10-second breakdown:
Although it might look a little more complex than some of the competition, Microsoft Project is a great choice for project management software. If you already use the Microsoft Suite, the good news is you won’t have that hard of a time adjusting.
Microsoft Project is used in small (0-50 employees), medium (51-1,000 employees) and enterprise companies (1,000+ employees).
The good:
It is easy to get started with Microsoft Project due to it’s familiar feel to the other Microsoft suite of products.
A wide array of reports are available and they can be customized with notes or comments and exported to other software such as Word or Excel.
MP lets users communicate in real-time for quick communication between teams and allows for easy pivots in priorities for projects. If your customer changes their mind in the middle of a project, this allows you to alert your team and reduce wasted effort.
The bad:
Some users complain that very large or complex projects can cause MP to get glitchy or buggy.
The vast amount of capabilities and customizations will require a bit of learning to fully discover the software’s full potential. This may cause some people to feel overwhelmed.
How it works:
One of Microsoft Project’s strengths is how it fits into the larger Microsoft Ecosystem. If you already use Microsoft Office 365 or the standalone versions of their apps you have a leg up on learning the system already. No matter which screen you’re on, you will find the usual ribbon menu up top with all of your settings.
When you start up a new project, it’s similar to the newest versions of Microsoft Word as a bunch of ready-made templates will pop up, you can pick from one of the Microsoft-ready ones or roll up your sleeves and build your own!
Project comes packed with all of the features you need for a good Project Management solution, you can make new projects, divvy them up into tasks, view Gantt charts and more. In addition to project templates, Microsoft Project also offers templates for many different types of reports. Microsoft has recently been making a push to simplify the program and fit it more in line with the existing Office line. You can also save your own timeline templates, if you need to bring up a chart that shows what a specific department was up to or how many priority tasks were completed every Friday, why not save it then run it with a few clicks of the mouse next week?
Microsoft also added the ability to expand the software functions through their own app store they call ‘Add-Ins.’ They vary in price from free to pay per month to a flat rate and add all sorts of functionality like a native plagiarism checker, a templet chooser that expands the amount of pre-built templates you have available and even an analyzer that will compare your performance to your industry average.
You can take Microsoft Project on the go with their apps for Android, iOS and Windows phones. This is one of the few programs to support Windows phones. Many competitors don’t offer apps and those that do tend to skip windows, so if you’re out of office employees use Windows OS phones you might want to take a closer look!
Pricing for Microsoft Project is about as clear as mud. When you take a look at the pricing page it looks like there are three options, but the cheapest one, ‘Project Lite’ requires you to have an existing subscription with Microsoft Project or have them come out and install a physical server in your business.
The only way you would use it is if you wanted to give some of your workforce a lesser version, while keeping a more expensive license for management or a different department that relies more heavily on project management software.
For that reason we’ll start with the mid-tier option, ‘Project Pro for Office 365.’ Project Pro costs $25 per user per month and comes bundled with everything you would expect from a project management suite, including tasks, project scheduling, and reporting on business intelligence. One neat feature only Microsoft offers is in this package you can physically install MS Project on up to 5 different computers. If the internet is out but you still have power, you can work within the downloaded app. It won’t be real-time any more, but when the internet comes back on it’ll sync with the cloud and update all of the projects and tasks you modified.
Microsoft Project’s ‘Project Online’ is up next. Although this one doesn’t come with the added benefit of physical installations, it does come with a few perks Project Pro lacks including the ability to share documents among users and the ability to submit time sheets. Each Project Online user costs $33 per month.
Last and certainly most complicated is ‘Project Lite.’ So in order to use Project Lite, you must have an existing Project Online subscription. The main advantage of Project Lite is that it is ridiculously cheap compared to the other two options, coming in at $7 per user per month. Project Lite offers almost everything Project Online does, except it cuts out reporting, business intelligence and resource management. You could use Project Online for managers and then distribute Project Lite to employees that may not need the access levels for reporting, but use the platform to keep track of their work.
If you’re looking for a solution that can scale with you, no matter what size you are, Microsoft Project is a great option. It also comes with the added benefit that the layout is similar to Microsoft’s other products like Office so while some features may be complicated if you already use Office you have a good head start on what to expect.
For complete rankings of all project management software, go here.
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