This article is about implementing Project Management Software in the company I work for. If you are Project Manager or you are responsible for business development and you like improvements, this article is exactly for you.

 1. About the article

 Most of the company owners dont like paying for implementing new things which dont bring direct profit to their pocket. Usualy they dont see the company growth because they are not comming to the office every day and they dont care about every day problems. I am the person who came to the company for HelpDesk position when the company was hiring 10 people. The owner was the only manager in the company. Every day there were milion of new ideas and new projects. I was in the middle of this becasue I was the only IT person in the company. Then I got promotion on IT Administrator. I build the whole IT infrastructure of the company and got new responsibility: IT Project Manager. I was managing 6 programmers at the begining without any methodology...propably you ask "why you didnt do it properly from the begining". My answer is " becasue there were no need for that " Projects was small and usualy there were 1 programmer assinged to each...After some time I got promotion to General Director of the company. When it happened the company was hiring like 200 people. It was easy to manage all the processes of the business because I was there for 2 years and I simply knew them. Then owners was not managing directly people but I was getting hundreds of mails every day "how is this, how is that, who responsible, it is mess, etc etc" I was loosing half of the day answering thise mails. The answers for thise questions was super obvious to me but I had to also encourage onwers that it all goes good ( sales were doubled with same staff byt anyway...u know owners, they want more and more and they dont trust you ;) ) The truth is that some of the Projects grew and I felt the need to set up proper project management in the company supported by some method. This article describes my way to get it done...actualy it is big project to implement such methodology, install tools, train people and make it routine...

2. Choosing tools

 There are many tools for Project Management but most of them are too complicated, the other part is not user friendly or too expensive. First step is to collect all the conditions which need to be fulfiled and in my case it is like follows:

- the software must be accessible through internet
- there must be possibility to set proper roles with access to defined items
- there must be projects, tasks, sharing files with version system, calendar, gant chart, forum per project, time tracking,
- every task must be assigned to human resources who are responsible for the task
- every project and task should have its actual status and % done
- email notifications to the project/task contacts

I reviewed few tools which you can find here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_project_management_software

and I am sure the best is dotProject which is Open Source software. The software satisfy all my requirements and even more. It also has nice help and tutorials in the internet ( take a look at YouTube too ). The software works in product enviroment in many companies in the world.

Very important thing is that dotProject is PHP + MySQL which is easy to be implemented and dont need a lot of resources. Everyone can add own modules. It is realy flexible tool which fits to every Project mamagement methodology.

If you like Java + Oracle environment you can take a look at project.net.