October 2012 - RationalPlan

Project Management Terms – Baseline

A baseline is a reference that is being used as a base for future measurement. In Project Management, the term baseline refers to an accepted and approved project plan. A project baseline is a must for a project manager to monitor and evaluate the success of a project. Without it there is no possibility to compare the current status of the project with the initial estimated one.

Once the project plan gets approved the manager should save it as a baseline plan. For a project there can be saved multiple baselines depending on the project size and how often the project plan changes. Ideally, once the project baseline is created it should not be changed anymore. However, it is sometimes inevitable to adjust it due to a new requirement that implies a major change to scope or cost. Also in rare cases the project was not well scheduled in the initial phase. In these cases the best solution is to keep the initial baseline and to save the adjusted schedule as a new baseline. This way there will be several interim baselines that can be used to remember the potentially bad project management or the team members that did not deliver as promised.

Types of project baselines

Since a project baseline includes many data from a project it is difficult to manage it as a whole and usually it is broken into several parts. This makes the complexity of baseline management easier to deal with. Project baselines generally include:

Scope baseline – the technical, physical and functional requirements for deliverable products
Schedule baseline – the project schedule and all of the elements supporting the schedule
Cost/Budget baseline – an approved budget usually in a time distribution format used to estimate, monitor, and control overall cost performance on the project
Quality/Risk baseline – the set of known possible changes (uncertainties) that could impact the performance of the project (more…)

By Tiberiu Ghioca|2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 26th, 2012|Project Management Glossary|Comments Off

Top 6 for RationalPlan in the Race for the 2012 Project Management Election

Another week is gone and RationalPlan continues the competition for Capterra’s Project Management Election 2012 as one of the six best project management software providers.

Many were and few remained. In the previous round we were classified as one of the first 3 players from The Traditionalists category so we were validated to enter the third round. Thank you all for your support and votes! We hope that you will continue to vote us daily.

Now the election continues with Round 3 where only the best project management product from each category will go to final round. Round 3 ends on October 29 so give us a helping hand and vote RationalPlan as your preferred project management software. Voting is easy and fast and does not require anything from you except two mouse clicks: one for selecting RationalPlan in the The Traditionalists red column and the second one at the bottom of the page to Submit your vote:

Thank you and do not forget to vote RationalPlan for the Project Management Election 2012 every day!

By Tiberiu Ghioca|2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 23rd, 2012|Contests, RationalPlan|Comments Off

RationalPlan in Round 2 of the Race for the 2012 Project Management Election

Last week we announced that RationalPlan has been nominated for Capterra’s Project Management Election 2012 as being one of the 55 contending project management software providers. In the first round we were classified as one of the first 10 players from The Traditionalists category so we were validated to enter the second round. Thank you all that supported us and voted for RationalPlan!

Now the election continues with Round 2 where only the first 3 products from each category will go to next round. Round 3 ends on October 22 so give us a helping hand and vote RationalPlan as your preferred project management software. Voting is easy and fast and does not require anything from you except two mouse clicks: one for selecting RationalPlan in the The Traditionalists red column and the second one at the bottom of the page to Submit your vote:

Thank you and do not forget to vote RationalPlan for the Project Management Election 2012 every day!

By Tiberiu Ghioca|2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 17th, 2012|Contests, RationalPlan|Comments Off

RationalPlan 4.1 Is Ready For Project Managers To Control Their Projects

RationalPlan version 4.1 is out. In this release were added some new features requested by users while others were improved: a customizable subject can now be used when sending emails with assignments to resources, more fields were added when exporting to spreadsheets, improved reporting and a faster way to establish the project workflow and to create dependencies.

RationalPlan is a project management software created to serve many types of users starting from novice project managers, users that need an environment to handle multiple projects and up to companies that need a server solution with concurrent access. It has been developed to help project managers keep their projects on time and within budget.

Changes in RationalPlan 4.1:

added notes to risks on Project Info report
added more fields when exporting to Excel
a faster way to establish the project workflow and to create dependencies
added customizable subject when sending emails with assignments to resources
use auto completion for clients combo box in Project Info view
bug fix related to importing projects to Server
bug fix for computing total actual/remaining costs in Timesheet table
bug fix – scroll to the start of the project on chart each time the current project changes (more…)

By Tiberiu Ghioca|2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 17th, 2012|News, RationalPlan|Comments Off

Creating Budget Or Cost Baseline For Projects

Cost Baseline in RationalPlan Project Management Software In Project Management, the term project baseline refers to an accepted and approved project plan. Besides the schedule baseline, the cost/budget baseline is the most important part of a project baseline. The cost baseline handles the amount of money the project is predicted to cost and on the other side when that money will be spent. It is an approved budget usually in a time distribution format used to estimate, monitor, and control the overall cost performance of the project.

In some cases there can be several intermediary baselines. This happens when either the project was not well planned or when significant changes appear to the scope of the project. However the initial baseline is usually what gets budgeted in the company’s financials. All types of baselines are closely related and changes to one of them will result in changes to the others. If a change is made in the project scope baseline, the schedule baseline gets adjusted. Hence the cost baseline will probably have to be changed as well.

How is cost baseline created

When it comes to computing the total cost of the project some estimates need to be done. Once the project schedule is ready and approved, a bottom-up procedure should be used. For each activity of the project it is estimated a detailed cost. This way a total cost for each major phase and for the entire project gets computed. These initial costs of all of the planned activities will become the initial estimated budget.

Cost Analysis

According to PMBOK the cost baseline is a “time-phased budget that is used as a basis against which to measure, monitor, and control overall cost performance on the project”. But many factors can affect the cost performance of a project. The above estimated costs established during the planning phase might not be estimated that well. The true costs of certain tasks may not be well known at planning time. If a given price for materials, trainings or travel costs was taken into consideration at planning phase but at execution time these are increased there is an unforeseen additional cost. (more…)

By Tiberiu Ghioca|2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 10th, 2012|Project Management|Comments Off

RationalPlan in the Race for the 2012 Project Management Election

We are pleased to announce that RationalPlan has been nominated for Capterra’s Project Management Election 2012 as being one of the 55 contending project management software providers. These 55 nominees were chosen from a few hundreds of software solutions.

Providers are split into two:

The Traditionalists – those who identified a Traditional/Phased-Approach as the methodology that best fits their software
The Contemporaries – those who identified Agile or another methodology as the best fit (as well as those who indicated their solution is tailored to multiple methodologies)

The election will start on October 9th and will have four rounds, each round for a duration of one week. The candidate pool will be narrowed down at the end of each one-week voting “round” based on which candidates have the most votes. Project managers can vote their preferred project management solution just once every day. The election will end on November 6th when the winner will be announced.

So give us a helping hand and vote RationalPlan as your preferred project management software. Voting is easy and fast and does not require anything from you except two mouse clicks: one for selecting RationalPlan in the The Traditionalists red column and the second one at the bottom of the page to Submit your vote:

Thank you and do not forget to vote RationalPlan for the Project Management Election 2012 every day!

By Tiberiu Ghioca|2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 5th, 2012|Contests, RationalPlan|Comments Off