PLAN, PLAN & PLAN, any renovation needs clear planning. If watching all the renovation programs and disasters has taught us anything it’s that “failure is not to plan; planning is not to fail” (sorry for the fortune cookie wisdom).

We’ve watched in stunned silence at the way some people have run their renovations, with all the good will in the world and enthusiasm failing to plan has cost people £1000’s or even worse their dream houses.

Project management can be done in many ways of course and using many programs however when it comes to a being Mac user your options initially seem limited. I’m used to using Microsoft Project, it’s extremely powerful, very easy to pickup and of course bloody expensive.

None of that helps me in the Mac user world, and I was starting to worry about not having a Mac version of MS Project.

Let me introduce you to Merlin 2.0
Merlin was super easy for me to get my head around. If Microsoft were to make MS Project for the Mac then surely this would be the outcome of that venture.

The ability to easily input tasks, assign dates to them with critical start and end points and well as very easy task linking ( so you know that item C cannot start until B is complete ) gives you a very clear and quick overview of your critical items on these paths.

Gant charts are a very clean and important way to show you what is happening when and what the impact will be if something clips. The ability to put in critical “End By” dates helps you keep track of your timescales.

A few things I found easier to do in Merlin than in the other packages was assign HOURS to tasks rather than full says or a % of a day. For instance I know the screed in the bathroom should take 3 hours to set and to be able to add “3 Hours” in the time window rather than say 65% of a working day ( normally 8 hours ) was nice. I want to get on with planning – since I’m not Charlie Epps.

Other things that I’m used to that seem overly complex in the other apps I tried was assigning costs to a resource. If I have a plasterer coming in at €150 a day I can put that in the planner again his time and get a report of the estimated or the project maximum costs. Very nice.

Below is a sample snapshot of the Gant chart function that they all do and to be honest this is what I find the most useful function in all these programs.

Fill the items out, see the plan and then print if off in A1/2 or 3 and have it on the wall. This not only focuses me but it also keeps my contractors’ minds on how much time they have set for the work.

Alternatives
By no means is Merlin the only package out there, in fact on the Mac you seems very spoilt for choice and it comes down to personal preference. Merlin is certainly not the cheapest software at $225 out there but I felt it was by far the best of the bunch and while Omniplan was cheaper at $140 but it’s a boxed product that you can’t buy online so as a European user I’m crippled. It appears that I was wrong and have since found a webstore for Omniplan. You can get it HERE

There are also a lot of online programs and my favourite would be Basecamp from the guys at 37Signals, but the total online nature of the program limited the choice since we need to be able to use it offline in the house. If only it used GoogleGears to do some sort of offline mode then we’d switch in a heart beat.

Sharing Plans
As with most of the things we are going to try and do on this renovation we’ll be sharing items with you. We are in the process of creating the relevant plans for the small “tarting up” renovation for March & Aprils and we’ll post those plans online for you to download and examine for yourself.

Links
You can get a trial copy of Merlin HERE