Gantt Chart Software for Coordinated Business & Project Management

Finally, a Gantt Chart and Project Management system that lays out as Simple as an Outline,
yet has all the Complex Tools Available... when and if you need them

Whether you're planning out ad-hoc single office tasks or a portfolio of projects with an international scope, ManagePro provides a Gantt chart solution that answers your needs without imposing a huge learning curve and complexity.

A project planning and project/task management solution that functions from either a Gantt chart, an outline, a scorecard or a map view - your choice.  ManagePro helps you plan, organize and translate your plan to others while giving you an effective "heads-up" perspective as you zoom in and out across time, start and due dates.

The Gantt chart display easily moves from displaying project and task assignments and Resource Allocation at the group level, to viewing them by each individual.  Being able to filter the display is a further enhancement - as an example you may which to only view those projects that are priority 1 and have a high risk setting.  The view moves to work with you as your business questions and needs change.

ManagePro is a Gantt Chart and project management tool  that combines comprehensive functionality with ease of use, and adds a complete set of performance, strategic alignment and portfolio planning business tools when you need them... in short it help you stay on top of tasks, and in-touch with your people with the information you need at your finger tips... every day.

ManagePro emphasizes visibility and current information, allowing you to move seemlessly from an outline, to a timeline, to a map view of your project based upon your planning and visualization needs at the moment. Even though it's a software management tool, scorecards, dashboards, time cards and document managment are included to track performance metrics and more across your projects. 

Question:  Will it have enough features to help me plan, organize and ensure collaboration with others?

• ManagePro starts simply, but includes more than 200 user defined date, number,text and calculated fields to enable you to define project goals and objectives, scope requirements, and report results tostake-holders.  Project managers will find that it integrates with MS Outlook and imports existing projects you may have in either Excel or Project, but is much easier to use and leverage information than MS Project.  Planning around time, budgets, resource allocation and calculations such as earned value is all handled very smoothly and pushes out to others to gather up-to-date feedback.  It also adds a complete set of performance, strategic alignment and portfolio planning business tools

Question:  Will it do what we need it to do?

• Whether you're someone in management or a certified project manager, sometimes the biggest challenge when evaluating new project planning software is determining if it fits your needs and keeping the learning curve from becoming an entire project itself.  We can help you answer those questions with a quick online demo or our cost effective "Does it Fit" service.

Question:  Does it do Resource Allocation, Gantt charts, Dependencies, Earned Value, CPI?...

• The answer is "Yes, it does all of them, very well in fact." But the reason PC Magazine described ManagePro as "project management for the rest of us" goes beyond ease of use and comprehensive features.  It's the fact that ManagePro addresses project management within the larger scope of managing a business group, a department, a business. An environment where some projects are formal and involved, and others are ad-hoc tasks and on any given day you need to move in and through all of them and have your people do the same.

 

ScreenShots

ManagePro at its core is outcome, not date-based, in its approach to helping you plan and manage projects successfully. Our gantt and project management tool helps you construct an effective plan to reach any outcome or objective and measure your progress along the way. A plan that can be attached to dates or not. A plan that can be linked with dependencies and resource requirements or not. Flexibility, not rigid programming-based rules, underlies the real connection between ease of use and value in ManagePro. Check out a couple of screen shots below. You can display as little or as much detail as you need in ManagePro.

The Gantt view displays the timelines between the Start and Due date of each goal. The Green triangle designates the start date of a goal and the Blue Triangle shows the Due Date. You can click on either end of a timeline and drag and drop to adjust the dates of any goal. Notice that it does remember the original due date and displays a Red Triangle at that point on the timeline. At a glance you can then tell if a project has slipped its Due Date or is finishing ahead of schedule. Buttons at the top allow you to show when Progress Notes have been added to goals as well as what percent complete each goal is set to. Finally, dependencies are created easily, especially if you are familiar with Microsoft Project, just click the link button, then drag your cursor from the predecessor task's duration bar to the dependent task's duration bar.

The Gantt chart also provides multiple resource allocation tools to help make youre plannning and manaement taskseasier and adjustments quicker.  In the view below a capacity planning graph is added with the click of a button.  Note the the display can be modified to include only those tasks assigned to a person or display tasks for the entire group.  Check out the screen shot below.

Whether you're in IT, Marketing, Engineering or over-seeing it all, you will find that the inclusion of performance management, task management, portfolio management, strategic planning and document management tools within ManagePro all make for a use-able project management system that will help you more effectively deliver results through others. Working a project is as simple as adding tasks from either an outline or Timeline view as depicted below, setting the start and due date if you know them (not required) and assigning who's going to complete it. 

At the core of ManagePro's Gantt and project management software is a 3 step emphasis on visibility and follow-through:

1. Planning, investigating and building a project - action plan sequence to reach objectives
2. Working the plan in a head's up manner that balances resources and priority every day
3. Tracking/documenting/measuring results to link project management to your everyday business process with handy red indicators (see chart) when a project due date has slipped.

Don't take PC Magazine's (we got a 5 out of 5 star rating) or our word for it, read a professional project manager and reviewer's observations and with the free demo make your own decision:

"First as a project manager, and most recently as a project management consultant, I have often recognized the limitations of traditional project management software in some project environments. Project management software packages are designed to plan and schedule a series of activities required to be accomplished in some relatively fixed order in relation to each other. They focus on determining the critical path and the shortest path through the project, which allows all of the activities to be completed. They are generally powerful, often necessary allies when confronted with a large project involving perhaps several hundreds or even thousands of activities which draw on a large number of often interrelated and limited pools of resources to accomplish the tasks. The class of software termed "project management software" is, in reality, project scheduling software which uses often complicated mathematical algorithms to redistribute resources and rearrange activities in order to make the most effective and efficient use of a limited set of resources to complete a project within a specified time and budget.

However, there are huge numbers of projects which fall into a different category. This category includes small, low budget or short-duration projects which are neither mission critical nor high risk. The majority of these projects do not have the budget, management resources or time to enter data into or use a full blown project management system. These projects may not involve interdependent activities or interrelated resources. They do, however, need management attention to stay on schedule and within budget while delivering the required scope and quality.

In fact, the majority of project environments are made up of relatively small projects involving fewer than 20 individual (usually human) resources. They typically have a duration of less than six months (one year at the most) and a total budget of $20,000 to $1 million each. They are not high risk, mission critical or in a key result area of the organization's strategic plan. These small projects are often discontinuous and involve several points in time where all work must cease while something is reviewed, money is raised or approved for release to the budget, or another entity develops some piece of the project required before the remainder of the work can continue. The environment which I will call "small project" is also normally one where many small projects are being done at the same time. Often, some of the projects are on hold, but they still require monitoring and management at some level.

This is an environment where ManagePro excels..."

-David McClure, OR/MS Today

There's a lot more to address about how our project management software can work for you. Things like:

• Follow-up and follow-through are both improved using the visibility and drill-down capability.
• Color coded scorecards track the execution of all objectives, results tracking, the presence of plans and checklists and their status.
• Everything is available within a couple of clicks, including the requirements and issues relevant to each project,
• Improved decision making, clearer results and more accurate feedback from top to bottom in “One Place where it all comes together!”

More Information about ManagePro