PM - Project Mgmt

(Please click on the hexagons for more information)


 

]po[ supports the entire PM lifecycle:

Project Integration

Project Management Methodology

Project templates are used to store and standardize frequently used project structures. For example, an "Analysis Template" may contain the standard tasks used during the project analysis phase of an IT consulting company. New projects can rapidly be created selecting several templates.

 

(Please click on the hexagons for more information)


   

 

Project Approval Workflow

A Project Approval Workflow makes sure that each project in the companies Project Portoflio has been initiated in terms of the aspects as defined by the PMO.

Project Planning and Staffing

Manage an unlimited number of projects and tasks with as many sub-levels of hierarchy as you need. Projects can be structured in any level of sub projects and "project tasks". Projects and Sub Projects allow to assign access permissions to project members, while "Project Tasks" serve to track the project advance and to log the dedication of employees.

Budget Planning

]po[ supports both top-down and bottom up budget planning. Budget numbers can be protected so that only users with special permissions are allowed to set budgets. A workflow component can dispatch a proposed project to one or more managers for budget confirmation.

Skills Management

Skills represent capacities of employees and freelancers. The provider is allowed to maintain his own skills. However, all changes are subject of confirmation by in-house staff.

Gantt Charts

Use ]po[ to generate Gantt charts that helps you communicating your project. ]po[ is produces read-only Gantt Charts that are shown on the each Project Page.
Besides that ]po[ integrates with the following products that are capable of creating more sophisticated Gantt Charts:  

  • Microsoft Project

  • ProjectLibre (OpenProj)

]po[ supports "round-trip" editing with both tools.  For details please refer to OpenProj/ProjectLibre Integration and MS-Project Integration.

Resource Planning

Recruiting and building the team requiries up-to-date data about disposability and profile of ressources. Project and Portfolio Managers need visibility and control over resources available. Information on how effectively valuable resources are used, which resources become available and what projects have consumed them, is needed throughout the entire project lifecycle. Instant availability of information about the status of resources is necessary to deliver the project within the specified time and budget parameters.

Resource Management

]project-open[ facilitates the resource planning process with reports showing assignments and utilization across all projects.

Project Risk Management

The Risk Management package provides a graphical risk chart that allows project managers and senior management to track the risks of the company's project portfolio throughout all phases of the lifecycle.

Project Collaboration

Project collaboration becomes more challenging when projects extend beyond organizational boundaries. The extended use of Email as communication instrument leads to cluttered inboxes, tedious recovery and archiving procedures.

Each project member needs to be informed about tasks, issues, priorities and due dates while at the same time information is often distributed over multiple locations and therefore neither consistent nor up-to-date Knowledge is an essential organizational driver in value creation. Because team composition changes there’s a potential knowledge loss between phases and across projects. Transfer of knowledge is relatively expensive but crucial to gain and keep competitive advantage


]po[ helps all stakeholders to collaborate and share information across internal and external project teams. Communication can happen in protected "Communication Sphere" among sub-groups of the project team.

Configuration of access permissions of project resources is based on roles or profiles of project members.

All major ]po[ objects provide a collaboration space ("e-Room") featuring Discussion Forums and Filestorage related to the specific Project, Customer or User.
]po[ emphasizes the possibility to integrate clients and providers into the planning and execution of projects Project Collaboration fully integrates all Collaboration and KM Modules. 

Project Tracking & Controlling

]po[ includes an editor for three additional measures per project task:

  • Estimated Hours:
    This figure specified a kind of "budget" for a specific project task. It details the project manager's estimated how many hours it will take to complete the task.

  • Billable Hours:
    This figure is similar to "estimated hours". However, it specifies how many of the estimated hours can be billed to a customer. For example activities such as "pre-sales" or "bug fixing" may not be billable to a customer.

  • Logged Hours:
    This figure is automatically calculated by ]po[ based on the number of hours logged by user on the project task.

Time Sheet Management

]po[ tracks employee's hours on projects and tasks
The Time sheet management module keep track of the internal costs caused by staff and employees, as opposed to external costs caused by freelancers, providers etc.

Financial Project Performance

]po[ tracks employee's hours on projects and tasks and evaluates the cost of the time for each project based on hourly rates of the employee. Project costs are completed by other financial information such as Provider Bills and Expenses and aggregated in a P&L calculation that provides real-time information about the projects burn rate.

Reports Module module allows checking profit & loss for projects and customers.

The Travel Cost package provides an "employee self-service", allowing users to enter their project related costs (e.g. travel costs) themselves, saving money to the administration/HR department.

Project Baselines

Baselines are basically versions of a project with all important information including sub-projects and tasks, start- and end dates, budgets, resource assignments etc. Baslines are manages using the ]po[ Baseline Portlet.

Earned Value

Earned Value Management (EVM, also called earned value analysis EVA) is a project management process that aims to identify performance problems early during the project execution. For implemntation details please refer to ]po[ Earned Value Management Process Description

Project Completion Tracking

Project Tasks can be attributed with a financial value. This value together with the completion % of the task allow to calculate the ratio between spent resource and project progress, allowing the senior management to detect project deviations early in the project cycle.

Automatic Calculation of Project Progress

Based on the feedback provided by task owners, total project advance can be automatically calculated.

Project Issue & Change Management

]po[ Issue Management tracks issues, capture feature requests and customer complaints centrally (helpdesk) or decentralized (customers, developers, project managers, ...). Software developers can report and filter issues according to product line, priority, severity, version and assignment properties.

Incident Management

Many questions and issues coming up during a project require decisions from an appropriate person such as a Project Manager or a person from the customer's organization. These decision processes can be long running and/or involve people from different organizations. ]po[ allows to associate a workflow with a specific type of incident that that makes it easy to manage and track the incident during its lifecycle.

Project Invoicing and Project Billing

Invoicing

Invoicing is an important but also a comprehensive part of the administrative work in a consulting company. ]project-open[ offers different billing scenarios that help you saving money and time and that ensure that invoices got delivered in time.

Project Closure

Project Closure WF

Set up a workflow in order to formally close a project. The workflow might include the following actions:

  • PM confirms that Project Goals haven been achieved
  • Accouting confirms that invoicing process has been triggered
  • PMO Office confirms closing of project

Lessons Learned

Store your "Lessons Learned Documents" using the ]po[ File Manager and make them searchable (permission-based)

Project History

]po[ automatically tracks past company contacts and projects a user has been involved in

 

 


References

Related Object Types 

Related Packages

Related Modules

Related Interfaces

  • MS Project
  • OpenProj
  • GanttProject
]project-open[ is capable of opening and displaying files from these outside applications, which both reciprocate the functionality with files saved in ]project-open[ (viceversa)


  Contact Us
  Project Open Business Solutions S.L.

Calle Aprestadora 19, 12o-2a

08902 Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona)

Spain

 Tel Europe: +34 609 953 751
 Tel US: +1 415 200 2465
 Mail: info@project-open.com