The Odessa Tools Collection — An Overview

A Software Comparison/Review – February 2008     By Harry {doc} Babad           © 2008

 

Introduction

When asked by Alexander Tyagulsky of Computer Systems [CS] whether I wanted to review, not the individual software produced by his firm, but the set (not billed as a suite) in its entirely, I hesitated a bit before accepting. The products, which are variants of project management, mind mapping and visual outlining tools includes three applications, which I briefly describe below. My initial concern was that the staff of macCompanion had already very favorably reviewed two of the three individual products.

 

So after a bit of email dialog, I accepted the review task thinking that it would sever to check several aspects of this three-product collection.

• What target audience is the best suited to each of these products. They are This was important because the “user of focus” is not specifically covered on the CS Odessa website, not or side-by-side comparisons between their features provided.

• Since the three software packages were approximately the same price, and some were available as both Pro and Standard versions. In both working with them and reading about their features, they seemed to overlap in function. Therefore I wondered whether there were advantages to owning more than one product.

In my summaries of these products, initially one at a time, I’ve done two things. First, I’ve paraphrased (abstracted or modified) the publisher’s product descriptions to be a bit less press release oriented.

 

Second, I in a summary fashion evaluated these individual products based on an overall assessment of the capabilities of the Odessa tool themselves, rather than redoing three detailed in depth reviews. My remarks are based on both my own experiences and the macC reviews of two of these three products. The specifications for these individual products are tabulated at the end of this article.

 

Finally at the end of this review, I assess:

• What target audience is the best suited to each of these products?
• Were there were advantages to owning more than one product despite the only modest reduction in price for purchasing a second product?
• Last but not least, I share a potential use of the three tool sets provide by Alexander Tyagulsky of Odessa; an analysis which I fully agree.

My thoughts about these questions are detailed in the summary section of this review. Be that as it may be — all three of these products are excellent choices for both a beginning or advanced user of mindmapping, project management and a more general concept diagramming software. In some ways these products are comparable to Omni Group’s OmniGraffle and OmniPlan http://www.omnigroup.com or Mindjet’s MindManager http://www.mindjet.com/us/products/mindmanager_7_mac/?s=6 Which I’ve previously reviewed for macC. Perhaps the Omni Group’s tools will be topics of future individual reviews. For the present, the capability to integrate the outputs of the three Odessa tools with each other and with other visualization and project applications makes these tools well worth trying.

 

The Tools Themselves

ConceptDraw Project 4.1

According to Wikipedia, “Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources (e.g. people) in a way that the project is completed within defined scope, quality, time and cost constraints. A project is a temporary and one-time endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service, which brings about beneficial change or added value.

 

“This property of being a temporary and one-time undertaking contrasts with processes, or operations, which are permanent or semi-permanent ongoing functional work to create the same product or service over and over again. The management of these two systems is often very different and requires varying technical skills and philosophy, hence requiring the development of project managements.

 

“The first challenge of project management is to make sure that a project is delivered within defined constraints. The second, more ambitious challenge is the optimized allocation and integration of inputs needed to meet pre-defined objectives. A project is a carefully defined set of activities that use resources (money, people, materials, energy, space, provisions (logistics), communication, etc.) to meet the pre-defined objectives.” Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Management

 

Back to ConceptDraw Project — ConceptDraw Project 4 project management software is designed to efficiently plan and track a number of projects simultaneously and to accurately allocate and manage any identified resource used in any and all of the projects being managed. Project 4 represents project data in a clear visual manner, displaying a color-coded representation of resource usage; as well as highlighting any possible areas of resource misalignment for easy identification. An easily accessible and convenient tabular project interface provides quick navigation between projects. Across your projects, a variety of different status views, make it easier to manage each individual project. For senior management purposes, these views can serve the same functions across all the projects in the manager’s portfolio. ConceptDraw Project 4 appears to be effective tool for both beginner and experienced users.

 

Doc notes that although he has been part of many projects in large corporate environment, he has only personally organized and dealt with small projects at church, community group or professional society associations.

 

Odessa has designed ConceptDraw Project [CDP] as a visual means to organize and manage projects with clear, easy to read and follow industry standard Gantt, WBS (work breakdown structure) charts and Mindmaps. It allows you to share your projects across Mac and Windows platforms. ConceptDraw Project lets you monitor tasks and resources in a project, using an easy to create and understand visual interface, quickly and easily. It is, based on my assessments, a comprehensive and powerful tool for project planning and resource management.

 

A Generic Gantt Chart and WBS	ConceptDraw Mindmapping Principal

 

The developer notes that, as described above, project management is a complicated process of planning, organizing and controlling tasks and resources aimed at achieving a definite goal. Usually in real life, such projects are also by their nature usually limited in available time, resources or funding; there’s never enough of these. Where ever a pinch point in a real project occurs, milestones a missed, costs go up and proverbial hell breaks loose for both a projects’ management and the clients oversight team.

 

"Any technical problem can be overcome given enough time and money" - states Lerman's Law of Technology. The corollary adds, "You are never given enough time or money.” Lerman’s Law is not Listed in Wikipedia

 

The CDP software lets you determine all essential elements involved into project, control resources and funds, and monitor projects progress in an easy to learn and use way. CDP documents and methodology allows you to track execution phases, take stock of resources and financial status, and create reports reflecting the state of affairs in a project.

CDP’s functionality helps you to:

• Define project goals
• Subdivide the project as a set of manageable tasks
• Assign appropriate and necessary resources
• Identify and build a appropriate team or teams to perform the project work
• Plan the work and allocate the resources to the tasks and team members
• Monitor and control the execution of you diagrammed projects
• Follow the progress of project performance with comprehensive reports
• Input corrective actions to update you project analyses

Previously Reviewed: ConceptDraw Project 3 version 3.4: A Professional Proactive Project Management Tool. Reviewed by Robert Pritchett. MacC September 2007 [4.5 macC rating.]

http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/September2007/Software/Project3.htm

ConceptDraw MINDMAP 5.2.2 [CDM]

 

According to Wikipedia “A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word idea or goal. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in the study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and in writing.”

 

“It is an image-centered diagram that represents semantic or other connections between portions of information. By presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, it encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an intrinsically appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within.

 

A mind map is similar to a semantic network or cognitive map but there are no formal (methodology imposed) restrictions on the kinds of links used.’

 

The elements are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts and they are organized into groupings, branches, or areas. The uniform graphic formulation of the semantic structure of information on the method of gathering knowledge, may aid recall of existing memories.”

 

In my analyses and testing I found ConceptDraw MINDMAP [CDMP] is a tool for personal and small group brainstorming, mind mapping and visual thinking. [Now I’ve checked Google and as far as I can tell these are all synonyms for an overlapping concept. Using images and relationship arrows to connect concepts or tasks. But a “Rose by any other name…” Although not so defined, the developers web site implies that this product is aimed more at individuals and smaller groups than for larger project management tasks.

 

Mindmapping tools serve as your personal logic board or recorder when discussing ideas and their relationship to each other. Such products support making decisions by cleanly illustrating their supporting concepts. They also enhance the projects planning process by graphically documenting your ideas.

 

CDMP enables you to present information in a simple, visual way by building trees of ideas or Mind Maps. The software to organize brainstorming sessions, take notes, plan your work and then make presentations to your colleagues presenting your ideas. In particular, the brainstorm mode helps you generate ideas and then discuss them in a group by combining the software visual out put and your own persuasive narrations. You were hit on the head when a wee person with a bit of the blarney stone, weren’t you?

 

When session is complete use Map view to discuss, edit, develop, remove or organize your ideas, again merging images and textual content.

 

Areas where this tool can support capturing and visualizing you thoughts include: Front-end project planning for your church and non-profit group or in a small business environment. It is especially powerful for capturing and distinguishing between concept alternatives. Use it for supporting business presentations and illustrating your ideas in the documentation you produce be it a report, pamphlet, a book or an article for external publication.

 

ConceptDraw 7.5

ConceptDraw is designed, according to its publisher, for professional flowcharting, diagramming and illustrating. Its flexible, handy tools help business and technical users quickly document complex structures, systems and processes. ConceptDraw 7 charts can be shared as a variety of graphics files and CAD documents, printed pages, presentations and web pages. Owing to the advanced libraries of pre-drawn shapes, ConceptDraw 7 is valuable tool for most of the charting tasks including business, IT, project, UML (Unified Modeling Diagrams, and network diagrams.

 

A built-in scripting language allows using ConceptDraw 7 to build enterprise-level visualization solutions so all users can be working to the same information (e.g., scrip or perhaps template). Especially useful is the products ability to visualize/display resource usage (people and critical tools), as well as the relationship between elements of your “concept map or maps”.

 

The product contains powerful vector drawing tools, graphics libraries with hundreds of pre-drawn shapes, built-in scripting language support, support the import and export of many file formats to assure exchange of information beyond Odessa software users.

 

Previously Reviewed: ConceptDraw 7.0.3 Professional, Reviewed by Robert Pritchett July 2007. http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/July2007/Software/ConceptDraw%207%20Professional.htm

 

Comparisons and Target User Audiences

You do remember my questions?

• What target audience is the best suited to each of these products?
• Were there were advantages to owning more than one product despite the only modest reduction in price for purchasing a second product?

Product [1]	Beginner User	Advanced Users
CD Project	Perhaps [2]	Pro
CD MindMap [3]	Standard	Partially Contained in ConceptDraw
ConceptDraw [CD]	Perhaps [4]	Pro
[1] Odessa bundles it software as a business suite [2]There are enough tools in ConceptDraw that for casual project management efforts, this product might suffice a casual user. However CD Project is definite preferred for use by users who have recurrent, even is simple, project management needs. [3] If the difference in cost is not a barrier, I recommend ConceptDraw over CD MindMap, because of its richer feature set. However Mindmapping capabilities are more limited and les intuitive in CD. [4] According to the developer, ConceptDraw 7 could not entirely substitute ConceptDraw MINDMAP. One can certainly draw a mind map in CD 7 but it takes much more time then accomplish the same task with CDM 5. Particularly, when it comes to business tasks time is essential.

Summary Product Specifications

CS Odessa LLC        http://www.conceptdraw.com [See Notes: 1-4]
Tool	Requirements
ConceptDraw Project 4.1 [Serious visually oriented project management tools]	Mac OS X version 10.4.0 or higher; Processor G3 (minimum) G4 for Leopard; 512 Mb of RAM; 20 Mb of hard drive space available. Cost — MRP $200 USD. PC Version Available.
ConceptDraw MINDMAP Standard & Pro 5.2.2 [Mindmapping and Support for Brainstorming]	OS: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger CPU: G4 or higher), Core Duo 1,6 GHz or higher. RAM: 512 Mb, HDD: 150 Mb. Cost — Available in either a personal [MRP $119 USD] or a richer feature Pro edition [MRP $200 USD]. PC Versions Available.
ConceptDraw Pro 7.5 - [Business Graphics, Diagramming and Mindmapping]	OS: Mac OS X (Leopard/Tiger) CPU: G3 or higher, G4 for Tiger; RAM: 256 Mb; HDD: 500 MB. Cost — MRP $249 USD]. PC Versions Available.
GENERAL NOTES: [1] A comparison of ConceptDraw MindMap Standard and Pro product features can be found at http://conceptdraw.com/en/products/mindmap/provsstd.php [2] All the Odessa products can export to MS Office including the Windows version of Project. [3] All the Odessa products have good to excellent built-in drawing tools and provide rich libraries of symbols. [4] Street prices for these products varied so greatly, as did the version being sold, that I could not in good faith define a street price I trusted. However the academic prices from Odessa are 50% of the MRP.]

A Corporate Use Example

Consider a manager in large project oriented organization. He's got new project to develop and wants to complete it in time and within budget. First he will need to prepare a brief task outline with approximate durations for each task. This document serves as a framework for further planning. The best tool to use for that task is ConceptDraw MINDMAP. It can also serve to capture possible alternative tasks/routes and has a memories function to capture non-mindmap items for future consideration.

 

The project engineer, using brainstorming techniques, gathers all major tasks required to define the project. Then in a mind map mode divide these broad tasks into smaller manageable subtasks. In the process, the engineer adds visual information about the importance, priority and duration of each subtask. As a result of this mapping activity he has developed a top-level draft project-planning document.

 

During the second sage of the panning work, the design engineer opens that document in ConceptDraw Project and transforms the individual mapped items into a detailed project-planning format including a work breakdown structure. This includes defining task dependencies, milestones and resource requirements and assignments. Later during he project’s implementation, this more detailed information is used on every day basis to manage project progress.

 

In parallel to the detailed planning activity, the project manager creates visual project documentation presentation to company executives or stakeholders in form of various simple charts. Such audiences don't usually want to see large and detailed Gantt Charts, schematic or interface diagrams. Such visual project overview reports can be produced with ConceptDraw 7.5.

 

Through all stages of project development and implementation, the Odessa tools can be used to capture and visualize the detailed project activities and tracking tools:

 

ConceptDraw Project is primary used for managing tasks and people assignments.

 

ConceptDraw MINDMAP at problem solving brainstorming session, complex topics analysis, decision making process, information management.

 

ConceptDraw 7 is used mainly used for preparing flow charts, org charts, WBS, UML and other visual documentation depending on project type.

 

Try these tools out, the demos are fully functional. You’ll like them; I did.