Operation
May 31st, 2007 by Noah
Rating: 3/5
General Info: Operation is a simple project management application, allowing you to keep track of all your current projects, people involved in each project, and any related milestones and tasks. It has an intuitive, easy to use, and clean interface. The options are to the point, and could not be simpler to use. Create a new project, team member, milestone or task is as simple as clicking the plus sign at the bottom, and filling in a few fields in a sleek, easy to understand form.
The project overview page has two view options, the ‘Detailed’ view, which shows all tasks, and their related milestones in a graphical maner, or the ‘Standard’ view, which show tasks in a list form. The ‘Team’ and ‘Milestone’ tabs only offer the standard view.
The applications preferences are basic, and barely offer any control over the way the app functions. The only option to change appearance is the Project list size, which offers a small or large option, changing between them offers little change though. The second pane is the ‘Titles’ pane, which allows you to create titles that you can assign to team members. The third option is ‘Lables’, which mimicks the labels pane in the finder preferences. Labels basically allow you to tag a task or milestone by colours, and each colour can represent something, such as urgent. needs attention, and so on. The fourth, and final, preferences pane, is the update pane. So far, I haven’t been able to make the supposed-to-be-easy update function work, so yeah…
Where Operation really lost points is its lack of multi-user project management. Without this feature, it is not true project management, as each member of the project would have to keep and update their own version, which defeats the purpose of organising project information in the first place. The developer could greatly better this app by allowing it to publish project data to an iDisk or FTP server, and allowing users to automatically download this database whenever they open that project.
All in all, Operation makes a decent personal project manager, offering most all of the features you would need to manage a basic project. I would say the best audience for Operation would be freelancers, who generally do not need to interface with many people on a project.
All in all, Operation would make a decent personal project manager, best suited to a freelancer who needs to keep track of his clients.
Retail Price: $29