Microsoft Project Reviews

We are in presales, and when the planning is very complex, we use Microsoft Project. That is, when we receive an RFP, we propose our solution and plan and build the different processes in Microsoft Project.

I like that I can change the task and include different resources related to the task.

It would be better if Microsoft Project were included in the DevOps stack. That is, I'd like to see this tool integrated to a different stack of the applications that we normally use in DevOps, such as in Jira, for example, to deploy a different version related to the different tasks that are included in Microsoft Project.

I've been using this solution for more than 10 years.

My impression is that it is stable.

It's very easy to install and use. It doesn't take a long time to deploy.

We have about 1000 people using it in our operations department.

I recommend using this solution if you working on a complex project or complex system.

We use it to manage our portfolio of projects. We use it to monitor, control, and update the status of each project, which includes our vendor projects and internal projects.

The ability to break down project phases is most valuable. Being able to align the tasks and reporting with project milestones and progress is also valuable.

Its price can be improved.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

It is stable and reliable.

It is medium in terms of scalability. We have approximately 50 people who use this solution.

Their technical support is great.

Its initial setup is simple.

It was implemented internally. In terms of deployment and maintenance, a single resource can handle its maintenance, main configuration, and setup.

Its price could be reduced a little.

I would advise others to concentrate on the culture and skillset of their team before implementing a project management tool. 

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate Microsoft Project an eight out of 10.

I am a utilities consultant, and I use it within the utility industry for managing different types of projects, such as for implementing a new system or new processes.

I don't know how it directly benefits our business per se because it helps our clients.

It is easy to use and pretty intuitive. User interfaces have stayed the same for the most part for the last 20 years. So, there is a familiarity.

Its reporting and its integration with some of the other related systems should be improved. It is not very easy to integrate.

Its scalability is not so good for the most part.

I have been using this solution for altogether 20 years.

It is pretty reliable. I can't recall any issues.

It is not so good for the most part. It is good for what we needed it for. Occasionally, we needed to be able to scale it up, but it is not as effective as some of the other systems.

We have around 30 project managers who are using it. We're all dispersed across the US, and it is being used extensively.

We have no experience with them.

I've used other project management solutions. Its simplicity and ease of use are the primary drivers.

The initial setup was straightforward. I didn't do it. Our IT guys did it, but once they got the process done, it took less than an hour.

We just did it ourselves. For its maintenance, we require probably a fourth of a person. 

As with anything, there is training, and there are standards. Make sure you have enough training and make sure you've established enterprise standards.

It is reliable, and a lot of people know it. I would give it a seven out of 10.

I was using this solution for project planning and status reports for a work project I was involved in.

Microsoft Project is user-friendly and easy to use to do very complex project plans.

The dashboard could be improved.

I have been using this solution for six months.

The solution is stable.

I have found the solution to be very scalable. 

We had evaluated other solutions before we chose Microsoft Project, such as Clarizen. Based on our discussion with the client, we decided to go with this solution.

I rate Microsoft Project an eight out of ten.

The roadmap functionality is very nice. All the dependencies and timelines are there. 

The board mode and the list of tasks are very handy to have in front of me. It looks very similar to a Trello board. It's very easy to navigate and understand.

The stability is very good.

Technical support has been very helpful.

I'd like to have few more specific features, however, it's possible that Microsoft will decide to implement and deploy them in the future. 

It would be nice, for example, if we have stages of the project, to have some tasks that can be split. We'd like to be able to see different timelines as a part of one task. 

I'd like to see the dependency of one task but split into a few parts. I'm mostly working with infrastructure projects in the company. Sometimes I have to stop the implementation of one part of the project due to various reasons, and I have to switch to another task. I have to see the stage and stop and show in another part I'm taking in the work. I'm not stopping the project. I'm just switching tasks and I have to see when I can continue the previous response. I need to see that the one task continuing, but not all the time. Right now, the organization is done mostly in my head, however, it would be ideal if I could visualize it with adjusted timelines.

We just started using the solution a few months ago. We're still in the testing phase and haven't fully decided on what were are going to go forward with.

We didn't have any problems with the product. It's very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It works great.  

We had contact with technical support on another project and had questions about our migration between two tenants. We talked directly to support and it was quite helpful to use them to get advice and assistance. We had a nice experience overall.

We've worked with Zoho One in the past, as well as a few other premium CRM providers. We were working on a full complex solution for our office that was a CRM with different other solutions. It was for complicated projects, however, we decided to switch to another software.

We are using currently using Office 365 and additional applications from Office 365 such as Branches, Project, and Power BI. We decided to have all the complex solutions from one company that offers connected applications, rather than just choose all different software without the basic platform from which we can connect. That's why we chose Microsoft Project.

We have three licenses. Three people have an opportunity to make projects, and two people are included in the project so they can see the timeline, the board, the task. They're quite happy with what they see in terms of being able to watch over the project.

While we're likely to use Microsoft, we're also looking at Jira, Confluence, and Trello.

We're customers and end-users of the solution.

While we are currently using the cloud as we test things out, it's possible, once we make a concrete decision about Microsoft, that we will switch to an on-premises deployment.

Currently, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten simply due to the fact that I don't know all the opportunities it offers us just yet. We haven't been using it for so long and need some more time to discover all the features on offer.

We use it for IT project management. It is mainly used for managing tasks.

The standard project planning features and charts are most valuable.

When a project plan becomes huge, it is painful to arrange and structure the project in Microsoft Project.

Currently, you require a separate product for managing agile projects, and people are using Jira and Rally to manage stories in agile. Primarily, on the software development side, people are kind of moving away from Microsoft Project.

I have been using this solution for 15 years. 

It is stable but not for huge project plans.

I am using its desktop version. They also have an online version where you can collaborate and do things like that. It is Office 365, which I don't use. 

In terms of users, around 10,000 people might be using it. Its users include service delivery managers, project managers, and business analysts.

I never had to use tech support for Microsoft Project.

I have used a competing product that was free and open-source, but it didn't have as many features as Microsoft Project.

We are kind of migrating to Jira for the agile model because we mostly have agile-based developments. All task stories and other things are managed in Jira. We are not using Microsoft Project that much now. It is only being used for project planning and for creating task dependencies.

In my organization, it is already packaged and available. 

I would advise others to learn about project planning. There is good enough information available online on Microsoft's website.

I would rate Microsoft Project an eight out of ten. It is good at doing what it is supposed to do. 

My primary use case is mainly to get down on paper the steps for our project - including who's responsible for them. We use it as a communication tool and then we (on a regular basis) review progress against the laid-out project plan or schedule.

I tend to step in and create schedules when project managers are too busy or oftentimes I'll create the initial schedule due to the fact that I know all the stuff that needs to go in it, and the project manager may or may not know that.

The solution is very useful for project planning.

The solution is extremely stable.

The solution can handle large-scale projects.

I'm totally confident that somebody that uses it more frequently and more deeply than I do certainly is aware of the features and functions in it that I just don't use. It's user-friendly, rudimentarily. I'm just creating tasks, linking tasks in terms of predecessors and successors, adding duration to the task, adding resources to the tasks, and coming up with the logical flow and the end dates. That's how I use it. And, in that sense, it's very easy to use.

One of the things that we struggle with is that we do a lot of smaller projects that end up using the same resources. We have difficulty managing or balancing workload across resources that are on multiple projects. 

For example, in project A we'll schedule Joel to do something in a certain timeframe. And then next day we have project B's schedule up, and he's scheduled to do something on that project in the same timeframe, and we don't have a way to expose those conflicts. We have to basically rely on Joe to say, "Hey, you've asked me to do different things. There's only one of me. I've got to manage my time. Either you give me twice as long to do both of those things, or you tell me which one to do first, and then move the other one."

It would be ideal if the solution itself could expose such conflicts.

One of the reasons that we have some projects using Jira as well as Microsoft Project is that we have to be able to access the project schedule to see, as an individual contributor, what the tasks are. It's not a great way to distribute that. In terms of Jira, where we create the Jira records, an engineer can go into the Jira database and search for his or her name, find all the tasks with the due dates on them, and anything assigned to them. If Project had a better mechanism to allow those who are not the project manager to see their own work tasks, that would be of help or of value to us.

I dabble in the product. We have actual project planners that are the experts in it, however, I've been using it for seven years at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is extremely stable. It's rock solid. I've never had a problem with not working. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Some people in our organization do keep super detailed, large project schedules in Microsoft Project. I'm not working on such a large project at the moment. I'm working on many small ones. I can't comment from direct experience, however, I'm confident that we are doing that within our organization and that it can scale to handle quite sizable projects.

I've never dealt with technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are when they receive queries.

I do not recall the company using a different solution. Certainly, when I started in the organization, I was using this product and not something else.

That said, we do have some projects using Jira as an agile approach to project management. With Jira, what they'll do is we'll have a project schedule, and then they'll break down the individual line items on the project schedule even further into Jira tasks in two-week bites. That's how they're managing projects there. 

I did not handle the initial setup. Our IT team handled that part of the process for the company. I just open it up and create a new project schedule. Therefore, I cannot speak to how difficult or straightforward the process is.

Our IT team did the initial setup.

I don't deal directly with sales or licensing. I can't speak to the exact cost or licensing structure of the product itself. It's not an aspect I deal with directly.

We likely have a support contract for the product.

We are customers and end-users.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I use. I don't use any advanced features. I basically put in tasks and assign resources, and assign predecessors, and successors. That's about the level I use it at. I don't do tons of work resource balancing, or Gantt charts out of it or anything like that.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It more than meets my needs for what I'm using it for. What a real project manager may rate it might be different.

We used it in my previous organization for business process optimization projects, application development projects, system integration projects, program management over a multitude of projects, and program interdependencies.

It served the purpose. It was pretty user-friendly.

I am not that close to it anymore, but I know that there were some cut and paste issues when we were trying to move one group of roles to another, and they used to muck up the interdependencies between the tiers, rows, and other things.

I have been using Microsoft Project since it was first introduced.

It was pretty good in terms of stability.

While integrating on one server, sometimes, there was a challenge. When you were leveraging the server aggregation tool, where you had everything, and you were integrating on one server to have the plans integrated for interdependencies, there was a constraint. I can't remember what it was.

A lot of Microsoft products are very Microsoft friendly, but they don't integrate well with a lot of other things. They fail in the extensibility model in the architecture design.

In terms of the number of users, we probably had about 200 or 300 people who were using Microsoft Project. In my past companies, I've had 700 people using them.

I never used the tech support for Microsoft Project.

I have used HP's PPM. There were two other tools that I have used.

It was pretty straightforward. Essentially, you should have taken classes in it and worked with it in order to understand some of the nuances of it. It can have a little bit of a learning curve.

I would advise others to look at what they have on the market because, with the advent of the cloud, so many different types of tools are coming into play that can integrate with other cost analysis platforms.

I would rate Microsoft Project an eight out of ten.