Let me begin with a confession. I’m constantly looking for the silver bullet in project management software. It’s been an off-and-on obsession of mine since about 2001. And while I fully understand that there are always trade-offs, it seems that I am too often forced to either go with complex tools to get the features I need or sacrifice functionality for slick interface and ease of use. Well, those days are over.
About a week ago, I went on yet another search for a solution and stumbled upon this jewel — Intervals.
I signed up on Friday and by Sunday had migrated most of our projects from Celoxis. Now, I must confess that I really like Celoxis. If you need all the traditional PM features such as task dependencies, resource leveling, forecasting, Gantt charts, etc, I highly recommend Celoxis. It does a tremendous job and I’ve used it since 2005. But it’s a very complex tool and I may need those elements once out of every 15 projects.
What I was looking for in a hosted solution is a perfect blend of time tracking (since we bill hourly) and project management. I also need simplicity. One of the biggest downsides of Celoxis is that you have to spend a lot of time learning the system. Practically speaking that meant that we had gaps in our tracking because designers will not be motivated to track a project and our developers are so focused on coding solutions that they viewed the tool as a hindrance to productivity. Truth be told they were right.
Celoxis seems most effective when a team has a dedicated PM that drives the project, whereas Intervals gets everyone involved. We still have designated PM’s but it’s much easier now to allow the team to track their time for a given task and collaborate with discussion and documents in a centralized location. Personally, I attribute that ease to the excellent user interface.
The Intervals development team has put a lot of effort into making sure users aren’t consumed by the tool, but are able to incorporate it into their daily routine very easily.
Reporting is the icing on the cake. If you do your part and remain diligent to track your projects, you will get huge rewards by having access to a whole suite of meaningful reports.
So if you’re looking for a way to improve project management and time tracking for your team, take Intervals for a spin. You can view the video demos here or just peruse the site.
Filed under: Project Management | Tagged: MyIntervals, project management software
Quick questions: Was migrating your data from Celoxis easy or was it a manual/tedious process? And did the myintervals people help you make the move? Finally have you had the chance to check other solutions before settling on myintervals?
You should also look at DeskAway. Its PM + Time + Issue + Social.
Fortunately enough, I was at a point where I could add all new and current projects, so I did it manually. I didn’t notice any import routine or mapping. My hunch is that you’d be better off starting from scratch.
The most tedious part was keying in the client list, but I just started w/our most active and then add as needed.
Yes, I’ve looked a many solutions. For us, MyIntervals is the best fit at that price point.
As a side note, we now have a month of data as we did spend the time to enter in time from the beginning of November. That means we can really get a good idea of reporting. It’s pretty nice.