Silverbucket offers a versatile and easy-to-use tool also for project managers who are familiar with changing of plans and monitoring the budget. Project manager can easily create a resource plan or continue from an initial plan that has been already made by e.g. sales managers. In this article, we assume that the initial plan has been already made and the project manager continues working with the resource plan when the project goes to production.
The ease of making changes to a resource plan
The sales manager or someone else has already initiated a plan which possibly has already the right project name, the customer data and the project owner (project manager) in Silverbucket. When the prospect project becomes a production project, the probability of the project is changed to 100%.
When the project proceeds, the unnamed role reservations need to be named and given to a person. Unnamed roles are used basically for identifying the role and work needs for a project and they can have resource allocations as well. It is also possible to add directly a person with a role and make a resource allocation for him or her. Silverbucket offers actions which help you to make changes easily when they occur. Project manager can easily move allocations, change resources and make resource allocation updates. Project manager can also use milestones that can make resourcing easier when one can set different phases and events that are shown in the resourcing panel.
Project manager can also manage lightly project finance in Silverbucket. One can add hour, income and expense budgets which Silverbucket compares with the future allocations and realized hours. Project manager gets real-time information of the state of the project by monitoring the progress numbers.
The project manager can give an hour budget for the whole project or to a person or a role in the project. This way it is easy to follow that the hour budgets won’t be outstretched.
Reports to support project manager’s work
During or after the project has been executed, project managers can view how the plans are succeeding compared to actualized hours. Project manager can view this from the project’s page or go to a separate report which collects and compares the data on a more specific level (people and project level). It can be a good tool for monitoring the current situation or for learning from the past.
Firstly, the project manager’s most important task in Silverbucket is updating the resource plan. Secondly the project manager can add budget information and monitor the project finance from the resourcing point of view. The project numbers table (see below) is a useful tool for monitoring and following the project numbers.
In addition, the progress graph, also known as ‘the S-curve’, provides beneficial information about a project. At a glance, one can see all actuals, future reservations, hour budget and total hour budget.
The project manager can also add different risks for the projects, such as a resource, scope, schedule and budget risk and update them as the project goes forward. As shown in this article, project managers can use Silverbucket in many ways.
