Most project management systems feel like slavery, especially the infamous MS Project, foisted upon the creative/marketing world by the tiranny of interactive firms who seem to be unable to communicate in anything but. Now don’t get me wrong, MS Project would be my tool of choice if I was making any kind of widget, building houses or any other endeavor that was suited to a linear schedule with har task dependencies. However, that is about as far from our industry as you can get.
Regardless of my essential antipathy to most project management systems, I have recently turned to a very sophisticated, multiuser, web deployed project management system called dotProject. The system is very flexible and lends itself to the creation of projects that can be fluid and managed by individual contributors via a dashboard that presents them with to do lists automatically generated form the projects entered into the system.
Though there is a relatively steep learning curve for those that have to manage projects, it is very easy to train individual contributors. It has all the functionality you would expect and includes Gantt charts, calendars and all the tools you would expect short of sophisticated resource levelling tools. Just make sure to run it on an open source OS, I recommend Ubuntu server. Check it out here
