Magic Projects

"Great tool that helped me manage teams of 15-20 people who were working on multi platform projects."

Pros: One of the assets of Magic Project is its task flow management. When initially creating a task, the project manager can set up the complete task flow, from design to implementation and tests. Each person contributing to the task can add comments and files in order to document his part. Once a team member has completed his part, the task is automatically assigned to the next member listed in the flow chart. There is no need for project managers to carry information from one person to another. This helps making the team both more autonomous and more collaborative. Another great thing about this tool is that it centralises a lot of information that is necessary for proper project management: tasks, schedules, expenses and budgets. There is no need to manually report the schedule to a dedicated budgets tracking spreadsheet in order to assess the budget, as the tool uses all information available to properly calculate expenses and forecast budgets. Man month cost, task history and forecast for each team member, external expenses, all this information (and more) is used and helps managers to run projects. Customer support is great, suggestions are always welcome and new features can be proposed. I have suggested some functionalities myself, and have seen the tool evolve over the years. In the end, Magic Project gathers a lot information that makes the team members more autonomous, and gives the projects managers a better view of the project's progress.

Cons: Newcomers need a bit of adaptation time before they fully understand the tool and feel comfortable with it. Indeed they'll have to use it daily to open and close tasks, and the system relies on their ability to self-report their activity. Some parts of the UI can be confusing and people can make mistakes when using the tool. Making sure everyone is using it properly is necessary in the beginning, and can be an annoyance for some newcomers. However they usually get used to using Magic Projects after a week or so.

"Successful experience on several projects of 15 - 35 people"

Pros: - Easy task creation process including (but not limited to) fields for the name of the project, a description, a number-based priority system, and a list of steps. - Steps are a good way to divide a task into smaller bits and can be individually assigned to different members, with an estimate length, and can be tagged. - Tags allow the project manager to track a specific kind of step, and get many information including the amount of steps remaining to do, the average estimation, and the actual time spent on average, which allows the PM to adjust according to the result. - Custom steps layout with a visual tool - to change the dependencies between steps. - Friendly drag and drop system onto "Todo" and "On Going" to track on-going tasks for daily users, and tracking of time spent on a task. - A comment section and an uploaded document section per task, to allow discussion between users. - Automatic calendar generated from each steps and priorities - which allows the PM to exactly know when a task starts and ends. - Amount of workload per person in a board - which allows the PM to balance if needed. - Tracking of finished steps via a chosen time frame - which allows the PM to create activity report from it. - Observer system to receive in-page or emails updates about a task. - Tracking of costs. - Tracking of holidays. - Accessible customer support / friendly creator willing to discuss and improve this tool.

Cons: - Even thought you can change the colors of the layout, the overall design could be prettier. - Could benefit from an alternative priority system (ASAP / Wishlist / Due date), as a number-based system tends to be difficult to maintain. - Lots of functionalities, it takes time to find and master them all !