"Management can be defined as all the activities and tasks undertaken for the purpose of planning and controlling the activities of others in order to achieve an objective or complete an activity that could not be achieved by the others acting independently" [1]. Management further means to coordinate many requests, tasks, and products to achieve a desired goal. In this respect, project management and change management are very similar, and project management almost always includes change management.
It is not easy to keep track of the many work packages and requests that come up in the course of a project. Any project leader that has tried to keep a project plan current has experienced that this is comparable to getting a good grip on a slippery piece of wet soap. The work breakdown structure might change over time, efforts are estimated far off from the amount of work they actually require, and people don't always tell project management when they have completed a task or are behind.
In project and change management, it has been proven useful to keep a list with all known activities (work packages, action items, change requests, change orders, etc.). Managing such a list of issues and managing a project with all its changes go to a large part hand in hand.
There are quite a number of tools out there for project planning and change or problem management. However, most tools are either tools for project planning or change or problem management. The change management tools oftentimes focus on software changes and do not adequately address the problems associated with other engineered systems. A good overview on free and commercially supported change management tools can be found in Dave Eatons site.
Some of the change management tools impose a rather over-engineered process on a project, trying to eliminate as many possibilities for making errors as possible. It is our experience that it is most of the time much more effective to live with a sporadic error than to have fool proof tools. If tools get in the way of people they won't use it.
The Track+ system is designed to support project management, change and problem management. In particular,
it should be simple to use and simple to administer
it is part of the email system
it can be made part of the regular information workflow
it reduces workload off a project manager since people can manage their work packages independently
it allows for accurate tracking of project and change states
it can be customized to any reasonable process
The Track+ system delivers a great deal of functionality required to reach CMM and SECM process maturity levels 2 and 3 [3].
The Track+ system doesn't require any client installation and can be used via a standard HTML browser. Users can register themselves if they have a valid email account. Thereby user administration is kept to a minimum.
The Track+ systems works with many different database systems. The preferred and most tested once are Interbase, Firebird and MySQL. Others such as Postgres, Oracle 8, Sybase, and MS SQL Server should work as well.