Has anyone found the use of Microsoft Project helpful or feasible for managing research projects in the lab? If so what if any advantages have you found this sort of approach imparting to your overall effeciency?

We use microsoft project to manage all of our research and development projects. For Research projects, we find it especially useful to map the project to its milestones and to account for people time within the milestones. THen, researchers can map their experiments to the milestones. We tend not to get into task-specific details in research projects. For development projects, everything, down to the tasks, are mapped to a timeline in microsoft project.
Rik

Oh how I hate Gantt charts...