[ajrichardson]

Personally I don't typically have more than 1-2 projects going simultaneously and they can span anywhere from 4 weeks to about 4 months and have 3-5 resources. The real project managers in our consultancy will have 4-5 projects going, again from about 4 weeks but up to maybe 6 months (though the majority are shorter), and have up to perhaps 20 resources. Smaller projects have as few as 20 tasks (I prefer to call them activities, less top-down feeling) while larger ones could be 2-3x that. But our business is very fluid (design consultancy) and each person is pretty autonomous and the work is non-routine, so doing micro schedules is not very worthwhile. So activities tend to cover pretty broad chunks of work with distinct milestones and deliverables at the end.

I think Omni Group needs to decide what it wants to take on as a first step with this app: competing with MS Project at running the building of the Boeing Dreamliner, or if it wants to tackle the myriad of projects that are far, far smaller. Personally I think there's a huge opportunity there, as something like 37 Signals Basecamp has shown in its domain. (I read somewhere that this is there focus, but it could perhaps be more explicit, help set expectations more.) The needs are much simpler, and in many cases even things like interoperability with MS Project are not that critical which would be deal breakers in much larger organizations. The tools and capabilities required for running a 2-4 month project with a handful-size team are easier to wrangle than for a 1-2 year project with hundreds of people working on it.

We can see already from the broad variety of responses to the Beta that there are very divergent needs for a project planning app, as there are a very wide variety of project types. It can quickly turn into a slippery slope of feature creep, which is how MS Project ended up where it is. I'd prefer to see something lean and mean at first, even if it means not satisfying the needs of the customers with the biggest projects if it risks alienating those with simpler needs (as MSP does). Personally I want something that will save me from having to hack this together in Excel or Graffle, and be quick and fluid and not make me put in too much detail which I'll just spend valuable time constantly changing.

My .02c

Adam