How do I track and display team projects like airports track flights?

Milkman Dan — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:39:02 -0800

You know the arrivals/departures screens that hang out in airports? I want one of those for my team, to help track the status of projects. What software do I need? I'm thinking it would be cool to have a tangible way to keep all team members informed about the status of our projects. My fictitious set-up is this: A monitor in a central location displays ten or so projects. On the screen, we have the following information for each project:
Project # | Project name | Date started | Date due | Status

It will display similarly to the airport monitors: different colours for different statuses, urgent projects on top.

My imagination suggests that with the right software running on a spare computer, hooked up to spare monitor, this should be easy. My question is, what software do I need? Is there any free airport tracking software that can be customized? Is there specific project tracking software that would do this?

We already have all of the data on each project in an Excel file. It includes extra fields that wouldn't be necessary for the display: person in charge, initiating department, project notes, project category, etc. If the software could read from this Excel file, beautiful; if not, manual data entry will work.

Does anybody have any useful contributions? I'm all ears.

Project Tracking Software for Marketing Department

willnot — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 10:17:29 -0800

We're looking for project tracking/resource management software for a small marketing department. What do you use, or what do you know of that's good? Alternately, what might we want to be sure to avoid? We're a mixed environment (Mac/PC) in house creative shop. We've tried MS Project (WAY more than we needed), Excel Spreadsheets (a bit less than we needed), a custom built solution in FileMaker Pro (this also ended up being a little bit more than we needed and was a little too intrusive which led to early abandonment).

I'm looking at Basecamp which looks very interesting to me. Has anybody worked with this at all? Does it have any way to track the number of hours spent on a project? How is archival data handled. Everything I see in the screen shots seems to be focused on keeping people informed while a project is in production.

Is there anything similar or different that we should be looking at?

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How do I track and display team projects like airports track flights?

Project Tracking Software for Marketing Department