Project Management Made Easy

With over 20 years experience in both the Private and Public sectors, in both small and large commercial companies, we have witnessed project successes and project failures. There have also been many other projects that could have been far more successful had they been better planned.

One of the hurdles to successful planning is the lack of an easy to use, sensibly priced planning tool. There are some Planning Tools on the market, such as Microsoft Project and others, but these tend to be priced out of the practical reach of small / medium size companies or individuals, priced as they are at several hundred pounds per licence.

Their complexities also mean that significant time and money needs to be invested in training, and the completed plan can only be shared with someone else with the same costly tool. Further, in truth, the vast majority of users only use a fraction of their functionality, yet pay for it all. We undertook a detailed "simple project planning software review" and found the choices limited.

These days we tend to all have Microsoft Excel, which is a superb spreadsheet / calculation application. However, there are many websites purporting to offer Excel planning tools, which, on investigation, generally offer no more than a static chart of task activity. With their limited functionality, they offer no real value for project planning.

In response to the above, SmartPlanner was created. A truly dynamic, functional and practical excel Project Planning application. SmartPlanner has been created to run on Excel but it is much more than an excel project plan spreadsheet - it produces dynamic excel project plan graphs. As a consequence of running on excel, it is sensibly priced, it is familiar and it is easy to use.

The finished plan can be shared with and viewed by any colleagues with Excel; they can update progress against the plan and if they too have a licence, they can also dynamically modify the plan.

Planning is the most crucial stage of a project - do you really want to do your project without a plan?