Project KickStart claims that it can have you developing your project in 30 minutes or less. Unlike the other PM programs mentioned in these documents, KickStart is really a project organizer. Its sole purpose is to help you get your ideas down on paper.... er, into the Palmtop. There are no fancy frills to this program: it simply works.
As the opening screen shows, the F10 function key is the "move ahead" key throughout the entire program. This can be disconcerting, at first, until you get used to pressing F10 instead of the usual Enter key. The KickStart program contains a small on-screen tutorial which is available the first time you run the program.
The main menu presents several choices. The first few all do the same thing: let you organize your ideas about a project. After you've named your project, you can choose to break the project into phases. Within the phases you can key in the sub-tasks, as is shown below.
If you've done projects similar to the current one you can use previous KickStart files as the basis for this one or you can start from scratch. If you're a goal-oriented person, you can organize your tasks around the goals for the project. The following screen shot shows the start of this process.
On the other hand, if you're a firm believer in Murphy's Law, you can even use KickStart to try and beat Murphy at his own game by organizing your project with the "Develop tasks by anticipating obstacles" choice from the Main Menu.
Sure, KickStart will let you print reports of your work either to the screen, to a disk file or to a printer. I didn't test the printing capability of the program on my Palmtop since I don't have a serial to parallel adapter. However I was able to save the reports to several disk files and transfer those files to my desktop. Since the reports are straight ASCII text files, they can be imported into all word processors for further formatting and printing.
One of the more interesting features of Project KickStart is its ability to transfer files to other PM programs, namely:
Of the programs listed above, I had ProTracs and Primavera available for testing. ProTracs is a DOS program that runs on the Palmtop. Primavera is a Windows program for power project planners.
KickStart was able to export the subtasks I had entered to a directory that contained the ProTracs files and then automatically started the ProTracs program.
Project KickStart is available from:
EXPERIENCE IN SOFTWARE, INC. 2000 Hearst Avenue, Suite 202 Berkeley, CA, 94709-2176 Fax: 510-644-3823, Phones: 800-678-7008, 510-644-0694
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