Thursday, August 21, 2008

TPAssist User Success - Project Management



TPAssist facilitates project management...



  • Plan / Communicate - A key aspect to project planning is the ability to easily and quickly identify tasks, groups of task, interdependencies, time and effort. Mindjet® MindManager® is an excellent tool for achieving this. Coupled with TPAssist 2007, you can automate dates, dependencies, task information roll-up and record where you first made and then changed your plans. TPAssist 2007 also has tools to export project plan details to Microsoft Excel® for communication, costing and analysis.


  • Manage Projects - The most important aspect to project management, however, is the ability to manage the "Levers of control" (i.e. Scope, Schedule, People, Materials, Quality and Risk) The flexibility of Mindjet® MindManager® means you can quickly and easily adjust the plan to suit the changes in the project. With TPAssist 2007, you can keep track of status, use Red-Amber-Green flags, priorities and also maintain an audit trail of all actions and communications.


  • Enable Workflow - Use MindManager and TPAssist to construct workflow tasks, set durations/effort and assign ownership. Also linking them with relationships and automated dates. As you progress your workflow, using TPAssist, you can visually track steps taken and yet to be taken. In addition, because your actions are tracked with-in the map, you have an instant audit trail of your workflow progress.


    • Track Costs - TPAssist uses custom properties to capture financial estimates and actual values. This values will be rolled-up the map to provide the visually means to track any number of financial aspects associated with task, stage/phase, project and portfolio. TPAssist 2007's publish to Microsoft® Excel® capability also provides "pivot source" worksheets, which are flat exports of map topics specifically formatted to facilitate pivot tables, charting and other manipulation to help you analysis and present project details.


    • Be more effective - Project Management is ultimately about two activities: planning and management. Linear task management tools, particularly when Gantt enabled, are great tools for planning the project and communicating the plan. However, these linear tools are less effective when it comes to managing the project.

    Also see the TPAssist Project Management Tools Summary.