(click to enlarge)
Project
ManagePro also provides a convenient overview
of projects, required hours and assigned resources from
a capacity planning standpoint. Using a Gantt
chart display, view projects and tasks and the relative
resourcing by person or by group for a complete view of
scope of work.
(click to enlarge)
Managepro doesn't just stop with
resource allocation, it provides a full range of project
and task management features, enabling 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 project and resource 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.
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 resource allocation 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.
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!”
