PlanningForce Express Premium review

Project management for small businesses always looks like a great idea – on paper. In practice, small businesses can’t usually afford a dedicated project manager. As a result, project plans aren’t kept up-to-date and quickly become useless. What you need is a way of automating project management so that it’s less time consuming and can be successfully done by someone who also has other responsibilities.

Yes, you’ve guessed it, that’s what PlanningForce does. Like most project management programs, it combines a task list with a Gantt chart to show you what should be done, when and by whom. Of course, it’s also more than that – it would have to be, as you can create automatically-updating Gantt charts in Excel.

Before you start a project, you create for it a list of resources (usually, but not necessarily, staff members). You then create calendars, and link them to your resources, telling the program when these resources won’t be available – for instance, on public holidays. You can create a shared calendar for a whole team and individual calendars for each team member.

When you come to create your task list, you allocate a resource to each task; specifying what percentage of the resource’s time the task will take up. Setting up the task list itself is easy; you create tasks or groups of tasks within each project, giving them descriptive names, setting milestones, specifying date constraints and so on.

Once you’ve entered your project variables, click on Run Schedule and the program will create a finished project plan for you, including a Gantt chart that takes into account resource availability. And instead of obliging you to manually update your project to take into account factors such as unexpected staff absences or missed deadlines, PlanningForce merely asks that you amend the raw data and click the “Run Schedule” button again.

It will then work out all the ramifications for you – updating successor tasks and linked projects. As well as creating a Gantt chart, the scheduling function also shows you how your resources are allocated, how well they’re being used, progress made in your projects and so on. It also allows you to generate reports, giving you hard data on subjects such as resource scheduling and usage.

PlanningForce doesn’t take absolutely all of the hard work out of project management. You still have to manually enter updated variables. If you have a lot of projects on the go, just this data entry task is going to be time consuming (in an ideal world, you’d want stakeholders to be able to update their task’s status over the network). Occasionally we found aspects of the interface slightly confusing – adding a date constraint, for instance doesn’t exactly follow the two-click process outlined in the manual.

However, we wouldn’t want to be churlish. PlanningForce is easy to use – you just type in the data and it more or less does the actual planning for you, though you can always tweak and refine the plans it creates. And at only £347, it costs around half of what you’d pay for Microsoft Project Professional 2007. If you’re prepared to put the time in, PlanningForce Express Premium can help make your company’s work, what you actually do day to day, more transparent and easier to manage.