Project Management 101: Dealing with ongoing projects Written on May 14, 2012, by admin.

Few weeks ago our support team received an interesting question from a client. She asked:

“If a project was finished, but new things came up, should I just reopen the project and add a new activity or create a new project, instead?”

That’s a tricky one and, as you probably suspect, the answer is: “It depends.”

Let’s review some of the common scenarios and possible solutions.
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Project Management 101: Top 3 tips to break out of Catch-22 Written on May 8, 2012, by admin.

As a project management software vendor we talk to literally hundreds of organizations every month. Quite often the same reason is given to explain why they’re looking for a project management tool: “We are very busy and constantly putting out fires. So we need to improve the planning and tracking of our projects. Can your product help us?”
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Project Management 101: What are Portfolios for? Written on May 1, 2012, by admin.

Portfolios are used to simplify the management of a group of current or planned projects.

The simplest usage scenario for portfolios is when you want to combine all your projects by department (e.g. IT, Marketing, Financial, etc.) or by business goals (e.g. Increase Revenue by 25%, Improve Customer Retention, etc.)

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Project Management 101: Why Use Estimated Hours? Written on April 23, 2012, by admin.

Before we start talking about Estimated Hours, we should first discuss Actual Hours. So if you have never tracked time spent on jobs, the whole concept of estimated hours is probably quite foreign to you.

So let’s start with some definitions…

Estimated Hours – the amount of time you think it’s going to take someone to complete a task or a project.

Actual Hours – the real amount of time it took to finish that task or project.

Estimated Hours vs. Estimated Duration
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Email notifications in Easy Projects Written on April 4, 2012, by admin.

Howdy folks! Al from Client Services is here…

E-mail really is a wonderful invention is it? It allows us to communicate with others, without the need for interruption.

For example – when I need to get an update on a project, or ask a question to my boss I’ve found that e-mails are my best solution. Rather than having to walk across the office, see if he’s busy, explain what I need etc, I can simply write everything out in a e-mail and he can respond when he has the time.

Of course there are some instances where it’s mission critical that I get a quick answer, but a majority of the time I’ll get my answer a few hours after I’ve written it. I’ve saved myself the hassle of having to check if he’s busy, I’ve also spared him the hassle of dropping whatever he’s working on to answer a question. This month I’d like to focus on this powerful tool, that sometimes gets overlooked in Easy Projects.

Currently, you can do the following with the e-mail notifications:

1. Create common notification rules
   You can create one rule (whom should get notified on which certain actions) and apply that to all of your projects.
2. Multiple notification rules per project
   As opposed to the common notification rule, you can create a series of rules for each project also.
3. Personalized e-mails to specific individuals
   Using the “Update Status” button found on the My Assignments page, you can write a personalized message to any assignee on the activity or any project team member
4. Downloadable templates
   All the e-mail notifications that are sent from the software can be editied and re-uploaded from Administration –> Settings –> Notifications –> Email Templates.
5. Tasks due for this week
   Easy Projects can e-mail you a list of all the tasks you are assigned to that are due for that week Simply go to My Options –> Notifications.
6. Compile all e-mail notifications into a single digest
   If you find that you are getting too many email notifications from the system, you can have them compiled into a single digest that will be sent at a specified intervals (example – every 4 hours).

Take care!

5 Easy Steps to Structure Your First Project Written on April 2, 2012, by admin.

When you’re new to the whole project management concept it’s very easy to get lost in the amount of jargon, new concepts and the plethora of complicated PM methodologies.

Here are 5 simple steps to create and structure your first project. We’ll use a sample project of creating and delivering a training course to illustrate these steps.

Step 1: Define Key Parameters
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Interactive Gantt Chart Hot Keys Written on March 28, 2012, by admin.

For those of us who prefer a keyboard to a mouse, hot keys can shave off a lot of valuable time while working.

Here are the hot keys for Easy Projects Interactive Gantt Chart:
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How to plan your project backwards from a deadline Written on March 26, 2012, by admin.

Sometimes you know when your project is supposed to be completed and need to work backwards to determine when you should start it. To do this you need to work with dependencies.

Dependencies are used when a set of tasks must be worked on and closed in a specific order. For example, if your project involved building a website for a client, you would need their content before you could go live with the site.
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Project Management 101: What are Milestones? Written on March 19, 2012, by admin.

In a reference to Project Management, a milestone is a special event that requires special attention. Milestones can add significant value to project scheduling. They help project managers to more accurately determine whether or not the project is on schedule.

There are two most common ways of using milestones:
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Project Management 101: Why would we use Parent/Child Activities? Written on March 12, 2012, by admin.

When you’re creating an activity you have a choice to choose its parent task.

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