Project Management with OpenAtrium

With the increasing of work in progress on our plate, we have to deal with more contractor to do part or the work. Usually the contractor work on completion task that already done by our team.

With the growing list of contractor, we have to deliver each new task without too much emailing and everyone can see those task for their reference. I want something robust, simple and easy to install in our web server.

We choose OpenAtrium, a Drupal based intranet application. OpenAtrium is not specifically for project management, but the OpenAtrium workflow can be adopted into a project management software. Here’s how I am using OpenAtrium as project management with the team.

Each team has it’s own group. This gives me a free control of each member within the groups.

In the groups we use the case tracker module to create project discussions, revisions and task. Each project has it’s own project description, project manager write the task and everyone job description in the projects. We are using case tracker for tracking revisions, additional request by clients and task reporting. With the notification system, everyone are aware of the project progress.

The other module that are important to Project Management is Document and Calendar module. We used Document module for write a how to or clients informations. Calendar module is to mark project deadlines.

The other modules, such as Blog and Shoutbox, is for sharing and communicating. It’s not a core module of project management, but it’s pretty useful for sharing contents between team members.

For us, OpenAtrium is a great web application for project management. More room can be improved to make it better. Currently there are no RSS feed for each group alternative notification system. The dashboard need user interaction improvement, sometimes I get lost track of conversation in tracker, because if I visit a link from dashboard it will displayed the single tracker not the whole conversation. As a Drupal based application, OpenAtrium doesn’t have rich text editor. For tech savvy users who is familiar with Markdown syntax is not a big problem, but for average user a rich text editor is a mandatory, although it can be additionally installed.

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