PROJECT Management explored

I keep seeing articles about the rise of open source and occasionally getting myself into 'discussions' about the value and validity of open source software.  It depends who you talk to whether open source is the saviour of us all who will release the shackles of commerce and provide better solutions at zero cost or is a random, collection or toys and pet projects which can't be relied upon by serious organisations.

As with most of these discussions the reality is somewhere in the middle and actually the discussion can be broader than open source to look at free software.  So I thought we should road test this....can you find all the tools you need to run a modest project for free?

Obviously I'm going to start with the PROJECT in a box Community Edition which is a free application from a commercial software house.  This will be my cornerstone and provide me with my project methodology, including templates and structure (PRINCE2 and DSDM Atern) as well as configuration management and version control of the documentation I produce.

For Planning I'm going with OpenProj from Serena.  I have tried a few but this is in my opinion comfortably the best due to its similarity to MS Project and the ability to load an MS Project .mpp file into it.  In our commercial packages we support the openproj.xml file format in our reporting engine so this will also ease your upgrade path should you want to later.

I know lots of you use mind mapping and I hear FreeMind is very well regarded in this space, certainly I see its outputs appearing more and more widely.  In terms of general productivity tools (word processing, spreadsheets etc) many of you may consider Office to be 'free' as it is bundled with your PC or already there...if so great!  If not then there is still hope with Open Office which is a great set of tools which in some cases arguably out perform their MS rivals.

Of course it would seem lunacy to try and run a project without the use of emails and there are loads of free email options although my personal favourite is Google mail.   All of these tools will work together and can be treated as free as you will not be charged to use them giving you a meaningful tool box for basic projects.  If you are looking to move up to larger project teams with multi user interactions then some of these solutions may start to feel the strain and we will provide some suggestions to that dilemma in a future post.