Project management

The basic prerequisite for proper project management is accurate information about the progress of the project. Navigo is a tool that allows you to know the current status of each of your projects at any time.

Navigo also automatically compares the status of the project with the plan immediately. This allows you to immediately see if you are meeting project deadlines, staying on budget, or if employees are keeping up with the work.

Navigo also makes project management easier by automatically creating a prediction of the project outcome based on data entered by employees during the project . You can see well in advance whether you need to make any changes in project management to avoid financial losses, time or capacity problems.

Contents

Benefits of project management with Navigo
Project plan – the basis of good management
Essential indicators
Managing the project to manage the company

Project management means keeping the project in line with the plan and having overview and control over all parameters that are important for its successful outcome. At the same time, it requires a timely and adequate response to changes and deviations from the plan to avoid mistakes such as missing deadlines, missing budgets, or failing to carry out necessary work.

Navigo3 is a tool that will not only help you keep track of all these parameters, but will automatically generate a number of outputs that are essential for project management. You won’t have to calculate, track down or make complicated comparisons of many different parameters. The comparison between the plan and the reality of the project is done automatically in Navigo based on how employees report work to Navigo, subcontracting, invoicing, etc.

Advantages of project management with Navigo

• You will see a prediction of the financial development of the project.
• You get automatic reminders of important deadlines and client commitments.
• You will have an overview of subcontracting.
• You’ll automatically get a comparison of how you’re doing with time and labor versus budget.
• Changes to the plan are automatically carried over to all related parts of the contract.
• You will see which employees are working on the project and what their capacities are.
• Through Navigo you can assign tasks to the project team.
• It will make the process of approving key points in the project easier.
• The overhead rate is prorated into your costs by the hours themselves.

Project plan – the basis of good project management

The basis of good project management is the creation of a project plan. More about his work and components here. Throughout the project implementation, however, it is important to keep in mind that the project plan is not something intangible, definitive. A number of unexpected factors can occur in the course of the project – a subcontractor fails, a project’s principal investigator drops out for a long period of time, a deadline is missed during project planning. In such cases, the contract plan needs to be updated and adapted to unexpected circumstances in a timely manner, ideally immediately.

Some deviations from the project plan appear subtly at first and their detection places great demands on the project manager – a large number of different parameters must be monitored and evaluated in detail. Navigo facilitates this work of management in two ways – it automatically signals well in advance that there are problems with the order. It highlights the budget at risk, the risk of missing a deadline or not completing the work. This saves the project manager a great deal of work and allows him to react to these risks in time, make changes to the plan and, if necessary, discuss the changes with the client in advance.

The second advantage of Navigo is that as soon as a change is made to the project plan, Navigo automatically restructures the entire plan so that the new version of the plan carries the change over to all parts of the job plan that it affects and maintains all the planned sequences. So, for example, if we move an important deadline linked to a specific part of the project plan, all the following ones will be updated.

Essential indicators

Tracking the budget, deadlines and reported work by the work team is essential for successful project implementation. All these basic parameters are already specified in the plan. Navigo itself starts comparing them with the reality of the project.

Budget control

Navigo has several options to control the project budget. The first is thermometers. The thermometers, which only show up in the job plan as delineated boundaries, will start to fill themselves in as employees report work or subcontracts are completed. Thermometers are good to track because they show how the contract is doing financially and, more importantly, how it will perform financially by automatically comparing the current situation with the financial plan. Thus, they do not only show the present, the current state, but also predict the future. Thermometers can be found virtually everywhere in Navigo – on every project, on its subparts in the WBS (the CBS load breakdown structure is also available), or on subcontracts. More about thermometers here.

The second option for monitoring the contract budget is the so-called EVM chart or analysis of the achieved value. This chart is also created automatically, and can be used to track the correlation between schedule, budget and the amount of work done. It shows whether the planned work of the project has been done in the given time and money. Despite the fact that this chart shows the status of the project more comprehensively than thermometers, only those offer a financial prediction. Read more about the analysis of the achieved value here.

The control over the project budget also includes the control over the invoice dates, i.e. the date of issue and due date. The dates for the revenue to be invoiced are displayed in Navigo based on the projected revenue. The dates for all invoices and billing are displayed in Terms.

Schedule control

All project time data is displayed in a Gantt chart. Either they were entered there when the project was planned based on time, or the Gannt diagram was created automatically in another planning method.

The project plan includes both a complete timeline and contractual commitments that are tied to a specific date. Navigo automatically displays all these deadlines and commitments as the project progresses. If a deadline is missed, for example for WBS or allocations, the deadline will automatically turn red.

If there is a change in a deadline, for example a sub-delivery, thanks to Navigo there is no need to manually reschedule. Navigo contains a set of smart functions, invisible to project management, called time references, which automatically maintain the situation of changes and follow-ups. If you change one date, all the others will change.

Using the Milestones feature, you can link important dates to specific parts of the plan. This ensures that when they change, the plan is updated to ensure that all activities are linked and key commitments are met. Any change in the schedule will automatically be reflected in the list of important dates.

Control of project work

The contract plan specifies how many hours and which team members or types of work will be needed for the project. Once the staff on the project start reporting on the work, it will be possible to see how much of the budget the team’s work is draining, but also how the budget drained compares to the work and schedule. In the first case, the thermometers need to be monitored, in the second the EVM chart.

Navigo also allows you to assign tasks to employees on a project and makes the process of approving key project items easier and faster. The notification system also helps.

Control over subcontracting

Already in the project plan, sub-deliveries can be scheduled, assigned deadlines and finances. It is then possible to monitor how much subcontracts are drawing from the budget, as well as their timing and invoicing, as the project is implemented. More about subcontracting here.

Managing the project to manage the company

By planning and managing orders in Navigo, you also get automatic outputs that are important not only for the project itself, but also for the entire company. These include cash flow, capacity plan, etc. Learn more about managing your business with Navigo here.