asta powerproject new features in version 14.0 · 2018-04-12 · new features in version 14.0.01...
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Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects
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Asta Powerproject
NEW FEATURES IN
VERSION 14.0.01
Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects
Asta Powerproject now
includes Risk Analysis, which
was previously available as
an extra-cost option, as part
of the standard product.
What is Risk Analysis?
Risk Analysis is a powerful analytical tool that you can use to assess and
identify risks within your Asta Powerproject projects. With this tool you can:
◆ Create more accurate and attainable schedules that are more likely to be
on time and within budget – i.e. projects that are more likely to succeed.
◆ Analyse risk in any Asta Powerproject project. If you manage programmes
of projects, you can choose to analyse risk across the entire programme
or in discrete areas of the programme as required.
◆ Identify the tasks within your projects that are most likely to cause delays
or cost overruns if they are allowed to slip, which enables you to identify
those tasks that you need to monitor most closely.
◆ Assess the likelihood of a project finishing on a particular date, of costing
a certain amount or of generating a certain amount of income.
What is the benefit of using Risk Analysis?
Assessing and analysing risk in your projects helps you to create more
accurate and attainable schedules that are more likely to be on time and
within budget -
i.e. projects that are more likely to succeed.
◆ Every project involves an element of risk. Risk Analysis identifies the most
sensitive tasks within a project - those that are most likely to affect the
project finish date or overall cost if they are not monitored closely.
◆ Risk Analysis also indicates the likelihood of a particular finish date, cost
amount, income amount or margin amount being accurate. Understanding
this enables you to set targets accurately.
◆ To create appropriate contingencies and to negotiate contracts with a
fuller knowledge of the risks involved in your projects.
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01
Assess and identify risks within projects with Risk Analysis
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01
Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects
Specify the likelihood of tasks taking place
If you use Risk Analysis to measure the risks associated
with your projects, you can use the new Task probability
field to specify, in percentage terms, the likelihood of the
task taking place.
Entering a percentage other than 100 in this field makes
a task a “risk event” – ie a task that has a probability of
occurring but that will not definitely occur. For example,
you may want to create a “risk event” task to represent a
possible delay in the delivery of certain items.
When you carry out risk analysis, you can specify whether
to take into account the probabilities that have been
entered against individual tasks. If you choose to do this,
the probability of risk event tasks is taken into account in
each iteration of risk analysis, meaning that the risk event
tasks will be included in some iterations but not in others.
If you specify that a task has an 80% probability of taking
place, the task will appear in – and therefore affect the
duration of – roughly 80% of risk analysis iterations.
The Task probability field appears on the Task tab of the
Bar and Task Properties dialog and on the corresponding
tab of the properties view. You can also add this field to
the spreadsheet.
Specify a risk analysis distribution to apply to
individual tasks
If you use Risk Analysis to measure the risks associated
with your projects, you can use the new Task distribution
field to apply specific distributions to the way in which
the durations of individual tasks are selected during risk
analysis.
If you apply a specific distribution to a task, this
distribution is always used for that particular task when
the duration of tasks is determined during risk analysis,
regardless of the distribution that you select on the Risk
Settings tab of the Risk Analysis dialog.
The Task distribution field appears on the Task tab
of the Bar and Task Properties dialog and on the
corresponding tab of the properties view. You can also
add this field to the spreadsheet.
New features added to Risk Analysis in version 14:
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01
Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects
Produce S-curves and Earned Value Analysis projections to get an overall view
of the progress of a project with EVA Reporter
Asta Powerproject now includes
an integral EVA Reporter
What is EVA Reporter?
EVA Reporter is a powerful analytical tool
(previously known as Progress Expert 2)
that you can use to:
◆ gain a clear overall view of the progression
of an Asta Powerproject project.
◆ produce anything from a simple S-curve of
progress to a full EVA projection, broken
down by resource, cost centre or code library.
What is the benefit of using EVA Reporter?
EVA Reporter can help you to ascertain the progress of
a project. EVA Reporter does this by taking a global,
cumulative view of the progress of the project and
comparing this to the progress that should have been
achieved by a certain date, according to a baseline of
the project.
What EVA Report types are there?
◆ Duration-based reports give you a good approximation
of earned value. They produce the same result as that of
a cost-based report for which you had assigned a pound
per hour for every task in the project, but they save you
from having to assign a pound per hour for each task.
◆ Cost-based reports are the most powerful and accurate
form of Earned Value Analysis, but they require you to
do the most work to achieve meaningful results.
◆ Effort-based reports use the number of hours of effort
that have been assigned to each task as the basic
measure of work. Any tasks that have a permanent
resource allocation are given a default effort value of 1
hour of effort per hour of task duration.
◆ Overall percentage complete weighting reports use the
overall percentage complete weighting of tasks as the
basic measure of work. Overall percentage complete
weighting in Asta Powerproject is a way of indicating
the relative importance of different tasks so that some
tasks contribute more towards the progress of their
parent tasks than others.
Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01
View project plans in the form of PERT charts
Asta Powerproject now includes
an integral Network Viewer.
What is Network Viewer?
Network Viewer is a powerful analytical tool
that you can use to view project plans in the form of PERT charts. You can use
Network Viewer to view any view within an Asta Powerproject project as a PERT
chart.
◆ The Asta Powerproject bar chart displays projects in the form of Gantt
charts. For the majority of uses, this is the preferred way of viewing projects.
Gantt charts display the tasks involved in a project, accurately depicting their
duration and calendar time, and the relationships - or links - between them.
As tasks are organised by row, additional information relating to each task
can be displayed in a synchronised spreadsheet display.
◆ The Gantt chart’s strength of depicting graphically the duration of tasks
and of the relationships between them can be a hindrance when it comes to
tracing the logic of a project. This is where PERT charts are useful: as they do
not depict graphically duration or calendar time, they are more compact and
easy-to-follow. They are excellent at depicting tasks and the relationships
between them together with a small amount of useful information.
What is the benefit of using PERT charts?
Assessing and analysing risk in your projects helps you to create more accurate
and attainable schedules that are more likely to be on time and within budget.
PERT – which stands for Project\Programme Evaluation and Review Technique –
is a statistical tool that analyses and represents the tasks involved in a project.
PERT analyses the duration of
each task in a project and the
links between tasks to identify
the minimum time needed to
complete the total project.
PERT charts represent the
tasks involved in a project and
the relationships – or links –
between them, making it easy
to identify the link logic.
You may want to view projects
in the form of PERT charts
in order to trace the logic
of a project, or in order to
produce a tender in which a
representation of a project
in the form of a PERT chart is
required.
Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01
Save projects and IFC files for viewing in Asta Project Viewer
The free Asta Project Viewer is now BIM enabled.
You can now save Asta Powerproject BIM projects together
with all of the information that is required to open them in
Asta Project Viewer. You may want to do this in order to make
a project available to someone who does not have access to
Asta Powerproject BIM, but who needs to view the project
together with its associated IFC file. This will enable access
to view a project schedule alongside a 3D model, including a
timeline simulation.
You do this by saving the project in PPV format – a format that
includes the following:
◆ The project’s PP file.
◆ The IFC file that corresponds to the IFC model that is open
when the project is saved.
◆ A baseline, if one is referred to in the timeline simulation that is current when the project is saved.
The Asta Project Viewer can be downloaded at http://www.astapowerproject.com/project-viewer
Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01
Export Business Intelligence data to Microsoft Excel or to an external database
You can now export Business Intelligence data
from Asta Powerproject projects to an external
spreadsheet or database, in a form that is optimised
for convenient reporting using a reporting tool of
your choice. Asta Powerproject includes a Business
Intelligence export to Microsoft Excel® as standard,
which means that you can use Excel’s reporting
tools to create unique reports on your data. More
advanced users may want to install the Business
Intelligence Controller, an application that enables
you to specify the way in which you want data to be
exported to an external database.
Choose from improved colour selectors
This version sees the
introduction of much-improved
colour selectors to Asta
Powerproject. When choosing
a colour to use prior to this
release, you had to choose
a colour from a pre-defined
selection.
With this release, you can still
choose a colour from the same
pre-defined selection, but in
addition to this, a “More Colours...” link appears at
the bottom of the colour selector.
If you click this link, a new Colours dialog appears,
which you can use to specify a precise colour. For example,
you may wish to specify a particular corporate colour that
you use.
You can use the Standard tab of the dialog to select from
the range of standard Windows colours. You can use the
Custom tab of the dialog to specify a precise colour.
Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects
NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01
Access rights now controlled by a combination of users and security groups
Prior to this release, you configured user access
rights at the level of individual users, using
the User Properties dialog. Version 14.0.01
introduces a new “security group” object to
Library Explorer, which you now use
in conjunction with users to configure user
access rights.
You can create as many security groups as you
need in Library Explorer, with each security
group configured to determine a different
level of access. Once you have configured
your security groups, you assign users to the
appropriate security group using the Security
group field on the User Properties dialog. You
can assign more than one user to each security
group, but each user can be a member of only
one security group. You should create a security
group for each different level of access that you
want to grant the various users in a project. For
example, the Project Manager may be member
of a security group that gives modify access to
the whole project, but a Line Manager may be
a member of a security group that gives only
read-only access to the sections of the project
that affect the manager and their team.
You may find it useful to create a hierarchy
of security groups that reflects the hierarchy
of your organisation. For example, you could
create a number of security group folders
to represent each department within your
organisation, with individual security group
records within each folder to represent the
different levels of access that people within the
department should have. However, the security
group hierarchy does not have to mirror the
hierarchy of your organisation; nor does it
have to mirror the hierarchy of users within
the project. This disconnection between the
hierarchy of access rights and the hierarchy
of users gives you more flexibility over the
assigning of access rights than before.
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