Let’s face it. We Greeks are not very famous for our organizational talent, neither for our ability of planing our work and getting it done just in time. Of course, we get our projects done someday. Maybe not in the planed time, maybe not in the planed budget, but we do manage to realize them somehow. So why worry? Well, one thing about me, which is not very Greek I have to admit, is my desire to plan. I need a structure for doing things. I like to define the necessary steps. I find it useful to have a rough impression of how long they will take to get realized, to be able to delegate them in order to have the work done quicker, to know which steps are preceding, and which resulting. I tend to keep track of the current state mentally and I don’t like shortage in material or lack of resources crossing my plans.
So I like to plan and my boss had a benefit out of my characteristic so far, but why handle so much information mentally when there are loads of project management software available? If the software supports you just right, you save money, time and improve your reputation among your competitors due to your reliable planing.
Searching in the internet, I came up with Merlin. I am sure it can help me in organizing our projects. From what I can see, from the quick guides I could read, it is “thinking” the way I do. It knows which compounds I consider when I am planing, calculates with time, work and budget, supports me doing reports, which I would otherwise have to do manually and brings throughout its intuitive user interface a bit of magic in my project planing working procedures.
So of course I have applied for the internship. My boss is really excited in getting all the possibilities of Merlin “work” for him, as soon I return. I am excited too and will be reporting from time to time how I am proceeding.
Bye bye Greece, ProjectWizards here I come :-)Hi, this is me Perri…
Today I have learned the names of the different areas in Merlin’s project window. There is the ‘main content area’ displaying the different views of my project, the ‘info area’ (the so called ‘inspector’), the ‘resource well’ for the resources or conflicts, and the ‘elements’ area.
The size of these areas is configurable. Further more you may choose to switch off the display of the resources or elements areas, or to resize the main content area.
This single window concept containing the necessary information is great! No matter how you setup your window, you have it always clean, tide and neat. No overlapping palettes covering important data. No comparison to my real desktop 😉
The inspector is of course context sensitive, and I was told that the elements area lists only the elements of the current selection.
So there are 4 possible ways to view a project, when seeing its:
- Activities
- Net Plan
- Resources
- Utilization
When I am in the ‘Activities’ view I can see the outline and the Gantt chart. Viewing the ‘Net Plan’, I see my activities and their dependencies. Being in the ‘Resources’ I get my resources listed together with their costs or contacting data. In ‘Utilization’ I see in which activities my resources are assigned and their work load.
This means, I can always view my project by another perspective. I like this. How can you tell whether a project can get realized if you haven’t checked whether your resources can handle it?
The activities view, I was told, is the most often used view. I can understand this and cannot wait learning how to use it.
