But what may be the advantage of DeltaProd over another product of Project Management?

That is what I will try to clarify here, comparing DeltaProd to other products I know.
I will try to be as impartial as possible in remaining factual.

If you find bugs in my comparative or do want a comparison against a given product, do not hesitate to let me know in forum .
I will try to satisfy your expectations as soon as possible.


Mantis

Mantis is a very popular Bug Tracker, and seems mandatory to any project management to follow-up anomalies.

Benefits
  • It is the Bug Tracker reference.
  • It is very popular.
  • He is quick to install and take control of.
  • It is 100% Web.
  • Search features are very comprehensive.
  • The display of status by colour is very interesting, and I find it fun.
  • It can manage the sequence of status in a workflow way.
  • Comments management is well designed.
Disadvantages
  • It is just a Bug Tracker.
  • It is not appropriate to manage a development project.
  • It does not support the workload follow-up. You must get a complementary tool for tracking workload and planning.
  • There is no link with configuration management.
  • Refreshing between updates is a little slow.
  • The configuration is heavy, through files, and you quickly get lost in configurations not taken into account because of integrity not met.


Ms-Project

MS-Project is a planning tool. This is the reference of the planning for professionals.

Benefits
  • It is very widespread, and often recommended by customers.
  • The interface is complete and delivers personalized statements.
  • With Project Web Access, it proposes a web GUI making it collaborative.
  • Displays and reports are very numerous, varied and customizable.
Disadvantages
  • The price of the license is high.
  • By default, it is not collaborative.
  • If you want to use the web interface Project Web Access, we need to buy a Server license.
  • Some bugs, especially in planning, are troublesome.
  • Planning is not suited to IS projects. The planning lead by workload his not his reference ... and it is the basic principle of an IS project. I never managed to have it properly planning tasks assigned to several resources ...
  • This is a planning tool, make it impossible to follow a support or maintenance activity, track customer requests, or manage the configuration. The description of the task is very limited and difficult to retrieve.


Open Workbench

Open Workbench is a planning tool. It is the proud heir of Project Management Workbench (PMW), I have used much before MS-Project. My preference goes to Open Workbench rather than MS-Project.

Benefits
  • It's free.
  • Planning is reliable and suitable for IS projects.
Disadvantages
  • The interface is not easy to understand, and in any case is less flexible than that of MS-Project.
  • By default, it is not collaborative.
  • As
  • MS-Project is a planning tool, with the same disadvantages.


CVS or SVN

CVS and SVN are versioning tools.
They are essential tools for collaborative management of the sources of an application. Beware, the implementation of these tools does not exempt the establishment of a configuration management fitted to the project, in which they will integrate.

Benefits
  • Totally inevitable !
Disadvantages
  • They are not really project management tools.


Excel

Excel is more than a simple spreadsheet, it is the indispensable tool for the leader. Provided you know how to use it, and know a bit of VBA, you can make get great things out of it.
I use if to show the data from DeltaProd: nothing better than a beautiful dashboard or graphic to seduce a client.
But be careful, it must not be the only tool of project management, as I too often see. It has its limits ...

Benefits
  • It can present data in a very advantageous way.
  • It is almost inevitable on a workstation, and very simple to implement.
Disadvantages
  • It is not collaborative.
  • You must know how to program in VBA to get its best.
  • Do not ask too much, it can not do everything. For a project with more than 4-5 people, you must find better, otherwise the project leader will use all his time to update it.



DeltaProd


Benefits
  • It's free.
  • It is collaborative.
  • It integrates the functionality that you usually must fetch in several tools: Bug Tracker, workload follow-up, planning, monitoring client requests, monitoring deliveries, configuration management, monitoring dashboards.
  • The GUI is quick and simple to ease its use on a daily basis.
  • You easily find links between different managed elements, and you can easily switch from one to another.
  • It is fully customizable, to adapt to any type of project.
Disadvantages
  • It is not very widespread.
  • It requires some adaptation phase for the setup.
  • It does not handle the financial monitoring of the project.
  • It does not have a Web interface for creating customer requests ... for the moment ... (see IMH Web )