Starting a project in any organisation can become a life-changing experience or a nightmare. With the right tools and good practices, you enhance your chances of painless success.

Simply Project Office, built by UK-based Mundane Software, takes an original approach to online project management: there are not tasks, no schedules and no Gantt charts. Instead, you have Programs, Masters, Change Control, Risks, Faults, and Quality Management.

Built as a set of tools to help managers achieve successful project completion, Simply Project Office offers a surprisingly complete range of options and parameters, tucked behind a simple, fast and non-intimidating user interface. The creators of Simply Project Office concentrated on offering flexibility and stability before fancy graphics that distract the user from the actual information displayed on screen.

In Simply Project Office, you first create Programmes, which contain Projects. These projects are managed not from a time-based focus, but a success-based one. This means users and managers identify actions, risks, issues and the like, then come up with a plan to ensure the successful completion of the project. This type of project management angle is especially useful for when politics – be it budgeting or human resources - is a factor to be taken into account.

We especially liked user access rights management, the customizability of the system, and its seamless administration interface.

In Simply Project Office, user management is comprehensive and detailed, yet quick and easy. Users are created quickly through a simple, one-page form, then assigned access rights based on all the parameters available in the system, through a checkbox-based list. We were surprised to see that all functions could be assigned individually to each user, hence no need to create groups. Even though Simply Project Office is a comprehensive system, checking the proper boxes only takes a minute!

Customizing Simply Project Office to your company colors and terminology is just as quick and easy. Administrators have full control over the text display of each button and form option available in the system. Moreover, each user can set his or her color scheme.

Since administration rights are set on a user-by-user, function-by-function basis, whenever someone has access to administration or management pages, they simply appear in the menus.

Overall, Simply Project Office is a highly adaptable system that is perfect for qualitative projects where timelines and statistics do not portray the reality and the challenge encountered.

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