Asta Powerproject NEW FEATURES IN VERSION elecosoft.com. Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects

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1 Asta Powerproject NEW FEATURES IN VERSION elecosoft.com

2 Assess and identify risks within projects with Risk Analysis 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.

3 New features added to Risk Analysis in version 14: 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.

4 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.

5 View project plans in the form of PERT charts NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 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.

6 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

7 Choose from improved colour selectors NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 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. 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.

8 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 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. elecosoft.com