Micro Planner is a family of products with different facilities and prices which can be used independently or combined to provide an enterprise-wide solution. Manager is ideal at the project level, while X-Pert is designed for use at higher levels for consolidating and managing many projects or many components of a single large project.
CROSS PLATFORM
Engineers may be using UNIX workstations, but what if managers are using PCs or Macintoshes? With Micro Planner, everyone can be working on the same project, passing data back and forth. Micro Planner is virtually identical on all platforms and the data files are totally compatible.
INTUITIVE USER INTERFACE
The most important element of any enterprise-wide project management system is a consistent and easy-to-use interface. Micro Planner's innovative project desktop has won many Editor's Choice awards on the Macintosh for its intuitive look and feel. Beginners get up to speed quickly and power users are more productive.
Desktop icons represent all the project elements such as PERT and Gantt charts, Work Breakdown, Tables, Calendars, Resources, etc. Icons can be moved around on the desktop or placed in folders to arrange the project any way the user likes. Point and click to open any view and all views are interactive so that a change made in one view is automatically shown in all views.
RESOURCE DRIVEN SCHEDULING
Micro Planner's sophisticated resource analysis optimizes your limited resources by applying them to critical path tasks first. You can work with 4 different types of analysis to determine the resources required to hit deadlines, or the date you can expect to finish given the resources you have.
MULTI-PROJECT SCHEDULING
Projects don't exist in a vacuum. Every new project must co-exist and compete with existing projects for your organization's limited resources. Micro Planner handles multiple projects as easily as one. You can analyze resource requirements across all projects to get a true picture of potential shortfalls throughout the organization. Executives can easily access the status of all projects as well as current and forecasted resource utilization. Proactive decisions can then be made about which projects can realistically be expected to complete and when and how to employ resources more effectively.
ROLLING UP INFORMATION
In addition to providing an outline method for building a project, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a powerful way to produce cost and date summaries. You can build a tree-structured hierarchy of work packages to collect costs into their appropriate costing category or account.
ENTERPRISE-WIDE PROJECT COMMUNICATION
Manager and X-Pert were designed from the bottom up to support the enterprise-wide project management needs of all organizations. Whether your organization practices decentralized or centralized decision making, Micro Planner supports your project information needs. For centralized decision making, Manager projects can be merged into X-Pert for a consolidated look at all projects.
In support of decentralized decision making, Manager and X-Pert files can be dynamically linked so that a change in a Manager project automatically updates another project in X-Pert! This is especially valuable in large or technically complex projects with multiple groups managing different parts of the effort.
