Experience in working in teams on a software project throughout the semester, yo

Question

Experience in working in teams on a software project throughout the semester, you should have a good idea of how difficult it is for management to properly track status and process manually. Also, you should also have a feeling for what would you professionally would like to see in a tool to help you be better software project managers.

You are to create an original comparison review as if you were a professional technical analyst/journalist writing for professional journal in the software outsourcing industry. Assume your work will be published and thus it should be approximately 3 to 5 polished paper pages (including diagrams, tables, charts, title area, sub-title, references, author bio, etc.). Note: It is expected that your article will be about 1/2 the size of the example ACM article which is linked below.

You may review general purpose project management packages or packages optimized specifically for software projects.

You are to perform original primarily research of vendor sites, product manuals, free trial downloads, pricing, upgrade policies, etc.

You are to properly and extensively reference your sources.

You may not use more than a few sentences from secondary sources, such as other people's review of project management software. Secondary sources also need to be properly referenced.

An example ACM.org (Association for Computing Machinery) article can be found at: http://www.acm.org/publications/word_style/V2-ACM-TOG-AUGUST-2012.zip

Note 1: You are to mimic a professional article, however, you are expected to be creative and thus you don't have slavishly clone the example article. Treat it as just a sample of the vision.

Note 2: Your original article is a Review, Compare, and Contrast article. Thus, your material will be "simpler" than the example technical article and shorter. However, as a "Review" article your advice to readers should clearly state the strengths and weakness of each and your defendable professional usage recommendations.

Explanation / Answer

Today, every organization needs software tools in order to manage its day to day work handling, planning, controlling, sharing , time management, and scheduling the tasks etc. In market, there are various software packages that meet these demands of the managers to assist them in planning their projects. Depending upon the number of users to use that package, and the tasks that are to be performed by the management, different project management softwares are used acccording to the needs.

Project management includes:

1. Planning (Analysis of Task assignments, Time approximation for each task, Distribution of tasks to engineers): Mgmt softwares used are: Microsoft Project, Dreamteam, Gantt Chart, Omniplan.

2. Managing the tasks ( Giving task to engineer, assigning a deadline, checking the progress of work, and getting known for its completion): Central Desktop, Basecamp etc.

3. Sharing files/ Email Addresses and other database attributes: Basecamp, Central Desktop, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange etc.

4. Solving technical problems at engineers end by cambating bugs and viruses: Mantis, Bugzilla, Trac, Fogbugz etc

Here I m writing illustration of few of those mgmt softwares:

1. Microsoft project: It allows the managers to work from any place, control the team schedule of tasks in company, plan, etc and to collaborate easily with all the stakeholders of project. The manager can show dependencies of one task incompletion over other scheduled tasks. He can discuss the risks , pros, cons etc of not meeting deadline etc with his team being anywhere.

2. Basecamp : It is web based software that helps in collaborating and communicating over the project. Due to its simplicity it is widely used and can be operated on a mobile also.

3. Smartsheet: It helps to coordinate on different dimensions of the project.

4. Gantt Chart: Shows linking of various processes and scheduling. Impact of one task completion over other etc.

Reference:

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