14 DAY TRIAL // To work efficiently, it takes much more than just the right resources. If you have the world at your feet and no management skills, you're destined to fail, but sometimes, you can replace a part of the managerial talent with a software helper, and this is exactly the purpose of the program that I want to review now.
Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources is such a way that these resources deliver all the work required to complete a project within the defined time, scope and cost constraints. Obviously, the resources that you have to take care of are human resources, software and hardware, all being done with an eye always open and looking at the costs involved.
Today's product is used by Apple Inc., Epson America, MacNews, NASA, a lot of universities and other institutions or companies. Its name is xTime Project, and the latest version available is 4.1.1. Available as a shareware version, this program requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later to run and comes as a Universal Binary application that runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. The size of the package you have to download is almost 14MB, which shouldn't be a problem considering that most people today have Internet access at speeds that will let them download this setup package in less than 5 minutes.
If I said "setup package", then I guess you figured out that this is not just a drag & drop install program, but you shouldn't call a specialist either. After downloading the DMG file, double click it, and then run the application called "Install xTime Project" that is available inside the virtual image. After that, all you have to do is follow the instructions available on the screen, and you'll have xTime Project ready to run in a snap! These being said, let's move to the interface and features of this program, because I am sure that a lot of people need such a tool to increase the efficiency of their work...
Well, you got it, you installed it, and now you have started up the xTime Project for the first time. First of all, you will have to pass through the shareware reminder that appears each time you start the program until you register it, because there's no way to avoid it as long as you're a shareware user, but then, things will appear to be much easier than expected.
First of all, xTime Project has a user interface optimized following Apple Human Guidelines, and since it was built especially to work with Mac OS X, this software product integrates perfectly with your Mac's operating system, being able to export tasks to Apple's iCal, add resources from the Address Book and, of course, share a project to a Web folder on your .Mac account. The graphics that can be noticed inside the program's window look great and, despite its complexity, I found xTime Project's interface to be really easy to use and the workflow is pretty straightforward.
So you opened the application, and now you think about the next thing to do, right? Obviously, you have to do what this program knows to do, and that is to create a new project and add all the elements that you have to take care all the time so that you finish it within the deadline and within your budget limit. Let's see how to do it...
Once you click the New Project icon on the toolbar, you will be asked to enter its name, starting date, deadline, a description and its budget. When you have more ongoing projects managed at a time, it would be a good idea to choose a new color for displaying new projects so that you can find the one you are looking for easier. Optionally, you can also add resources at this stage from the ones available, or create and add completely new ones, but this can also be done later.
Now that you have created your project, the interface allows you to check the tasks assigned to all the people involved and, of course, add new items as needed. These elements include daily/hourly tasks, milestones, processes, events, links and resources. For example, you have added a human resource called "junior programmer". If you have a contact called this way in your Address Book, this guy's information is going to be added automatically to xTime Project. A very important element that you shouldn't forget is the daily cost of a resource, no matter if it's a human or a material one.
Each task that you add to a resource should have a name, a start date and a deadline, a budget and a color, and you can add more events to it, attach documents and detailed descriptions for each of these.
There are more ways to view your ongoing projects, including PERT charts, so if you think that you are going to work better this way than using a visual timeline view, then you're free to choose what you like.
With this program, you shouldn't worry about assigning to somebody (or something) two tasks at the same time, because overallocation and resource conflicts are instantly detected and you can make things right in a matter of minutes when such a problem occurs.
Although you can have this program setup and ready to go in less than 5 minutes, its features are more than enough to help you get a job done. According to statistics, 80 percent of Microsoft projects clients use only 20% of its large number of features, so why not use what you got the right way?(let's not forget that you also get to pay only what you use with this program!)
Now that you know all that, I think it's time to draw the conclusions and see xTime Project in action, because action is better than a thousand words, don't you agree?
The Good
xTime Project is a program that manages to be easy to use, fast, reliable and without eating your entire software budget for a single license, offering excellent system integration and the features most people need, without tons of additional functions that you never get to use.
The Bad
Being a standalone application, the fact that you won't be running a client-server solution limits the ability to work in a networked environment, but sometimes you don't need an entire team to manage projects, so this is partially a problem, partially a strong point.
The Truth
I always get a headache when I think about managing projects in a shared environment, where a lot of people access resources, modify them and change items as they want. No, I am not talking about anarchy here, I am talking about making project management as simple as possible. I know that xTime Project may not be perfect, but even I could manage complex projects without a 3 months training before this happens, and this is more than I could ever ask!
Check out the screenshots here:
