Project management

Basic precondition of a successful project management are exact information about the course of its realization. Navigo is a tool, which will allow you to learn an accurate status of every single project of yours.

Navigo will also compare the status of the project with the plan. Thanks to this, you can check if you are on schedule with deadlines of a project, budgeting or if employees are not behind on their work.

Navigo will make project management easier for you by automatically creating predictions of the project outcome based on the data which are being put in during the realization of the project. This way you can see if the project management requires some changes to prevent some financial or time related losses or capacity problems.

Contents

Advantages of project management with Navigo
Plan of the project – A key to the good management
Basic indicators
From project management to the company management

To manage a project means to maintain a balance between the plan and having the overview and control over all the parameters, which are important for its successful result. At the same time it also requires to adequately react to changes and deviations from the plan so there are no mistakes like missing the deadline, budget or not making sure that necessary works have been done.

Navigo3 is a tool which will not only help you with keeping an eye on all these parameters but will also generate a number of outputs, which are crucial for project management. You will not have to calculate them in a complicated way, look for them or do any elaborate comparisons between many different parameters. Comparison of the plan and reality is done in Navigo automatically, based on how the employees report their work, subcontracts are being carried out, invoices are being done and so on.

Advantages of the project management in Navigo?

• You will see a prediction of the project financial development.
• You will get access to automatic notifications for important deadlines and commitments towards the client.
• You will know about all the subcontracts.
• You will automatically get comparison about how are you doing with your work compared with the budget.
• Changes in the plan will automatically overwrite into all the related parts of the project.
• You will be able to see which employees are working on the project and what are their capacities.
• Through the Navigo you can assign tasks to the workers on the project.
• It will make the process of approving the key points in project easier for you.
• Overhead rate is automatically and proportionally being calculated into the costs.

Plan of the project – foundation of a good management

Creation of a plan is a foundation for solid project management. You can read more about its creation and components here. It is necessary to think about the fact that plan is not something untouchable or definitive during the whole realization of a project. Over the course of time, many unexpected factors can occur – subcontract fails, main project director drops out for a long time, some deadline is wrongly estimated. In such case it is necessary to update the plan, ideally immediately, and adjust it to the unexpected circumstances.

Some deviations from the plan are manifesting as non suspicious and identifying of them can be a huge challenge for the project manager – it is necessary to monitor and evaluate a huge amount of different parameters in great detail. Navigo makes this work much easier in two essential ways – signalizes the problems in advance automatically. Alerts to the budget in danger, risk of not finishing before the deadline or unfinished work. This saves the project manager a lot of work and allows him to respond to these risks in time, to make changes to the plan and to discuss the changes with the client when it is necessary.

The second advantage of Navigo is that as soon as a change is made to the plan, Navigo automatically restructures the entire plan, so the new version will transfer this change to all parts of the plan to which it applies, and all scheduled sequences will remain. So, for example, if we move an important deadline linked to a specific part of the plan, all of the following deadlines will be updated.

Basic indicators

It is very important to monitor the budget, deadlines and work done for successful implementation of the project. All these basic parameters are already assigned to the plan. Navigo begins to compare them with reality automatically.

Budget control

Navigo provides several ways of controlling the budget. The first of them are thermometer diagrams Thermometer diagrams, which appear in the project plan only as lined out mantinels will start to fill up once the employees start to report work or subcontracts fill up. It is good to monitor the thermometer diagrams because they can show you how your project is doing financially based on automatical comparison of actual situation to the financing plan and also how will it evolve from financial viewpoint. So they do not show only the present, actual state, but also predict the future. Thermometers are everywhere in Navigo – at every project, its subsidiary parts, in WBS or at the subcontracts. You can read more about thermometer diagrams here.

Second option to monitor your budget is so called EVM chart or analysis of earned value. This chart is also created automatically and we can see here the relationships between the time frame, budget and amount. It is obvious if the work done and money spent equals to the planned work. Even though this chart displays the status of a project in more complex way, only the thermometers offer the financial prediction. More about EVM here.

Part of the budget control is also the control over the deadlines of your invoices, so over the date of their issuing and due date. Deadlines for income which need to be invoiced are displayed in Navigo based on planned income. Data for all of your invoices and invoicing are displayed in Deadlines.

Temporal schedule (plan) control

All the time-related data related to project are displayed in Gantt chart. They were either inserted there while planning the project based on time or Gantt chart was created automatically at another way of planning.

Plan of the project involves temporal schedule as well as contractual commitments which are tied to a specific date. Navigo displays all these dates and commitments while realizing project in the deadlines. At the event of failing to fulfill your commitments untill the given deadline at WBS or allocations, this deadline will automatically go red.

If there is a change in the deadline, for example at the subcontract, you do not need to re-plan anything manually thanks to Navigo. Navigo contains user-invisible package of smart functions, so called: temporal references, which will contain the situation with the changes and relationships automatically. At the event of changing one deadline the others will change as well.

You can connect the important dates with specific parts of the project by using the function Milestones. Thanks to that, at the event of a change, the plan will update so all the activities follow up and all the key commitments can be fulfilled. Every change at temporal plan will automatically transfer into the section with important deadlines.

Control over the work on the project

It is stated in the plan of the project how many hours and which specific people or types of works will be necessary for the given project. As soon as the employees will start to report their work on the project you will be able to see how much from the budget is being spent on their work but also how depleted is your budget compared to the work and temporal plan. In the first scenario it is necessary to monitor the thermometers and in the second one the EVM chart.

Navigo also allows the employees to assign the tasks on the project and makes it easier and faster to approve the key points of the project. Notification system helps with that.

Subcontracts control

Subcontracts can be scheduled and assigned their deadlines and financing even at the plan of the project. During the project realization, it is then possible to monitor if the subcontracts use up the budget and also their deadlines and invoicing. More about the subcontracts here.

From project management to the company management

By planning and realizing the project in Navigo you will also get the automatic outputs important not only for the project itself but also for the whole company. We are talking about for example: cashflow, capacity plan etc. More about managing the company via Navigo here.