Best named product

Merlin is a superb name for this Microsoft Project compatible — yet so much better — product. Imagine taking the core features most often relied upon in project management; then, wrap it up in a gorgeous, intuitive user interface. Provide integration to other excellent applications such as NovaMind, so that you can visualize your project as a mind map. You’ll end up with a truly useful project management tool — one that is superior to many similar products and actually a useful project management tool.

I find waterfall project management techniques very limited and high in overhead — agile techniques that are more tightly integrated with the development iteration tend to be much more accurate (and responsive). Nevertheless, tools such as Merlin make it possible to do projection analysis and lay out long-term goals during the analysis phase of a project. Once analysis moves into design, development-driven tools such as JIRA tend to offer a more tightly integrated, accurate representation of project health.

The differentiator with Merlin is its clean user interface combined with a very complete picture for individual tasks. For example, tasks can have checklists, events, files, issues and risks attached to them, effectively providing a very complete representation of all issues related to the task. Detailed textual descriptions — even complete use cases — can be added to tasks as well. Merlin also provides integration with the OS/X Address and iCal applications for assignment and scheduling. Mainstay features such as task costing, assignment and load balancing and scheduling are all very well supported.

What really sets Merlin apart is its user interface. As with many OS/X applications, user documentation seems almost unnecessary — an hour exploring the application seems almost entirely adequate a tutorial. Immediately noticeable is the high standard applied to the interface and the multiple views Merlin supports into a project, including resource and task centric views, sorting based on any column headings, Gantt as well as Network diagrams and a comprehensive search tool.

ProjectWizards has also shown exceptional care for its user community, adding many user-requested enhancements in a very short time and achieving an excellent reputation for quality software with a quick evolution path. Their choice of a product name reflects the products’ capability and their dedication to fulfilling a rather demanding marketing catch phrase: “Merlin is the model tool for project management for Mac OS X.”