PlanningForce 1.5 Portfolio Planner

PlanningForce 1.5 is an advanced and intelligent application designed to give you a professional way to offer, through a simple and logical methodology, the most advanced features in the field of program management, project planning and resource scheduling.

In a first stage, PlanningForce focuses on planning simulations, decision makings and progress monitoring. PlanningForce agile methodology can help you deciding and keeping control over objectives in a complex and changing environment.

Due to its totally original graphical user interfaces and workflows and its automatic scheduling engine, the planning process has never been so intuitive and interactive.

Major Features:

1. Project management
   
   • Project portfolio. Organize projects in hierarchies and portfolios; dependencies can be set between these projects or sub-projects.
   • Resource-constrained. Task descriptions can be made in terms of roles, skills, levels or need for specific resources; planning depends on the resources available; no over-allocation is allowed.
   • Templates. Templates of project portfolios, projects, sub-projects or task groups can be created and used in a click.
   • Duration and load. Define your tasks in terms of duration or load expressed in man days.
   • Dependencies. Use simple or complex dependencies and express lags in days or in percentage of completeness.
   • Calendars. Calendars can be defined at a group level or at indivual level; calendars can be cumulative. Apply calendars from/to a specified date.  
   • Coefficients. Coefficients take account of uncertainties that impact task achievement, such as illness or weather conditions, and other restrictions or obstructions like learning curves, holidays, task difficulty, etc.
   • Apply coefficients from/to a specified date or period in the future.
   • Task details. For each task, the Task Details ranks the resources according to their profile match ; you can then choose to impose, include or exclude specific resources to carry it on.  
   • Group details. Check at a group level the balance between required and offered roles & skills.
   • Impose or exclude resources at a group level.
   • Progress percentage. Actualize the progress of your tasks, so you can relaunch the automatic scheduling and update your plan.
   • WBS Gantt. In this interactive Gantt chart, you create the structure of your projects and tasks.
   • Input diagnostics 
2. Resource management
   
   • Resource portfolio. Organize resources in hierarchies and portfolios which reflect your company organization; set their quantity and contract dates.
   • Roles and Skills. Hierarchies of competences expressed on a major dimension (roles) and a complementary one (skills).
   • Efficiency levels. You can associate grades and efficiency levels to roles and skills, so they have an impact on the choice of the resource and the scheduling of the tasks.
   • Calendars. Calendars can be defined at a group level or at an indivual level; calendars can be cumulative.
   • Apply calendars from/to a specified date.
   • Daily work intensity. You can adapt the intensity of daily work of any of your resources to reflect exceptions.
   • Coefficients. Coefficients take account of uncertainties that impact task achievement, such as illness or weather conditions, and other restrictions or obstructions like learning curves, holidays, task difficulty, etc.
   • Apply coefficients from/to a specified date or period in the future.
   • Capacity curves. Capacity Curves show the theoretical and real resource availibility before scheduling.  
   • Diagnosis tool
3. Planning & scheduling
   
   • Automatic scheduling. Task dates are automatically calculated according to resource availibility, priorities, critical path and earliest start.
   • Planning Wizard. Input more preferences in the automatic scheduling process to obtain even more personalized solutions.
   • Task validation. In the Output Gantt, this function 'freezes' the validated tasks so they wont be affected by any subsequent planning.
   • Project & resource selection. To increase your testing capabilities, this feature allows you to include all or part of the projects and resources before lauching the automatic scheduling.
   • Priorities. You can specify task group priorities and task priorities into a project.
   • Granularity. For mid to long-term planning and scheduling, granularity (precision) can be expressed in days, weeks or months. For short-term planning and scheduling, granularity can be expressed in 1/4 days.
   • Ideal Gantt. In this Gantt chart, you plan your projects manually, checking the adequacy of your plan relative to your resource capacity in real time.
   • Automatic snapshot. This feature allows you to create automatically a new simulation each time you run the automatic scheduling; it allows you to keep track of the different changes you can make in the search for the plan that suits you best.  
   • Planning horizon
4. Outputs & analysis 
   
   • Output Gantt. Output Gantt shows realistic planning and scheduling according to all constraints, goals and risk scenarios you applied to this specific planning simulation.
   • Role curves. See the simulation results expressed on role allocations; it helps you to analyze peaks and valleys, so you can try to match the pool of resources to the actual needs or to optimize the workload to your existing resources.
   • Extension ratio. This ratio informs you about the probable extension of the theoretical duration of a task to its realistic one.
   • Allocations. Allocations are the result of automatic scheduling from the resource side.
   • Resource usage. Resource Usage shows how this availability has been used both in efficient and inefficient ways and displays the remaining availibility.
   • Cash-flows. Depending on the result of a simulation, you obtain a realistic view of your estimated future cash-flows in both monthly and cumulated data.
   • KPIs. Key Performance Indicators present in both numerical and graphical ways the results of simulation on various dimensions: completeness, planned load, end dates, extension ratio, resource usage, role usage, ...
   • Reports. Reports aggregate the most relevant information and produce it in clear lists of project and task schedules, resource allocations, cash-flow forecasts...
   • Daily resource planning.
   • Output diagnostics
5. Program management
   
   • Program Manager. Program Manager regroups all tools that allow you to manage your plans, their simulations, their progress status and related dashboards and plan trackers.
   • Plan Manager. Plan Manager displays the full history of the successive plans and progress statuses, without any limitation in number or time.
   • Simulation manager. This Manager displays the history and hierarchy of simulations and produces KPIs comparisons between them, and selects one as the 'official' plans.
   • Scorecards. Thanks to the scorecard feature, you will be able to rank simulations according to selected and weighted KPIs; in addition, these results are reported into radar charts.
   • Display the results on a radar chart and have a graphical view of your selected and weighted KPIs.
   • Gantt charts comparator. The dual Gantt chart comparator offers you a visual comparison of the results of two simulations. Analyzes are made on several dimensions: dates, resources, and extension ratios.
   • Progress Status. Actualize the progress status of your tasks and projects as often as you want, so you can relaunch the automatic scheduling and easily adapt your plan and strategy if necessary.
   • Resource achievement. Encode your resources real achievement on a daily basis and compare this with what was planned.
   • Plan Tracker. See the history of your successive plans in an advanced Gantt chart, so you can appreciate the deviations and isolate the problematic projects or tasks at a glance
   • Portfolio Progress. See on multiple charts how fast your projects are progressing toward their complete achievement and see the contribution of each of them in the project portfolio.
   • Resource portfolio. Multiple charts display how you use your resources over time according to their roles and availability.
   • Dashboards
6. Other features
   
   • Import Excel. Work with your Excel data in PlanningForce thanks to our Excel import wizard. This will be done by using our featured Excel template.
   • Import MS-Project. Import projects, tasks, dependencies, resources, calendars and allocations from one or several MS-Project files.
   • XML Import. Import into PlanningForce projects and resources according to our predefined XML scheme.
   • Welcome startup. while working in PlanningForce, this screen allows you to access fast file openings, tutorials, examples files and a support form at any time.
   • Video tutorials. Watch our 23 video tutorials covering all the topics of PlanningForce to learn at your speed.
   • Tutorials. Incremental tutorials coupled with example files can be accessed from the Welcome Startup, so you can learn in a few minutes and interactively how to benefit from the most advanced features of PlanningForce.
   • Guidelines. Through simple workflow, follow the steps of the PlanningForce guidelines to create your first plans.
   • Contextual Help. From any part of the application, you can access contextual help.
   • Multi-lingual enabled

Enhancements:

• Full import MS-Project files,
• Resource achievement,
• New diagnosis tool,
• New reports,
• Group detail features,
• New filters,
• New calendar features

Requirements: RAM: 500MB

WareSeeker Editor