What is ProjectLoad? (Cont.)
ProjectLoad is a computer system that organizes, tracks, and forecasts the entire workload of a group of people.
In most organizations there are multiple people who each work on multiple projects. Organizing the work from a person's perspective doesn't show the relationship of one person's tasks with other people working on the same projects. Organizing the work from a project perspective misses the effects of having projects compete for a person's time. ProjectLoad combines project management with resource management and tracks the relationship between them over time. It functions by:
- Allowing an administrator to add people and establish a default work schedule and level of authority for each.
- Allowing project managers to define projects and set the overall target dates and estimated hours (if applicable).
- Allowing project managers to assign individuals to work on pieces of the projects (activities) and letting each person set target dates and estimated hours to do each activity. (Project managers can choose to allow people to assign themselves activities on a project.)
- Using the project estimates, work schedules of personnel, and activity estimates to automatically generate detailed forecasts for each person, activity, and project.
- Highlighting areas that exceed boundary conditions such as activities that will not be completed within the project target dates and personnel who are overloaded and will need to work overtime to achieve their target dates.
- Displaying complex data in simple interfaces that only provide the information each person will need, but include drill down capability for more details.
- Providing extensive reporting and exporting capabilities to access historical and forecasted information from a variety of perspectives and summary levels.
- Including drill down capability on all reports to show underlying data for summary information.
ProjectLoad is an Internet application.
Your only contact with it is through a standard Internet web browser. It is available twenty-four hours a day from any location on the planet (where you can reach the Internet). You don't have to worry about:
- Installing software on a server or on anyone's desktop. All they need is a browser and an Internet connection.
- Upgrading software to new versions or applying patches. You are always running the latest version automatically.
- Maintaining the database. Our personnel handle all aspects of version upgrades, database configuration, performance tuning, daily backups, disaster recovery and system administration.
- Providing physical security for the servers and databases. The servers are housed in a multi million dollar data center with redundant Internet connections, an uninterruptible power supply, fire suppression, hurricane rated facilities, and armed guards.
- Providing virtual security for the servers and databases. All servers are hardened for security and kept current with the latest security upgrades. A mirror data center is maintained in real time replication at a remote facility to allow immediate fail over in the event of a catastrophic failure of the primary facility.
ProjectLoad is simple.
A project and resource management system must be easy to use or it will not be used. ProjectLoad does not handle every methodology or every aspect of project management. Instead it strives to provide a simple methodology and implement it in a computer system that is sophisticated enough to provide simple user interfaces. This philosophy shows up in everything from our choice to build the system as an Internet application to the way the pages provide everything needed for normal daily use in one place.
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