About Tiberiu Ghioca

Tiberiu Ghioca, is a Product Manager at RationalPlan. He is responsible with the effective communication between customers, development team and marketing team.

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:

RationalPlan Project Management Software on the 2012 Project Management Election

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

By |2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 17th, 2012|Contests, RationalPlan|Comments Off on RationalPlan in Round 2 of the Race for the 2012 Project Management Election

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 |2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 17th, 2012|News, RationalPlan|Comments Off on RationalPlan 4.1 Is Ready For Project Managers To Control Their Projects

Creating Budget Or Cost Baseline For Projects

Cost Baseline in RationalPlan Project Management SoftwareIn 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 |2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 10th, 2012|Project Management|Comments Off on Creating Budget Or Cost Baseline For Projects

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:

RationalPlan Project Management Software on the 2012 Project Management Election

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

By |2022-11-18T10:20:10+00:00October 5th, 2012|Contests, RationalPlan|Comments Off on RationalPlan in the Race for the 2012 Project Management Election

Managing Projects Using Project Baselines

Baselines in RationalPlan Project Management SoftwareA baseline as the name suggests is a line that is being used as a base for future measurement. It is a reference. In Project Management, the term baseline refers to an accepted and approved project plan. Usually known as project baseline, it is a must for a project manager that wish to monitor and evaluate the success of the project. Without it there is no possibility to compare the current status of the project with the initial estimated one.

Once established what the baseline is, the next important step is to store it for future use. If it is not stored, then it cannot be used to compare against it and it is meaningless. For a project there can be saved multiple baselines depending on the project size and how often the project plan changes.

To obtain the best efficiency a project manager should best use a project management software to create the detailed project plan. After it gets approved the manager should save it as a baseline project plan. During the project execution, comparisons can be done between the initial baseline estimates and the current status to compute variances. This comparison can be done either manually or automatically by software tools. Of course the second approach is preferred.

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 |2022-11-18T10:20:11+00:00September 24th, 2012|Project Management Software, Project Tracking|1 Comment

RationalPlan Project Management Software Goes Viral Using Popular Social Networks

Social media networks for RatinalPlan Project Management SoftwareThe team behind RationalPlan Project Management Software recently revamped their website, offering a new modern look to their users. In addition to that, the social networking life caught form on the project management blog and through the help of the well known social platforms Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Project managers need more that just a project management solution to successfully manage their projects. They also need to have access to project management related articles and discussions on forums, blogs and social media. The experience and knowledge is gathered in time and this is a long process. However a faster solution is to obtain it from experienced and senior managers.

“We reached the conclusion that our users need more besides our RationalPlan products. They also need to learn how to use them, they need tools and techniques to be applied, they need a place where to chat and share opinions. And what better place to find all that than through our forums, blogs and social networking sites?” says Gabriel Toader, CEO of RationalPlan.

Users can stay up to date with the buzz around RationalPlan products by subscribing to feeds or can actively participate on the Project Management Facebook or Project Management Google Plus pages. Twitter fans were also not forgotten. (more…)

By |2022-11-18T10:20:11+00:00September 11th, 2012|News, Project Management Software, RationalPlan|Comments Off on RationalPlan Project Management Software Goes Viral Using Popular Social Networks

Project Management Terms – Project

A Project is a temporary set of actions which aim to create a unique, final deliverable.

This concise project definition reveals the major differences between characteristics of projects and operations:

  • Is temporary which means that is subject to change at a certain moment. In fact since it might change at any moment in time makes it rather transient than temporary.
  • Its outcome is unique. Although the product or service may be included in a large category (e.g. a building, a software product), the details can give the uniqueness of a project result.

A similar definition can be found into A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide): “A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service”.

By |2012-08-28T13:48:22+00:00August 28th, 2012|Project Management Glossary|Comments Off on Project Management Terms – Project

Is RationalPlan Supported On Mac OS X Mountain Lion?

In the recently released Mac OS X Mountain Lion the Gatekeeper was introduced that by default does not allow users to run applications downloaded outside of the App Store. In this situation are also the RationalPlan users that are downloading our products directly from our website.

So if you find yourself a Mountain Lion user and when trying to install RationalPlan you get an error like this one:

RationalPlan on Mac OS X Mountain Lion

you can solve it by going to Apple menu > System Preferences… > Security & Privacy > General tab and under the header “Allow applications downloaded from:” check the Anywhere box. This will allow you to install RationalPlan. However after the install is complete you might want to set it back to Mac App Store and identified developers. (more…)

By |2022-11-18T10:20:11+00:00August 28th, 2012|RationalPlan|Comments Off on Is RationalPlan Supported On Mac OS X Mountain Lion?

Project Management Terms – Critical Path

Critical Path is the sequence of activities for which the slightest delay will influence the end of the project. The critical path of a project may change in time according to the new changes of the project schedule. In a project there can be several critical paths. Tasks that compose the critical path are called critical tasks.

Critical tasks need a special attention as they are more likely to compromise the completion date. Sometimes the project manager needes to see those tasks that could delay the project finish if they are late with a certain amount of time, in other words the tasks with a slack smaller than a given value.

In RationalPlan Project Management Software the Critical Path can be displayed by pressing the corresponding button from the toolbar while in Gantt view.

By |2022-11-18T10:20:11+00:00August 20th, 2012|Project Management Glossary|1 Comment

Project management is a difficult but thankless job

Project Management - a difficult and thankless jobFor a thankless job the success is not that noticeable while the failure is very obvious and with strong impact. Applying this in project management it results that in the case of success there is little evidence that the manager had any merits while in case of failure the manager gets all the blame.

This is the conclusion that Ike Maboe also reached in a LinkedIn post on the Project Management Expert group. According to him “Project management is a thankless job, everybody wants the glory when the project succeeds and the project manager gets the blame when it fails!” And it is nothing more true than that.

But beside the fact that project management is a thankless job it is also a difficult job. Many problems need to be solved when managing projects and these are not easy ones. It all starts with a good project plan. The planning phase of the project is the most important one and if well done it will make life a lot easier for that lucky manager. At this stage arise questions like: are tasks correctly stated, are there enough resources for every task? Optimized planning is necessary for best results: for example how can we use limited resources most effectively? And this is not an easy job to do although using project management software with resource leveling capabilities helps a lot.

Things go further and can become even more complicated once the project is started. Managers need to control how the progress affects the plan and conclusions must be taken to avoid already encountered problems for the future.

Bottom line is that project management is a difficult job and as a project manager the “thank you” words for your efforts and hard work are kind of missing… But are there just not spoken or they do not exist at all? More than probably everyone from team members, clients, stakeholders etc. appreciate your work just that they do not say it, they forget to mention it. A simple “Thank you for keeping things on track!” would be just great. The strange thing is that they do not forget to blame you when the project fails or goes wrong.

That’s the life for a project manager!

By |2022-11-18T10:20:11+00:00July 20th, 2012|Project Management|2 Comments
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