Project Planning Software that Combines
Planning with Results
Finally, a project planning software that lays out as simple as an outline,
but even more importantly get's everyone involved in
working the plan
Whether you're in charge of planning ad-hoc office tasks
using a list of todos or a
portfolio of projects with an international scope or a
formal work break-down structure, ManagePro meets you at your
point of need.
As a project manager you'll find that it's important
to plan with the ability to track hours, resource
allocation, dependencies when needed, and yet not be
encumbered by those same features if you don't need them
on your timeline. ManagePro
allows you to add them as you need them, with an
emphasis upon flexibly re-arranging the plan at any time
- when your situation warrants.
When you're finished planning, ManagePro is ready to support you in the project
management and
coordination/collaboration phases with a complete set of
task and performance management tools and features.
As a project manager you may plan best in an
outline format, Gantt Chart or
mind map format. ManagePro accommodates you easily, switching between formats with
a click of the mouse button. ManagePro helps you:
- Plan, organize, track and communicate your plan to others.
- Integrating with Outlook it
provides synchronization and drag 'n drop of email
correspondence into your project plan
- It includes more than 200 date, number and text fields to enable you to define project goals and objectives, scope requirements, stake-holders, over-arching action plans... all the way down to tasks if you need that detailed of a plan
- Planning around time, budgets and people resources is all handled very smoothly and pushes out to others to gather up-to-date feedback
- Along with a flexible project planning feature set, it also adds a complete set of performance, strategic alignment and portfolio planning business tools
ManagePro emphasizes visibility and current information, allowing you to move seamlessly from an
outline, to a timeline, to a
map view of your project based upon your planning and visualization needs at the moment. Even scorecards and dashboards are included to track
performance metrics on your projects.
Question: Will it have
enough features as a project planning software 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 to stake-holders. It integrates with MS Outlook and imports
existing projects you may have in either Excel or
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.
ManagePro at its core is outcome, not calendar, based in its approach to helping you plan and manage projects successfully.
Our project planning tools help you construct an effective plan to reach any outcome or objective and measure your progress along the way.
Working a project is as simple as adding tasks from an
Outline View as depicted below, setting the start and due date if you know them (not required) and assigning who's going to complete it. Check out a couple of screen shots below. You can display as little or as much detail as you need in ManagePro.
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 solution
that will help you more effectively deliver results
through others. A plan can also be established and
managed within a Gantt Chart view. The program
enables you to work a plan that can be linked with
dependencies... or not. Flexibility, not rigid
programming-based rules, underlies the real connection
between ease of use and value in ManagePro.
Need more extensive resource allocation for effective
project planning? We have that as well. Just
click the Capacity Planning button in the ribbon control
and you have instant access to resource allocation
tools.
At the core of ManagePro's planning and project management software is a 3 step emphasis on visibility and follow-through:
- Planning, investigating and building a project - action plan sequence to reach objectives
- Working the plan in a head's up manner that balances resources and priority every day
- 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.
But 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!”
