Project planning
Structure, control and plan your projects with foresight, realistically and professionally.
The success of your projects stands and falls with a well thought-out and holistic project planning. Thus, the planning of a project is a central task of project management. With project structure elements such as work packages, tasks and milestones in Projektron BCS, you can structure and plan your projects easily, reliably and clearly. With the integrated functions for time planning, resource planning and budget planning, all information relevant for detailed planning flows into your project plan right from the start. Create the ideal basis for successful project control with project planning in the software!
Projektron BCS project planning: Software that puts your projects on the right track
➤ You want to make sure that you map every eventuality in the project plan?
➤ You want to guarantee that no one in your project team is overloaded?
➤ Documentation and comparability of different planning statuses is important to you?
➤ You want to assign each project task to a qualified employee?
➤ Your customers demand well-founded calculations and cost plans at an early stage?
➤ You would like to prevent impending resource bottlenecks already in the project planning phase?
➤ Do you want complete freedom to plan your projects top-down or bottom-up?
➤ Are you planning projects on an international level and have to make time-consuming calculations in several currencies?
With the comprehensive project management software Projektron BCS you make exactly the right choice for all these concerns, because its tools for project planning are:
versatile, because the right wizard is available for every desired planning approach.
clear, because they allow you to configure project structure elements and planning views according to your needs.
interactive, since they not only map your planning, but also actively support it.
up-to-date, since the project plan maps project progress in real time.
foresighted, since they detect impending bottlenecks in resource planning at an early stage.
comprehensive, since they plan structure, cost, and resource planning in one process.
time-saving, since they allow templates to be created for all structural elements.
economical, as they help you find the perfect balance between time, effort, and cost.
international thanks to multi-currency capability.
The project planning functions in Projektron BCS are available via the corresponding user licenses for project administrators and project managers. See for yourself and plan your next project with Projektron BCS.
Your planning assistant for every approach
No matter which planning approach fits best for your project planning: BCS comes up with the appropriate planning wizard that guides you through the necessary planning steps in a structured way. The wizard automatically adapts to the planning approach of your choice:
Bottom-up planning: do you start your project planning at the task level? In this case, the bottom-up planning mode supports you in determining an overall budget.
Top-down planning: Do you start with an overall budget and need to distribute it sensibly among subprojects and tasks? No problem with planning according to the top-down approach in Projektron BCS.
Reverse project planning: Or would you like a bit of both planning approaches? With reverse project planning, you benefit from the advantages of the bottom-up and top-down planning models.
Do you sometimes plan projects with long durations? In this case, you will appreciate the time slices in Projektron BCS. They allow you to plan order values and planning efforts with foresight, without binoculars or a wide-angle lens.
Get off to a structured start with project phases and the work breakdown structure
Do you already have all the necessary information at the start of the project to create a meticulously prepared project plan that equips your project team for all eventualities? No?
No problem, because with the freely definable project phases in Projektron BCS, you can let your project plan grow successively with your level of information and gain contour. The project phases allow you to design an initial rough structure and schedule at a very early stage. Define individual project phases centrally in BCS and display them in colors of your choice in the clear Gantt chart. Project managers can access their project phases at any time and generate a new project-specific phase plan with just a few clicks.
Work breakdown structures (WBS) are the basis of project organization. They divide projects into manageable sub-areas and thus make the project structure easy to grasp for all project participants. They form the basis for detailed planning, project control and all subsequent project management activities. In Projektron BCS, you have two view options to choose from to display your work breakdown structure:
Tree view of the work breakdown structure: Navigate flexibly within the different structure levels and edit each part of your project structure as you wish.
Graphical view of the work breakdown structure: BCS displays your plan as a graphical structure plan so that you can immediately see hierarchical project structures and personnel assignments. Status colors also allow you to see the current processing status of each individual project structure element at a glance.
Which plan variant is more efficient? To find out, you can compare different planning statuses in the Gantt chart. Save intermediate statuses of structure plans as a base plan so that you can use it later as a comparison plan. You can also compare team plans, effort plans and material cost plans - the tabular baseline comparison in the project planning software is perfect for this!
Interactive project planning with system
Projektron BCS offers you various project structure elements with which you can plan your project professionally:
Sub-projects/sub-sub-projects
Work packages
Tasks
Milestones
Permanent tasks
The dependencies End/Start and Start/End allow you to set the various structural elements in the appropriate relationship. In the clearly arranged tree view, you can enter effort estimates and structure your project as deeply as you like by integrating checklists and workflows. In this way, you can create a detailed schedule in no time at all. Such a network plan graphically represents activities, tasks and milestones in the project, their chronological order and logical dependencies between the activities and forms the basis for your subsequent scheduling.
Project planning is easy: You can drag and drop subprojects, tasks and work packages into the right order. If you have made a mistake, you can restore the original status with a single click. Use a wizard to define templates for complete project structures, tasks, checklists or workflows to save valuable time when planning all future projects.
You can keep an eye on dependencies and scheduling particularly well in the interactive Gantt chart. As a special form of network diagram, the Gantt chart displays the project structure elements you have created on a time axis. With just a few mouse movements, you can edit your scheduling and sequence planning directly in the diagram. It provides many additional display options for evaluation, such as the critical path. Projektron BCS automatically calculates the appropriate schedule, provided you have specified the duration and dependency of structural elements.
Well-founded calculation: Cost calculation and resource management for your project planning
In team planning, you can easily determine who should be part of the project team, who will take on which roles, and the hierarchy of the team members in relation to each other using drag-and-drop. If some personnel and responsibilities have not yet been determined, placeholders and groups of people are available. Alternatively, you can also search for the required skills to put together the perfect project team. In the project plan, you directly define how much time per month or per project each team member should spend on the individual project tasks and work packages. By defining responsibilities and accountabilities, you also lay the foundation for communication planning, because all project participants are informed about project progress or planning changes that are relevant to them.
At the same time, you always keep an eye on the availability of all employees in the dynamic display of resource utilization. In real time, the resource management tool shows you which employee has the necessary skills to complete a task and has free capacity. If you change your project planning, effects on the workload of the employees become directly visible. In the Gantt chart, you can also see immediately when a resource bottleneck could occur in your project.
Is manual resource planning still too time-consuming for you? No problem thanks to resource-oriented scheduling. Projektron BCS automatically adjusts your planning so that the specified maximum utilization of employees is not exceeded.
Based on your structure and effort plan, you can use the multi-level cost planning in Projektron BCS to create well-founded calculations at an early stage. These calculations are available for target/actual comparisons during the course of the project. The project management software automatically calculates the personnel costs for your project based on the resource requirements and the stored internal and external hourly rates and daily rates. You can also assign the calculated costs to cost centers, cost types and cost objects and evaluate them in detail.
Alexander Stoß
IT Controller and IT Administrator, DFB GmbH & Co. KG, Frankfurt am Main
“Working with project templates in BCS is super convenient, simple and very time-saving. I read through the documentation at the beginning and after ten minutes I was able to create a project template and create a project from it.”
Gesine Chatfield
Directora de Tecnología de la Información, IQTIG, Berlín
"BCS es una herramienta de gestión fiable e indispensable para que gestionemos nuestros proyectos de forma eficiente y utilicemos nuestros recursos de forma sensata y selectiva. En BCS conseguimos recorrer fácilmente los pasos de planificación utilizando los asistentes. Los empleados que quieren realizar tareas más complejas en la planificación de proyectos pueden hacerlo llamando directamente a las máscaras."
Jörg Klenke
Management Board | PMO, BURGER ENGINEERING GmbH & Co. KG
“BCS not only ensures greater transparency during project execution and for internal project controlling, but also for the customer during the planning phase: even the first rough planning can be shared with the customer via BCS. This makes the entire process and the estimated costs and budgets more transparent for our customers.”
Volker Weber
Project Management Office, Strategic Development and Communication, German National Library
"What we particularly appreciate about Projektron BCS is the combination of project planning and resource control, as well as the fine-grained rights structure, which allows differentiated views of the project participants from different departments."
Thomas Schlegel
IT Development (Architecture and Infrastructure), HanseMerkur Krankenversicherung AG
"The flexibility of the software greatly accommodated the recurring change requirements here. Today, templates are used for typical planning objects, which support the creation of new components or projects, for example, and ensure a standardization of structures. The administrative effort could thus be reduced and the concentration on the content increased."
Planning and managing material costs: simple and efficient in BCS
Discover the comprehensive functions of BCS for the efficient management of material costs in your projects! With the "Material cost plan" view in the Projects workspace, you can easily record internal costs for material services and external services in one place and edit them in detail. Use planned material costs as a reference for recording costs incurred at different levels of your project - be it at project, sub-project, work package or task level.
Inserting new planned and actual material costs? No problem! You can easily insert them via the action menu and even drag and drop them in edit mode. Benefit from the option of defining planned internal costs and sales prices as well as displaying and editing descriptions from the master data of the non-personnel costs. Best of all, actual material costs can be easily copied and linked to planned material costs, while external suppliers can be easily linked to material costs for detailed sales analysis.
You can easily duplicate planned material costs. And thanks to the new material cost plan tree view at project group level, you always have an overview. Individual sub-views for overall and interval planning as well as the option of filtering according to various properties in tree views make analysis and evaluation child's play.
But that's not all: cost accounting and billability details are already preset, and expected travel and expenses can also be easily entered as planned non-personnel costs. Simply assign a corresponding cost type and off you go! These comprehensive functions make managing and monitoring your non-personnel costs in projects easier than ever before. Experience BCS and optimize your project work today!
Project planning at intervals: Orders, effort planning and material cost planning
Project planning in intervals with the tools in Projektron enables the distribution of order values, planned efforts of employees and material costs to specific time intervals. It provides detailed and time-based control over the resources and costs of a project in time slices.
Order planning allows you to define order values for the project in monthly, quarterly or annual intervals. You can define these values manually for each interval or have them distributed automatically on the basis of a total order value.
With effort planning without intervals in Projektron BCS, you enter the total effort that each employee should spend on a task. With effort planning in intervals, you can specify how much effort an employee should spend on a task per interval. This procedure can be particularly useful for projects and tasks with long durations.
Material cost planning in intervals allows you to create planned material costs for the project in monthly, quarterly or annual intervals. Here too, you can either distribute the costs manually or have the tool automatically distribute them evenly over the intervals.
Project planning of international format: multi-currency capability
Does your project planning know no boundaries? Do you calculate and plan in euros, but charge your customer in US dollars or yuan? Calculate confidently with project planning in Projektron BCS: You calculate comfortably in your local currency, and the software does the rest for you. BCS automatically generates quotations or invoices in your customer's currency. Daily rates, external hourly rates or article prices are centrally provided with all currencies relevant for your company and transferred to your project planning as required.
For project controlling and project evaluation you have the free choice: BCS outputs the data, reports and analyses in your desired currency. BCS already provides a wide range of different currencies. If the currency you are looking for is not available, you can expand the selection quickly and easily
Exchange rates for relevant currencies can either be displayed automatically or you can enter a rate manually. Have you agreed a fixed conversion rate with your customer? Count on Projektron BCS: With one click, you can fix an exchange rate for your project.
BCS for your project planning: You can plan with these advantages
Planning aids through wizards for top-down, bottom-up and counter-project planning.
Intuitive planning thanks to interactive diagrams and simple operation via drag-and-drop
Customizable selection of project structure elements (subprojects, work packages, tasks, milestones, standing tasks)
Time savings and standardization through individual templates
Documented planning statuses and project progress recorded in real time for target/actual comparisons
Automatic schedule optimization
Resource-based scheduling to prevent bottlenecks or overloading of employees
Automatic personnel cost calculation
Full multi-currency capability
