AN EVALUATION OF MICROCOMPUTER-BASED SOFTWARE PACKAGES FOR PROJECT-MANAGEMENT

A wide variety of commercialized project management software packages for personal computer systems have emerged over the past few years. The objective of this paper is to report on a thorough evaluation of the best known commercially available packages performed by a working group sponsored by the Belgian Building Research Institute. Among the evaluation criteria used are the hardware and software requirements, the type of planning system supported, capacity items in terms of number and type of activities and precedence relations, calculation mode, resource and cost monitoring, diagnostic capability, duplication and merging of different projects, progress reporting, printing and plotting capabilities, file transfer to integrated software packages such as spreadsheet programs and database managers, user learning time and dealer assistance.