I was surfing the blogosphere and ran across an article about how Project and Portfolio Management strategy (and software) are musts for CIOs in hard times – I would argue that the belt tightening in lean times and the wild-wild-west rules when times are good is all the more reason to invest in PPM tools for the enterprise.

If you need a tool to tell you what you ought to cut out in one economic climate, it stands to reason that this strategy would work all the time.

I’ve never heard someone say, “Wow, I’m glad we wasted all that money while the stock price was good”… – have you?

PPM strategy a CIO’s must-have in hard times

In the series, Finding the right PM software package, I set about trying to find the few ’shining stars’ out of the hundreds of applications that I am aware of. I’m not limiting this search to commercial, off the shelf software or to desktop applications – the sector is getting incredibly large and spans well beyond these bounds.

I had heard good things about GANTTproject (http://www.ganttproject.biz) and decided to download and install the Windows version of the app (v2.0.6). The install was very straightforward and didn’t require me to jump through any hoops. GanttProject is also available for the Linux and MAC OSX. For the Windows version, you do need a version of JRE (Java Runtime Environment) loaded as well as GanttProject. (more…)