CHAPTER 9 - PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Benefit of Using PM Software

(PART-01)

"The software often brings your attention to things that you forgot or left out entirely,"

- EricSpanitz,president of Synergest, (Chicago consulting and training company)

By using Project Management Software, The Institute could probably run

their Project Management (PM) team and deploy their resources more effectively and efficiently. It has a capacity to help plan, organize, and manage resource

pools and develop resource requirement forecasts. Depending the sophistication of the software it can include tools for estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, and documentation storage. Excel and Google Docs are great, but there are some project management and resource scheduling tools, which are designed to help you organize and manage projects more efficiently. There are many different types of project management tools -- some are basic organizers, while others help to plan and track all aspects of a project.

Some Project Management software used for different type of use:

1. Resource Guru

Resource Guru is a dedicated resource management software. With a great visual calendar style interface, it shows what everyone’s working on and clearly displays availability so you can maximise utilisation. The tool

allows Project Managers to make bookings simultaneously with no chance of stepping on each others toes. Clashes are automatically prevented. Bookings can be added to a waiting list and used for capacity planning later. Each staff member gets their own resource dashboard so they can log in and know exactly what they should be working on. And to monitor business performance, powerful reports monitor utilization of your team and help with capacity planning.

2. Hub Planner

Hub Planner is a sweet looking resource planning and management tool for PM’s to plan, schedule, track and book their teams of resource. The tool focuses around ahigh-level view of resources, their capacity and utilisation, and also gives PM’s the power to deep dive into projects to at a glance establish progress, billability and profitability. Within the tool are some powerful tools and features for resource scheduling and planning – with drag and drop and filtering, timesheets – to analyze schedule vs actual, and reporting – with smart report templates and custom reporting capability.

3. Float

Float is a simple (but pretty) resource management and scheduling application built specifically for agencies and studios. It’s a great tool to use alongside project management software, when you’ve already planned your projects and need to schedule a team to do the work. Float allows you to easily manage your staff’s workload and upcoming projects from a single place. Workers are updated with their weekly schedule via auto generated email system. They don’t need their own login information, which keeps the system simple. There’s also a reporting component so that you can monitor your team’s utilization at any time – report on scheduled hours by individual team member, department, client and project.

4. Clarizen

If you’re looking for an enterprise level and fully tailored solution, check out Clarizen – a complete project management professional servi ces

automation(PSA) platform with a great set of tools for managing projects, tasks, resources, and budgets – wrapped in a single product offering. Clarizen brings together project management, configurable workflow automation, in-

context collaboration and a tailored, role-based experience simplifies work, reduces communication overload, and provides extensive visibility so everyone can work more effectively and adapt to changes. It centralizes release plans,

release backlog data, bugs, documents, communications and more into one system, helping you to deliver releases efficiently, track and prioritize incoming tickets and schedule them for iterations with stacks of handy built-in reporting.

5. Harvest

Harvest is built around a robust time tracking tool. Harvest allows staff to track time and send invoices from an integrated application. Staff are able to start and stop timers to allow accurate reporting and submit time sheets.The Harvest system then generates visual reports allow you to analyze time and see the distribution of your staff resources at a glance, helping you to keep your projects on budget and estimate for future projects accurately. Harvest also allows you to invoice accurately using the time sheet tracking data. The system provides an integrated invoicing component which generates and tracks invoices and retainers through to payment.

6. Teamwork Project Manager

Teamwork Project Manager is a Base camp alternative – an online teamwork & project management application to assist managers, staff and clients in working together more productively. Teamwork has components to enable Project Management collaboration, task management, milestone tracking, messaging, file management and time tracking.

7. Projectplace

ProjectPlace is a powerful project management, and collaboration tool. More than just another Basecamp alternative – Projectplace has a slew of additional features including issue management, project templates, online meetings, meeting and resource management and organisational reports and analytics. The resource management features in Projectplace give users overview of all scheduled resources in all projects, show the availability and capacity,allow searching and booking of resource, perform scenario planning of resources ,and priorities resources between projects.

8. Basecamp

Basecamp is an excellent project management tool that focuses on making collaboration easy. It’s really simply to use and for many years it was the de facto choice of agencies. Basecamp helps you manage multiple projects at a time with to-do lists, file sharing, chatting, messages, calendars and time tracking. As it’s so established there are now many different possible integrations and ways to extend the base product including time tracking, invoicing, accounting, reporting, planning (including Roadmap), file synchronization, bug & issue tracking, source control, creative approval and lots more.

9. 10,000 ft

10,000ft is a tool designed give you a big picture (hence the 10,ooo ft) of

your business, teams and projects. Armed with this information you’re then able to make better strategic decisions based on this real time, complex data. The tool is based around a dashboard which gives an overview of project,schedule and analytics. The project element gives top level project information across different types, clients, and states. The schedule element provides an interface for scheduling resource – you can spot who is available; schedule upcoming projects; and set up how long they will last. The Analytics component gives a great overview of forecast and actual project hours and estimating accuracy.

10. Roadmap

Roadmap is a project portfolio and resource forecasting tool which plays nicely with Basecamp. At a top level there is project portfolio

planning and analytics allowing you to view all projects to see project stats. The resource planningcomponent allows cross-portfolio and individual resource forecasting. The cross-portfolio forecasting allows you to view all resources in traditional calendar view and high information density grid view, filter by specific resources or roles and a team calendar gives you the ability to block-off company-wide events or holidays, and individual resource holidays. The individual resource forecasting allows you to view all work items assigned to a specific resource, by calendar view or filtered by specific projects.

11. Traffic Live

Traffic Live is an online studio management software with an elegant interface, and some pretty amazing scheduling functionality. The system automatically knows the right person for a job, based on their availability and client suitability. It allows you to split tasks and defer until later, or just drag it onto someone else – drag, drop, split, reallocate and park work as you need to balance day-to-day demands and changing priorities. Traffic Live’s point of difference is that it’s built on an open system which plays nicely with lots of other systems including Jira, Maconomy, Outlook and Mailchimp.

12. Workmajig

Workamajig, was one of the first web-based systems ever built for the creative industry, and is now the most selected advertising agency software on the market. It’s a web based, mobile friendly complete project management solution. Workamajig creates schedules producing gantt chart and calendar views of schedules, shows resource availability and sends alerts if individuals/groups are overloaded. The schedule is integrated into timesheets to enable quick reconciliation on projects. It’s also got functionality to support file collaboration and sharing with clients, estimating, job costing, and accounts payable and receivable are built into the system.

13. Primavera

Primavera was launched in 1983 by Primavera Systems Inc. and was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2008.As of 2008 Primavera Systems(Acquired by Oracle Corporation) supported long-established products - P3 and Sure-Trak - and the newer P6 version. The long-standing P3 product in its various forms was used by 25% of the heavy construction industry, its predominate customer base; the next most popular software was used by 11%.The P3 version to P6 version change is based in a move from DOS-type shortcut keys to mouse-based icons. Thus a software application that was once very fast to use but grounded in shortcut functions (which some users found difficult to master) moved to a mouse-based application that is quicker to learn, but once mastered never achieves the same speed of use.

In 2012, Primavera P6 EPPM Upgrade Release 8.2 added capabilities for governance, project-team participation, and project visibility. Mobile PPM was introduced through Primavera’s P6 Team Member for iPhone and Team Member Web Interface, to streamline communications between project team members in the field and in the office.

Field Of Use:

Today, Oracle Primavera services project-intensive industries such as engineering and construction, aerospace and defense, utilities, oil and gas, chemicals, industrial manufacturing, automotive, financial services, communications, travel and transportation, healthcare, and government. This Primevera software includes project management,product management,collaboration and control capabilities and integrates with other enterprise software such as Oracle and SAP’s ERP systems.

The PGBU is currently focusing on providing web-based Enterprise Project Portfolio Management software that encompasses resource allocation, cost reduction, supply-chain efficiency, and decision-making―using real-time data, for the Enterprise market.

·  Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management

·  Primavera P6 Professional Project Management

·  Primavera P6 Analytics

·  Primavera Portfolio Management

·  Primavera Contract Management

·  Primavera Risk Analysis

·  Primavera Inspire for SAP

·  Primavera Earned Value Management

·  Primavera Contractor


14. MS-PROJECT

           Microsoft Project has some amazing features for planning and tracking a project.The exciting part of MS-PROJECT reports is that you can build a custom report,by using S-Curve(for project Cash Flow),Performance Evaluation & Review Technique/PERT-Analysis,GANTTChart,Hishtogam,Network diagram,Resource raph,Critical period for any project,WBS,CBS,Baseline-Analysis,a pivot interface which provides access  resources and task allocation data.User friendly character and Graphical User Interface has made MS-Project a handy & popular PM tool.Extended part of this 
Chapter will cover whole MS-Poject.

There are many advantages and disadvantages of these project scheduling tools that you should think about before you decide if one would be a wise investment for your small business needs.

(To be Contd........)