I work for a small plastics manufacturing company. We have 14 employees total but only 3-5 to start would be using Project to organize our projects. To this point we have only used excel and other rudimentary ways of handling our project management and are looking to get more sophisticated.
I downloaded a free trial of MS Project because it is suppose to integrate well with the ERP system that we will be getting by the end of the year. After working with MS Project for a while there are several questions that I need to have answered so that we can determine the best system for us.
Here is what we are looking for:
- 3-5 people to start that can work on own and simultaneous projects
- Eventually my have up to 9 people using it on a regular basis
- Have a system that multiple people can see and make changes to as the project evolves
- Manager has access to see what items are on track or overdue
- Individuals be able to see all projects they are on and at a glance see what needs to be completed that day (a task list perhaps)
- Receive email notices to let individuals know that they have something due coming up or if something is pass due on a project they are heading up
- Track costs of resources and overlap of resources on different projects
Are these things that can be handled and what is most cost efficient? Each individual has it on their desktop with something like drop box keeping the files for people to open or is there a server or web cloud type application that is more cost effective for our size company.