Planning, Supervising and Controlling Projects with VARCHART XGantt

What projects really want? Since 1991, the Swiss company SPOL AG concentrates on this question and offers comprehensive services in any area of project management. SPOL shows how to carefully plan, supervise and control projects. The company is member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and of the International Project Management Association (IPMA). Today SPOL is one of the leading players in Portfolio- and Project Management in Switzerland.

SPOL's many years of experience was put into the web-based project management portal pmplus+.

The modular operational platform aims at supporting and enhancing the project-related skills to gain the best possible project performance. Hence pmplus+ provides defined processes and guides for the project management. Moreover, a training module provides any technical-relevant information that is needed for successful project management.

Furthermore, the portal's module PM-Online allows planning and supervising individual projects as well as aggregating the data for the higher level (management). Here SPOL uses the VARCHART XGantt ASP.NET component of NETRONIC to create schedules.

Project plans are subject to a constant and iterative process of adjustment and correction. The scheduling of the milestones, particular points in time and the working packages can be entered in pmplus+ in two different ways: on the one hand, entry masks are available for the project manager, on the other hand it is recommendable that during the course of the project, data modifications should be entered directly into the schedule. Hence the interactive functionality was an important criterion for selecting the ASP.NET component of NETRONIC. The adjustment of dates as well as the insertion of new working packages or defining of groups can be carried out easily and intuitively by using the according icons that have been installed in the chart with the help of VARCHART XGantt. Furthermore, the bars can be shortened or extended as well as dragged horizontally or vertically if needed, thus allowing the project manager to react promptly to changes of dates or of the required person days. The modified data such as dates, number of days of the working packages, degree of completion or resource allocation are copied to the other entry masks without changes and updated automatically.

Schedule chart in pmplus+

Other features in the chart such as displaying the operation's degree of completion in the bars or free scalable time scales support the project manager in supervising his project. The visualization follows the look and feel of Microsoft Project. The current project status can be printed or forwarded in PDF format. By creating an always up-to-date and clearly-arranged schedule by means of a Gantt chart VARCHART XGantt optimizes the project planning .

"The schedule realized by VARCHART XGantt is a capacious tool that provides considerable additional benefit for the user. We are planning to offer multiproject-management visualization for the next versions of pmplus+. This enhancement is definitely a further improvement of our application pmplus+. Also for this tool we count on the functionality of VARCHART XGantt supporting us in the project overview", Philip Achermann, product manager of SPOL.