Project management functions in BCS

Successful project management begins even before detailed project planning: With the project preparation functions in the Projektron BCS project management software, you create the ideal framework and starting conditions for the success of your project. With system-supported target definitions, stakeholder analyses and environment considerations, you start ideally equipped.

• Goal definition: Define and edit project goals, sub-goals and sub-objectives and present them in a project goal graphic.
• Environment analysis: Analyze your project environment and identify all environmental factors that can influence the course of the project, be it parallel projects, relationships with conflict potential or synergy effects.
• Stakeholders: Identify and record stakeholders for your project and evaluate their influence and support potential in the stakeholder analysis.
• Opportunity and risk analysis: Counter identified risks by defining effective countermeasures and exploit opportunities by planning suitable support measures.
• Significance: Define the strategic importance of a project and weight values for the areas of innovation, image, market potential, customer requirement and profitability, shown in the radar chart.
• Project application wizard: Prepare the application for your project in a professional manner.
• Project applications: Review project applications clearly, compare and decide based on data which project applications will be approved.
• Report generation: Create a project application report in no time, summarizing all the necessary information for preparing your project in one document.

More about project preparation with BCS

Create and plan your projects in Projektron BCS according to different project planning models (top-down, bottom-up or counter-intuitive) and project management methods (PRINCE2, IPMA, Hermes, AutomotiveSPICE, PMI).

• Project planning wizard: Plan your project in ten steps, through which the Projektron BCS project planning wizard guides you.
• Project templates: create and use project templates from projects, sub-projects and project structure elements such as work packages, tasks and milestones to create your work breakdown structure.
• Network: Place structure items in the appropriate dependency relationship and structure your project as deeply as you like with tasks, checklists, and workflows to create a detailed schedule.
• Schedule: Manually plan the schedule of your project and project phases directly in the dynamic Gantt chart, in terms of on-time scheduling based on the duration of tasks and dependencies between project structure elements, or in terms of resource-driven scheduling based on optimal utilization of your project team.
• Team planning: Staff your project team based on skills with the appropriate employees at optimal resource utilization.
• Multi-level cost planning: Based on your structure and effort plan, you create well-founded calculations at an early stage, which you can use for target/actual comparisons later in the project.
• Baseline comparison: Save different planning statuses of your work breakdown structures, schedules, structure plans, team plans, effort plans, and non-personnel cost plans as baselines to compare them with each other.

More about Project Planning with BCS

Organize project work efficiently and react proactively to changes: With a wide range of tools for project communication, project documentation and project adaptation, our project management software Projektron BCS supports you.

• Project progress: Always keep track of the processing status of each individual task thanks to clear displays, such as in the Kanban board, the project overview or the Gantt chart, track the progress of the project in detail and see which employee is currently working on which task.
• Project execution: If desired, the BCS Assistant supports you in implementing your project on schedule and in compliance with planned efforts.
• Project calendar: You can use your project calendar to view subproject goals or milestones and easily create meeting dates and appointments.
• Change requests: Use the ticket system in Projektron BCS to control, document and track approval procedures for changes in project planning.
• Project-related time recording: The members of your project teams book their working hours directly to the tasks to which they are assigned in the project. The effort data is directly available for ongoing project controlling and invoicing.
• Staff scheduling: As a project manager, prioritize tasks and schedule your staff accordingly with just a few clicks.
• Project documentation: In the progress log in BCS, you centrally record all relevant information in chronological order.
• Quality assurance: use the checklists and automated workflows to provide your project team with clear guidelines for the professional execution of your projects.
• Project communication: in addition to communication within the project team, BCS also supports communication with stakeholders and external project participants with a wide range of options.

More on Project Execution with BCS

Make optimal use of your resources: With central employee management, vacation management, workload analyses as well as planning support, Projektron BCS creates synergies and provides everything you need for your resource planning and management with comprehensive and clear planning tools.

• Workload planning: Determine who should staff your project team with just a few clicks. Thanks to BCS, you can immediately see which employee is available on which day and for how long, and who has the necessary skills. Existing scheduling conflicts can be viewed and resolved centrally.
• Flexible organizational structures: Whether line organization or matrix organization - in Projektron BCS, you map the organizational form of your company and your project organization holistically and clearly in an organizational chart. Define department and project-independent groups of people and assign individuals or groups of people to your project.
• Workload forecasting: Forecast the workload of your employees based on all relevant factors such as project assignments, working hours, basic loads, vacations and absences due to illness.
• Utilization analysis: In the resource preview in Projektron BCS, you can easily recognize the utilization level of an employee thanks to colored bar charts and also keep an eye on line activities in resource planning. In this way, you can also easily manage cross-project capacity planning.
• Utilization mountains: In the graphical analysis of capacity utilization, you can immediately recognize overloads and underloads of individual employees, teams and departments.
• Material resources: Plan material resources, which you manage centrally in the asset management module of Projektron BCS, with just a few clicks.

More about resource management with BCS

Are the projects running as planned? In project controlling you receive all important evaluations of your project key figures, for example in the total cost diagram or in the analysis of material costs and personnel costs in the project. On the basis of effort recording, you monitor the progress of the project and receive a reliable forecast of the key performance indicators. Thanks to material cost recording and external allocation rates, you have an overview of the entire project budget.

• Project overview: As a project controller, get all project deadlines, tasks and important key figures of the project such as total costs incurred, material costs and efforts always in view thanks to the simple tachometer display. You can obtain more detailed information with just one click in the cost diagram or in the effort diagram.
• Monitor project progress: With the milestone trend analysis, you can identify schedule deviations and make well-founded forecasts for stakeholders, management or clients.
• Earned value analysis: Determine the actual project progress and make forecasts about the expected completion date and effort at the end of the project.
• Analysis of project efforts and project costs: Evaluate the commissioned, planned and incurred efforts or costs for the entire project or subordinate project structure elements.
• Analysis of project bookings: View the bookings of individual employees and their remaining effort estimates.
• Project controlling reports: Generate individual project reports in BCS - overview, effort and cost reports according to your needs.

More about Project Controlling with BCS

Focus on the right projects: With resource planning for project groups and multi-project controlling functions, Projektron BCS provides you with the basis for strategic and operational multi-project management.

• Multi-project board: View all projects and their status, priority, project category and most important KPIs in a compact Kanban overview.
• Multi-project controlling: Cross-project evaluations show you not only planned and actual values, but also residual efforts estimated by your project streetcars. In the graphical multi-project evaluation, you immediately recognize where action is required.
• Project groups and project categories: Combine multiple projects into project groups or under different project categories for easier comparison, management and evaluation.
• Resource planning for project groups: As a multi-project manager, set a resource budget at the project group level.
• Cross-project milestones and milestone history

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More on multi-project management with BCS

Generate and compare project proposals from project ideas with the lean portfolio management of Projektron BCS project management software.

• Create and check project ideas: Your employees simply enter project ideas in Projektron BCS. The person responsible receives a suitable checklist for checking.
• Compare project proposals: Evaluate applications according to factors of strategic importance, such as image, innovation, customer requirement, profitability and market potential.
• Assemble project portfolio: Easily add and score projects to portfolios to deliver the right projects at the right time.
• Compare projects: Easily compare the projects in your portfolios with BCS based on their Return of Investment (ROI), Net Present Value (NPV) or Internal Rate of Return (IRR). In the portfolio diagram, you can see at a glance the strategic importance of the projects in your portfolio.

More about portfolio management with BCS

Project management software is an application that helps companies and teams to plan, organize and manage their workflows effectively. It provides a central platform on which project managers, team members and other project participants can coordinate their tasks and projects. This facilitates collaboration and increases the efficiency of work processes.

The seven key benefits of project management software at a glance:

• Greater overview and transparency for all project participants
• Allocation of tasks, responsibilities and structures are clearly defined
• Promotes collaboration and centralizes communication
• Leads to time savings and increases efficiency
• Enables decentralized work on the project
• Optimizes the use of personnel and resources
• Helps to identify and control risks

Projektron BCS not only offers the full range of project management and resource planning functions, but also includes numerous other functional modules that you can use to map your business processes. These ERP functions include, for example, quotation and invoicing, time recording, personnel management, vacation management, contract management, document management, inventory management, customer and contact management (CRM), ticket system or process management according to BPMN 2.0.

The term project management software covers a wide range of different tools and software solutions, depending on the narrowness of the definition. What all project management software tools have in common is that they offer a variety of options for organizing tasks. Some of the most commonly used features are to-do lists, task lists, Kanban boards, a ticket system, calendar views and planning views such as Gantt charts. With these tools, they provide an easy way to create, plan, assign and track tasks and can help increase the efficiency of workflows.

However, the term "project management tool" says nothing about whether you can use the software to carry out professional project management in accordance with internationally recognized standards and methods such as PMI, IPMA, Automotive SPICE, Hermes or Scrum, or whether it is simply a tool for organizing work.

As open-method project management software, Projektron BCS supports all common standards according to agile, classic or hybrid approaches. As part of project management, Projektron BCS project management software supports all tasks that arise in the project life cycle:

• Project preparation
• Project planning, resource planning, capacity planning
• Project execution / project implementation
• project controlling
• Project management / multi-project management
• resource management
• Quality management
• Project risk management
• Project portfolio management (PPM)
• Documentation and reporting

Various planning features and the ability to track tasks in real time allow you to optimize your project management and ensure that projects are completed on time and within budget. Visual tools such as Gantt charts, work breakdown structures, milestone trend analyses and target/actual comparisons make this possible.

However, project management software also provides your team with a central platform where all relevant data is centrally available and where all members can coordinate their tasks and projects. This can help to improve collaboration and communication, increase productivity and ensure more effective use of working time. However, this can also mean that you have to redefine your work processes if you choose project management software that cannot be flexibly adapted to your working methods.

The variety of project management features offered by Projektron BCS can be explored further up this page.

The cost of project management software can vary depending on the provider and the features you need. Many providers offer different plans that allow teams to customize the product to their specific needs. There is often a free or low-cost basic version, as well as various paid plans with advanced features. The payment models are also structured differently (e.g. per month, per year, per module, by number of users or per license). It is important to carefully check which functions you need and which tariff best suits your team. Don't save money in the wrong place and don't introduce a tool that doesn't fit your processes. The selection of suitable project management software is an important project for your company's success and should be well planned.

The prices of Projektron BCS are based on the edition, the number of licenses, the type and number of modules used and the desired service model (license purchase or cloud/SaaS). You can find more information on BCS editions and prices here.

Most project management software tools offer various security functions such as password protection, access authorizations and encryption to ensure the security of your data. Make sure you find out early on in the software selection process whether potential providers meet these security standards.

If you want to be sure that your data is secure, you should either opt for a cloud-based solution that is hosted on certified servers or an on-premise product that you host in your own IT landscape.

Projektron BCS is available in both versions: As a cloud solution (SaaS) and as an on-premise license purchase variant. You can find out more on the Editions and prices page. We also provide transparent information about our extensive information security and data protection measures.

Good project management software includes a comprehensive service that provides support for setting up, integrating and using the software. Customer service should be able to respond quickly and, above all, competently to your questions and concerns and offer you support in solving problems.

In addition, some providers offer training, video tutorials and online resources to help you get the most out of the software and improve team collaboration. Another important service is regular maintenance and updating of the software to ensure that it is always up to date and working optimally.

Projektron BCS is developed and offered by Projektron GmbH in Germany. This is also where our entire consulting and support team is located, providing you with competent, personal, individual and fast support for all the services mentioned above.

How does Projektron BCS compare to popular project management tools such as factro, OpenProject, Wrike, Asana, Trello, InLoox, Jira, Monday or MS Projects? Take a look at our comparison of the most popular project management software solutions. Aspects such as

• Range of functions
• Suitability for different project management methods
• Industry suitability
• Suitability for different company sizes
• Usability and user experience
• Structure of the system (modular, integral/monolithic)
• Interfaces
• Quality standard and data protection
• Customer support
• Service model (SaaS, cloud, on premise)

If you would like to see the results of the comparison for yourself, start your no-obligation test now!