General Information
Name: AlchemyWorks
Vendor: AlchemyWorks Ltd
Hosting options: Only web. An android app is also available.
Languages: English is the default language. You can also add terminology in your native language. However, contextual help and system prompts are only available in English.
Cost: Get a 30-day free trial and then plan from $4.99 per month for basic features with document storage.
AlchemyWorks sponsored this article, but all opinions are mine. This article was updated on 13 March 2018 to include additional information about Gantt chart functionality.
This article:
General Information
First Impressions
AlchemyWorks: Creating a Project
Adding Tasks
Templates
Scheduling
Gantt Charts
Risk Management
Collaboration Features
Agile Projects
Reporting
Let’s sum it up…
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First Impressions
AlchemyWorks was the first thing I saw. The dashboard that you saw when you first logged in had a very old-fashioned look.
It turns out you can change the look and feel of your browser. I played around with the style and found one I liked. The mobile browser version feels more modern and “app-like” than the desktop version. However, it is highly configurable so you can change the look and feel to suit your needs.
The AlchemyWorks dashboard. You can customize the appearance of each browser so that you can get all the functionality that you need in a mobile-friendly manner.
Projects are organized in directories. It is easy to create a project. Click New and give it a name. This opens the screen where you’ll spend most time: the project dashboard.
Update the General tab to include information about your project. You must click Update Project before you move to any other tabs. Otherwise, you will lose any changes that you have made.
You can then work through all tabs, adding workers and documents as needed.
The Events tab allows users to add activity they have worked on. This feeds into time used and automatically subtracts time from existing estimates to reduce them. It also accumulates financial information that can be used for the project. The built-in time can be used to track time per activity.
It can look like a list of all activities that have occurred on the project. This can make it appear like an audit trail of who changed what. You can also see the entries in the diary view and on your project timelines to monitor progress.
Adding Tasks
If you are used Gantt-based scheduling, the interface for adding tasks is not intuitive. Adding a task to the tree hierarchy is equivalent to adding a subproject. You can also add sub-projects. The hierarchy of the project can be viewed from the main project tree. You can then drill down to the tasks.
The hierarchy view shows the tasks for a project. However, the Timeline view only works for one “layer” of the project hierarchy at once. You can’t see the entire picture on one screen. Only the rolled-up version. It might not matter much if you do repetitive work such as client installations of widgets (which is the case in the help file). There are other views that provide similar information like diary view.
You should remember that resources can cascade down to new sub-projects but don’t roll up. I added resources to tasks (subprojects), but that information is not passed up the hierarchy. When I look at my main projects, I only see those resources that have been assigned to it. Don’t forget to add your resources at top level!
The timeline view in AlchemyWorksTemplates
AlchemyWorks offers the ability to save a project as an example. This will save you a lot of time when you start a new project. This is a great feature.
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