Achieve +MindManager + OneNote
For years I've been looking for the Holy Grail of project management tools only to discover lately that it doesn't exist.... although Achieve looks like it may come close. The reason why there is no one tool suited to all projects is because the scope and size of projects varies so widely. Kewms has effectively said so in these forums and in a recent re-reading of Getting Things Done I find that David Allen says the same thing, although this simple fact apparently eluded me during earlier readings.
I purchased MS-Project along with my very first Windows-compatible computer and upgraded Project two or three times and tinkered around with it but have yet to use it for managing a single project, and for precisely the same reason David Allen says it's not suited for nearly all of the projects that most of us do most of the time: The overhead of maintaining the system is just too high. There are, of course, projects where MS Project is the appropriate tool but, as Allen points out, those who need it already use it.
For the other projects, I've finally concluded, I need a collection of tools at my disposal so that I can select the right assortment of tools for each particular project. The simpler ones can he handled readily in the task lists in Outlook, and simpler is almost always better. But Outlook task lists are not sufficient for organizing and tracking the multiple tasks and schedules of the larger, longer, more important, higher-value projects, or for organizing the information and ambiguity and complexity that is inherent in those projects. Those kinds of projects need more sophisticated toolsets. (The only time I've suffered Mac envy was due to the Project Center in Entourage. I was deeply disappointed when I learned Microsoft didn't intend to add similar functionality to Outlook 2007, since it seemed like such an obvious thing to include. My thinking has changed. The bigger, multi-dimensional, higher-value projects I wrestle with have more complexity than even an Entourage-like Project Center would likely handle.)
Since Outlook has my e-mail client, calendar, contact list and task lists, I've concluded that whichever tools I use to organize and track and monitor projects outside of Outlook must be capable of funneling tasks and schedules into Outlook. From what I can see, it looks like Achieve can do this quite well.
There are two other tools—in my tool set—which I find quite useful to deploy for the bigger projects, and they integrate well with Outlook. MindManager, because it can build a three-dimensional hierarchy of information and is such an intuitive and fluid environment to work in, is a wonderful tool for dealing with a lot of complexity. It can export individual tasks to Outlook. MindManager can also export to Project, but there’s a much simpler add-in which synchronizes with MindManager and can track timelines and costs. I sometimes use it to get a rough idea of how long a given project might take, and later perhaps to monitor the project that’s on my plate right now. (There’s another insight that others have written about in these forums. You can’t really DO more than one of these large projects at one time. You can be thinking about and planning for a few or several of them concurrently, but when it comes time for the doing, it’s more efficient and effective to do them sequentially.)
I've had OneNote since the beta version of the initial release but until now have mis-used it as just another collection black-hole holding a mish-mash of stuff. Now, I'm starting to use it for organizing project-specific notes and information. It can export tasks [next actions] to Outlook on the fly and this can be useful for the off-line but project-related kinds of tasks which tend to crop up. And I can link from MindManager to specific pages in Outlook.
What these tools lack is good scheduling-calendaring functionality. It appears that Achieve can do this quite well, and synchronize the project-specific schedules with the Outlook calendar. Furthermore, Achieve looks like a good tool for those projects that require a bit more up-front planning and information gathering than Outlook tasks lists lend themselves to but don’t have the scope and size of the larger projects, which require significant amounts of time and resources to complete. I can’t imagine trading the combination of MindManager and OneNote--for the kinds of projects with enough complexity where those tools are especially appropriate--for Achieve. Nor can I imagine having my total inventory of projects scattered among different applications. So, Moises, I’m curious. Do you happen to know if tasks can be imported directly from MindManager to Achieve? And is it possible to link next actions in Achieve to OneNote pages?
