I am now also using a combination of MSP and Excel, even though I am not very happy with it. Let me give you an example: right now we need to ensure that 65 documents delivered by 20 different people will be ready for submission to the project review board by a specific date. Some of these documents will go through a review and be revised afterwards, some are dependent on each other. I want to schedule those in the classic” way, with separate tasks for creating, review, revision, and with milestones and dependencies. But some just take 30 minute to review and update. But all are important for the review, if any of them is not OK then we don’t pass. I don’t want to clutter my schedule with these minor things, if I could put them in the notes I could track both in one tool.
I agree that people will always track their tasks with Excel, but with _several_ Excel sheets, so the central scheduler does not have an overview of those.
My solution because I cannot use the Notes field: I have a “slim” schedule, plus a redundant Excel with all the details.
Btw: I see light at the end of the tunnel: my company will be rolling out a sw development tool called JIRA, which supports the management of action items in a very “democratic” way, which means users can add their own action items, delegate ai, split them, etc. And JIRA can be connected with MSP. This might be the solution: the central scheduler creates a high-level MSP task, sends it to JIRA where it can be broken down to more details. This serves both purposes: central overview, plus decentral action item management.
