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Hillary Russak wrote:
>
> Newbie here... I won't bother lurking.
>
> I'm in search of a good project management tool for technical writing
> projects. The other technical writers in my division (ES&H at the Stanford
> Linear Accelerator Center) have been using MS Project and we're all pretty
> disgusted with it. My portion of the work was once manageable without an
> organizational tool, but isn't anymore.
>
Hillary,
We use MS Project to manage large and complex documentation and online
help projects and have had good success with it. It's an excellent tool
for planning and coordinating large-scale projects, but using it
"correctly" (by which I mean getting real value from it) requires a
pretty good understanding of critical-path method (CPM) project
planning. If you don't really need or want to do CPM planning, MS
Project is probably more trouble than it's worth.
What do you want your project management tool to do for you? Are you
looking for a way to estimate and track schedules through the lifecycle
of a project, or are you just looking for a way to track the status of
various components at any given time?
Regards,
-- David Knopf
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David Knopf Tel: 415-731-8398 david -at- knopf -dot- com
Knopf Online Fax: 415-731-8399 http://www.knopf.com/
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