add child nodes to the diagram and rearrange your thoughts as you go along, and you can insert links to websites and images to make your mind map more useful.