Seasoned project managers or PMs know that project management is a team effort. Top management down to the rank-and-file need to work on and process the project plan. Aside from the project management software, project planning requires a variety of business productivity tools. Remember: groups of people working as a team initiate, create, review, verify, custom-fit, approve, update, monitor and eventually close all project plans.

In short, PMs manage the teams, the execution and most importantly, the project plan itself. As part of the project management process, PMs communicate the project plan across many stakeholders. They focus on one aspect of the project one at a time at work during the planning and execution. They also consider the inputs of many project specialists. Sometimes when PMs are too busy, they delegate plan updates to administrative staff.

Project Planning Management Challenges

The traditional project management software floods the PM with too many features in several views. While this complexity looks pretty impressive, this very same complexity relegates the PM to manage the project plan instead of managing the project itself and the teams of people involved in it.

When reporting to corporate executives such as the CFO or even the CEO, the PM has to present the project plan in a high level view that executive management can easily understand in 3 minutes or less. The CEO typically wants to see how the project team will execute the project in 1 or 2 pages and other information that he or she needs to make a decision. Meanwhile, the CFO will want to see the project budget and whether the project is proceeding smoothly within this constraint.

Moreover, the PM wants to be aware on how the project is progressing and see whether actual data have already exceeded the estimates or assess how long it still takes to complete a particular work package.

Aside from these, the PM will want to communicate the details of the project plan to each team member. This initiative enables the team to have clear goals, well-understood deadlines and a better handle on how one milestone will affect another.

What are Project Planning Management Perspectives?

Project management software, 2-plan Desktop has innovated on project planning management. It has categorized 5 basic PM work into 5 user-interface windows or ‘Perspectives.’ These project plan viewers or user-interfaces are organized arrangements of PM work that 2-plan designed to be flexible and scalable to adapt with a user’s needs.

These 5 Perspectives are:

• Controlling
• Planning
• Reporting
• Set-up
• Work Breakdown Structure

The Controlling Perspective is designed for project tracking and monitoring purposes. It presents project information in a simplified table form for easier decision making and alerts.

2-plan Desktop has designed the Planning Perspective for the easy creation of the work breakdown structure for detailing or decomposition into several work packages. It presents the project schedule into an easily manageable, click-and-drag Gantt chart. Likewise, it provides a calendar view for start and finish dates as well as a Business Object Editor for detailing each work package.

The Reporting Perspective covers the bare essentials reporting requirements of a project and addresses the drill-down requirements of some reports through a .csv report function.

The Set-up Perspective enables PMs to enlist project staff, assign roles, create teams and assign teams or individuals per work package.

Finally, the Work Breakdown Structure Perspective enables the PM or project team leaders to manage the WBS in table form, graphical form, business object form and workspace form. 2-plan Desktop’s graphical WBS presents project information in a high level IDEF0 node format that simplifies the complexity of projects.

Perspectives – Key Functions

2-plan Desktop’s Perspective has the following functions:

• Switch user-interfaces among 5 or more work categories;
• Arrange each user-interface with selected views;
• Load plug-ins on a need basis;
• Disable unused or seldom used views, features or functions; and
• Integrate into mobile devices and/or web client.

2-plan Desktop Perspectives – Key Advantages

The major advantage of the 2-plan Desktop Perspective is that it helps the PM manage complexity. The PM can present the project to executives with its easy to understand graphical WBS or discuss each work package details with each team leader. In turn, each team leader can discuss the project details with each team member. Moreover, it has 50% less clutter than the traditional project management software.

This project management software essentially considers real-world scenarios. It understands delegation and the PM’s need to simplify his or her work. As a result, this design consideration ensures that the PM ably completes the project on schedule and within budget.

2-plan Desktop Perspectives – Limitations

The key advantage with the Perspective feature is also 2-plan Desktop’s limitation. PMs might miss the multiple features and functions that they normally see in traditional project management software. This limitation can be resolved though with the activation of several plugins that PMs might want.

Conclusion

The Perspective feature empowers PMs with greater flexibility and the ability to communicate the details of the project from the top down. PMs better manage complexity with less clutter, delegation, adaptability and the power to disable unused or seldom used functions. These cool viewer features are intuitive project planning management tools where the plan meets the real world. This project management software review highly recommends the 2-plan Desktop which is a Free Download with free-trial plug-ins.

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