By using effective project management tools like Microsoft Project and Celoxis we gain solid control of project management for our partners outsourcing their web and software development to us and this allows the milestone and time tracking process to be effectively managed but also gives visibility to all members of the project. We are able to build complex project plans with time, resource and work breakdown structure (wbs link to wiki on this subject) and have a great deal of information and clarity, the same amount of information and clarity is not available with things like basecamp, Redmine and various other time and project tracking tools. There are many free as well as paid tools and it is often the case that you need to test the tools with live projects that have comprehensive workflow to understand if the solution will work well.
For our outsourcing partners we were keen to remove as many distractions relating to project work (including better control over end client billing) and it makes sense that this area should be very comprehensively supported, but also shared with our partners. We found that clients / partners are familiar with using the variety of different project productivity tools, but we found the tools could not give us the detail and framework required, so we spent some time testing and failing solutions that had great front end looks but did not meet all the functional requirements we needed.
Our outsourcing services are now underpinned by a consistent approach so that all our projects are managed from one place and any partner seeking 3 or more developers gets access to our project tools free of charge.
Whether it’s managing one project for a shopping cart or multiple web and software projects, we can give our partners high level information as well as great detail. Where we have multiple similar projects, Celoxis (celoxis.com) allows us to template the project plan very quickly and if needed we can develop the API set that comes with Celoxis to adapt to new requirements (like connecting to accounts software or billing platform).
For our existing outsourcing partners we will be swapping over all projects to this solution in the coming weeks and both existing and new partners will enjoy a refreshing change in the quality and details available to them.
Source:http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/101730/
