Project management

Project management can be approached in various ways. The differences in the management of individual projects compared to the management of several projects simultaneously, i.e. multi-project management, are significant.

If your company only has one or two projects to plan and manage in parallel, which run independently of each other anyway, this can still be done manually using Excel or with individual project management tools such as Trello. If, on the other hand, you have to handle a large number of different projects, which also access the same resources, at the same time, it quickly becomes crucial that you always have an overview of all your projects and resources.

How Blue Ant helps you with project planning

Our project management software provides you with a structuring tool to help you organise multi-project management clearly, transparently and efficiently, from the planning to the implementation and evaluation of your projects.

To create a resilient basis for the success of your projects, realistic activity planning and resource planning are especially important. As a multi-project management tool, Blue Ant places special emphasis on this.

In activity planning, you define which activities or tasks are to be done in your project, and which must be completed in order to achieve your overall or intermediate goals. In other words, you define the "what" and also say in which order the activities have to be completed. Resource planning, on the other hand, defines which people, skills or material you need and how long you need them for to bring a project to a successful conclusion.

Plan precisely & stick to the project plan

Often, the same people and their know-how are needed again and again in different projects. So precise planning is indispensable in multi-project management. First define the necessary activities, tasks and the respective time requirements, and only then the required resources (human and material).

Blue Ant gives you a precise overview of where you need a certain person or materials. You immediately recognise where bottlenecks can arise and where longer running times are required because the person or material is already assigned to another project at the time required. This way you can identify and prevent overlaps, delays and negative effects on your projects from the very early stages of your project planning.

When planning your project:

• Don't forget to get the resources you need approved. Only then can you be sure that your plan will work.
• Learn to plan neither too inexactly nor in too much detail. Otherwise you will have to deal with over or under-estimation or with enormous pressure to change your planning.
• Choose the appropriate planning method. If it is important to you that your resources are accurately mapped on a weekly or daily level, use the agile method and plan in sprints at specific intervals. If the dependencies of the tasks and a deadline are particularly important to you, choose classic project planning. 

Blue Ant excels in both classic and agile project planning and supports you with:

• Fast creation of projects using project templates
• Linking of activities across projects
• Definition of employee, project or individual cost rates down to activity level
• Centrally managed ToDo lists
• Kanban boards
• Much more

Blue Ant is also a reliable assistant during the implementation and administration of your projects. This is especially true when assessing whether your planning is in line with reality. Our project management software provides you with various tools and features for this purpose.

With Blue Ant task organisation, you give your team members work packages including deadlines and “ToDos”. Your team members, in turn, report back regularly on whether work has been done on these work packages.

In time planning, you also record the amount of work in order to keep track of the project's progress. Consistency is the key here, so that you have a chance to recognise any imbalance and intervene in at an early stage.

Ad hoc tasks must be completed quickly so that they do not hinder the implementation of other activities. Blue Ant solves this requirement using ToDos, with a reminder function, so that your team members can complete them quickly.

Working with availabilities

To prevent delays, you need up-to-date information on the availability of your staff. This becomes particularly clear in cases of illness. When planning the project, you made assumptions and assumed the optimal case of "everyone healthy". If cases of illness are not communicated and taken into account quickly enough, they can soon become a challenge in the implementation of your projects, throwing your time planning into disarray.

A tried and tested multi-project management tool, Blue Ant ensures that information about absences actually reaches the project management, and can be approved or rejected if required, for example in the case of holidays. In this way, you always have time and resource planning firmly under control.

Manage projects, balance costs

Blue Ant also helps you plan project costs. Your project management can compare the planned expenses (material costs) with the actual costs already incurred at any time, down to the level of individual work packages. You can choose whether the material costs are to be organised using Blue Ant or in an external ERP system. Blue Ant provides you with a variety of suitable interfaces and connectors. With our project management software, you can put this information into a timeline context with just a few clicks and check in no time at all which costs and budgets have been incurred over weeks, months or even over several years.

At this point, Blue Ant's extensive project administration tools become important. In Blue Ant, project management can assign detailed access rights. For example, they can determine which employees or external persons have access to which documents, who is allowed to change values, data and contents, or who is only granted viewing rights.

Ticket management instead of gridlock

Any serious project management tool must be able to support project implementation with practical ticket management. A ticket can be understood as a small task that must be completed at a certain point in time in order to ensure the progress of one or more ongoing projects.

In Blue Ant, tickets are not directly included in the corresponding project. Instead, project management first clarifies the importance of a ticket before deciding how and when a ticket is to be processed further. This avoids congestion and blockages caused by too many small-scale, but in the overall view irrelevant individual tasks in your projects.

Are stand-alone solutions not enough?

If you are now wondering whether it is not enough to connect a ticket system to your basic project management software, first assess your initial situation. Individual, stand-alone software solutions for project management, resource and task organisation can be flexible on their own. However, due to the complexity of your projects and tasks, are you dependent on transferring the data from the different tools into a common, coherent context without having to maintain it separately? If so, isolated solutions quickly become a burden and produce unnecessarily high time and cost expenditures.

As an integrated solution for multi-project management, Blue Ant creates a uniform database for each product and thus provides an overview of resources, capacities, availabilities, pending tasks and more. Since all information is available in a uniformly structured layout, it can be used multiple times for varying perspectives, without you having to enter data three or four times, then manually adjust, condense and analyse it.

Did you know that MS PowerPoint is one of the most popular tools for controlling? The reason is simple: project managers need to communicate figures, data and facts to stakeholders, clients and team leaders who are not involved in the day-to-day business but still need to stay informed.

Blue Ant provides you with the essential figures for your own overview, back-up, coordination with other project managers and the aforementioned unavoidable reports in a particularly fast, simple and secure way. To achieve this, reporting starts at the so-called "single point of truth" - the reliable and centrally stored data within Blue Ant itself. Of course, you can condense this data manually if the "operating altitude" provided is not sufficient for you, but you can do so on the basis of secure data.

You decide which type of evaluation you want: a commercial evaluation in the form of a statement that also serves you as a performance record? Or an ad-hoc report or detailed documentation? Do you need a report on resource utilisation, key figures in tabular form or GANTT diagrams that can be quickly recorded? Blue Ant offers you a wide range of display options and levels of detail for preparing your reports.

Project software has become an almost indispensable tool for companies of all sizes. It enables better planning and control of processes, individual project steps and human and financial resources before, during and after a project. But not every project management tool is equally suitable for every company. Are you running several internal and external projects in parallel? Then a free app will quickly reach its limits, even if it would have performed well in a different environment with a different task. So how do you find the best project management software for the tasks in your company?

Since project, portfolio and resource management are mutually dependent and influence each other, a high degree of complexity arises even with a small number of projects and resources. For example, if resource utilisation changes, this affects the strategic planning of the portfolios. Single project management is also affected when looking at time planning. If the completion date of a project is postponed, this changes the resource requirements, but resources may have already been committed elsewhere. A kind of chain reaction develops that now requires a prioritisation and reorganisation of projects at portfolio level.

So, it’s clear why software for managing numerous projects simultaneously is so useful: the data from all areas must interact and be synchronised in one planning tool. Otherwise it becomes disconnected and represents different views of one and the same project landscape. What's more, this data is no longer reliable, because the overall picture required for planning reliability can only be achieved through the interaction of the data.

With the help of multi-project management software, also known as project portfolio management software, this can be accomplished, as long as the solution combines and networks the three sub-areas of project, portfolio and resource management. This often leads to greater complexity when introducing the software, but soon pays off with a coherent project landscape. Everyone is now looking at the same database, albeit from different perspectives. This applies to portfolio management as well as resource and project management.

Multi-project management and task management is too complex to be simply written down and easily handled. Before you start selecting the best project management tool for you, you should once again formulate the functional requirements in concrete terms. What are the mandatory and optional functional and methodological requirements? Simply copying feature overviews from the manufacturers of enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) or project software tools is not enough. This may point you in the direction of a solution that can do a lot. But it does not help you to find the best project management software for your precise needs.

Every good project management tool must have these essential features:

• The core requirements from the three sub-areas of project, portfolio and resource management are in place.
• The administrative core requirements are met. The project software is operated in Germany or Europe (for cloud applications).
• The software has a modern user interface and is user-friendly.
• The planning software can be customised by the user to their own requirements without help from the manufacturer
• The project tool has powerful rights management (can be combined with LDAP and SSO)
• The data objects can be extended by the user without the help of the manufacturer (define own screens and data fields)
• Release and approval workflows can be defined by the user.
• There are interfaces (APIs - REST services) for reading and writing data.
• There are connectors for importing and exporting data, ideally time-controlled, e.g. for budget management or time recording.
• Interfaces to authentication systems (SSO, LDAP) are available.
• There is a report generator for preparing data in the form of analyses, presentations or reports.
• Personal data is stored and anonymised in accordance with the requirements of the GDPR.