NetPoint

Comentarios: Simplifies interactive planning. Easy to understand by stakeholders for their review and "buy-In" of the plan. Helps focus on critical and near critical path in addition to manage project floats. Great tool to simplify the complex and help upper management in decision making.
Great tool for on the spot "What-If" scenarios. Real time and visual aid on impact on project plan based on changes and progress.

Puntos a favor: Easy to use and very intuitively. Great for interactive planning. Prefer software for upper management to understand critical and near critical path. Help team members to focus on critical activities and manage project floats. Easy to export data to Excel including charts. Easy to update and track changes. I used this software on a daily basis with directors, plant managers and execution leads. I will highly recommend Netpoint to anyone who has to work with planning and scheduling. Customer Support is A+! Fast response and issue resolve within same business day.

Contras: Inserting standards "Clip Arts" like arrows, lines, geometric figures not very intuitive and with no options like in MS Office products. Most cases I use a print screen in PowerPoint/Word for better comments. Resource chart and over limit not always easy to convey and understand.

Comentarios: I have been using project management tools for many years mainly for nuclear power unit maintenance outages which contain tens of thousands of activities manpower intensive and finely timed windows, also the need to get the unit back up safely and back producing power and earning money. High end scheduling tools were used that were very complicated and manpower intensive. But my main issue was how to show the overall project at a high level from a very detailed schedule.
Well I found NetPoint, at last a program that could show an entire complicated project on one screen that was also a scheduling tool and could be resource and cost loaded. It was very intuitive to learn, but what I liked best was I was able to gather our entire project management team and executives in one room and review the schedule from one end to the other, in away that all in the room could follow and understand.
Another great feature was the ability to very quickly do what if's and scenarios if you have ever tried this with a 20,000 activity project with all it's relationships you know how time consuming it is, in my experience management want quick results to these situations.
This is a great companion tool when client specs call for high end software schedules but also for any applications that do not call for a high end software package.
This is a great scheduling tool, I had searched for many years for a package such as NetPoint. Down load the trial version and take a look that is what I did.

Puntos a favor: Ease of use, functionality and presentation in a form all the team can understand

Contras: Not much, for its cost and functionality it meets most of your project management needs.

Comentarios: NetPoint is a vital tool being used to assist multiple offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico in planning projects and POB (Persons On Board). Asset stakeholders are especially drawn to the visual aspects of NetPoint and the ability to see the affects of moving activities on the fly. I have been using this program for over 4 years and I find that it is very user friendly. I was able to learn how to use the program during a 1 hour training session and a week later I presented it to a team that made the decision to use the tool for a 3+ year offshore program.

Puntos a favor: Ease of use & visual aspects

Contras: I don't like that you can't change the histogram. I'd like to be able toggle back and forth from # of hours to # of POB (persons on board). I'd also like to be able to overlap bars with the ability to bring forward and push back.

Comentarios: I've used Netpoint where schedules were needed to be prepared quickly in front of an audience of non-scheduling experts. I have also used Netpoint together with Netrisk to simply a much more complex P6 schedule for the purposes of running a Schedule Risk Analysis.

Puntos a favor: Its an exciting new method of Planning and Scheduling for projects, and Netpoint + NetRisk really does follow the ethos of being a graphical and visual method of preparing schedules

Contras: Often need to be jumping across buttons and menus, and keyboard selection to do this is still quite limited. The formatting of the bars themselves should be more cutomisable.

Comentarios: The best part about this software is that I can lay down schedules of multiple projects on one sheet and see if there are any overlaps between projects. In addition, it is great to make presentations to the board using this tool

Puntos a favor: The best part about the software is the ease of operability and the next best part is you can visualize the schedule which is great for presentations and gives you an overall view of the project

Contras: The things I like least about this software is that while being very user friendly and being great for presentations, it fails to solve the purpose a P6 might be able to solve. It does not allow me to have unique ID codes for activities, tasks etc. though being a great scheduling software it does not provide any cost control features provided by P6