Is Microsoft Project worth it?

Microsoft has been a crucial part of our lives for more than a decade now. Managing the tons of documents and tasks would have been a nightmare without it.

While, Microsoft has its challengers. Some of which provide better services, MS however, stays a tech giant.

With many of its software systems providing the services to perform different tasks, MS Project has its role for project managers to control their projects. Being introduced for the first time in 1984, it allows its users to manage projects, create reports, assign tasks, manage resources, and much more. Its advanced versions introduced in the later years and its plate of services make it quick to dominate in management.

Microsoft Project Features

MSP has a number of features for the managers and their teams to manage their work better. Here is the list of some of its important features

• Grid View: A project view that is used to plan and manage projects with a task list.

• Board View: A visual board view that helps with managing workflow and status.

• Timeline View: The traditional Gantt chart used for scheduling tasks over a project timeline

• Communication & Collaboration: Teams can work together on projects.
• Coauthoring: Stakeholders and team members work together to edit and update task lists and schedules.

• Reporting: Pre-built reports that can track progress, resources, programs and portfolios.
• Roadmap: Track programs and project portfolios.
• Timesheets: Collect project and non-project time for payroll and invoicing.
• Resource Management: Manage resources by requesting and assigning tasks.

Pros and Cons of MS Project

Like all other tools out there, MS Project has its features that makes it worth using or worth leaving behind.

Pros

• One of the biggest pros is that it’s Microsoft, and so it integrates with the company’s other products, most notably Office 365, but also Skype and Sharepoint.
• It has a similar interface to other MS products.
• It’s been around for a long time, and its features have developed over time.
• It’s part of Microsoft and has the reliability and support that coming from such an established company represents.
• It has financial management tools that help project managers with estimating budgets.
• It can be licensed as a desktop application. While this might make it seem more like a dinosaur, there are still organizations that will want this instead of a cloud solution.
• It has templates to help users get started, which saves time.

Cons

• It’s a desktop application. Yes, this was a pro, as well, but the number of organizations that want a project management software that is siloed is rare.
• Though MS Project does have a cloud-based solution, it is not very agile. Even with Sharepoint, which is designed to take advantage of the cloud, MS Project has great limitations on the cloud.
• It’s difficult to learn and use. There’s a lot of time and effort, and even intensive training, that must first be invested in the software before project managers and their teams are comfortable using the software. This adds time to the project during the implementation stage.
• It’s expensive. The prices quoted above, again, are per person, per month. This quickly adds up as you buy licenses for team members who must have access to the software in order to take advantage of its collaborative features. Otherwise, it’s more of an expensive tool solely for the project manager.
• It’s not shareable. As mentioned earlier, files are saved as MPP, a proprietary format, so that if you’re not using MS Project, you can’t read those files. This would be less of a problem if the software was less expensive, but if you must have a MS Project license to view a MPP file, then it adds up. This creates a lot of unnecessary hurdles when sharing project files.

While being the most used software for project management out there, there still are better alternatives to MS Project. ProjectManager is one of them. ProjectManager is a cloud-based project management software, which automatically reflects status updates when they’re posted. Project managers have the tools to control the planning, monitoring and reporting of the project’s progress, and team members can collaborate with features that are simple to understand.

Source: https://www.projectmanager.com/blog/what-is-microsoft-project