RationalPlan 6 – Project Baselines, Reports, Clients Management, Improved Scheduling and Microsoft Project Integration

Craiova, Romania, December 12, 2022 --(PR.com)-- Stand By Soft launches RationalPlan 6, a new major version that comes with lots of new features and improvements, especially for the web-based interface. To be noted, the possibility to work with baselines and Earn Value Management technique, generating reports, clients management, improved projects scheduling with timescales up to seconds, custom columns and new filters, data export, etc. Compatibility with Microsoft Project files was also enhanced, while integration with Google Drive was updated to the latest V3 version.

The upgrade from RationalPlan 5 to RationalPlan 6 will be free for customers that have purchased the product in the last year. Older version 5 customers will be able to upgrade with a 50% discount.

RationalPlan is a project management software suite that is available either as stand alone products or as a cloud service. It is used by individuals and companies that need a solution to manage their projects in an efficient way.

New features in RationalPlan 6:
- Possibility to work with baselines and Earn Value Management technique when managing projects.
- Reports were added to Portfolio view: calendar report, resource assignments, costs, project info, task cost distribution, resource cost distribution, resource work distribution.
- Added project status column in Timesheet view and corresponding filter in My assignments view.
- On-Premise products (Single and Multi) are now available within the Microsoft Store.
- Clients view was added and also exporting clients to Excel.
updated “Tasks for resource...” filter to be able to filter for tasks without resources assigned.
- Added custom columns for Portfolio, Clients and Resources and a corresponding “not contains” filter.
- Added expand all/collapse all buttons in Gantt view and a level expand functionality.
- Improved the scheduling algorithm to keep the completion date when changing task duration.
- Export projects in several formats (.srp, .xml, .xls).
- Updated Google Drive integration to V3.
- Added minutes/seconds timescale for micro-projects.
- Edit the task name directly within the tile component when working with task lists.
- Improved compatibility with Microsoft Project.

Baselines management is essential for tracking the evolution of a project. With RationalPlan, users can save up to 10 baselines for different stages of the project. Using these baselines and an estimated project budget they are able to work with well known entities from Earn Value Analysis like: CV, SV, CPI, SPI, ACWP, BCWP, BCWS. For those that are more interested on this subject, the team behind RationalPlan prepared some short tutorials on Earned Value Management.

The On-Premise products (Single and Multi) from RationalPlan suite are now also available within the Microsoft Store. It is just another option to install or buy the products for those Windows users that prefer to manage their software through Microsoft Store.

Starting with RationalPlan 6 reports were added to Portfolio view in the web interface: calendar report, resource assignments, costs, project info, task cost distribution, resource cost distribution, resource work distribution etc. This way users can directly generate a report from browser without the need to start Planner+ as it was required until recently.

“Tasks for resource…” filter was updated to offer the possibility to also set a criteria for tasks without resources assigned. This way project managers can see not just the tasks for a particular resource but also which tasks are unassigned. This is useful for resource work leveling.

Custom columns were added for Portfolio, Clients and Resources views. They are used to store details not available by default in RationalPlan. Using these columns, data can be sorted, grouped or filtered by, even using a “not contains” criteria. This gives flexibility in managing various details for projects.

Productivity is many times measured in the ease and speed of using a software. And when working with large projects with complex work breakdown structures, sometimes you need to look at task level details while other times you just want a birds eye view from an upper level.

The scheduling algorithm was improved such that when changing the duration for a task that was already started the application keeps the completion date and automatically recomputes the percentage complete. The completion date is the date up to which the task was executed. This date remains fixed even if from various reasons (poor estimation, unforeseen factors occur) the duration of the task needs to be updated. That is the already executed part is kept as is and only the remaining part of the task gets modified.

Starting with this version, users can export projects within Portfolio view in several formats: RationalPlan Single .srp, Microsoft Project .xml, Excel .xls.

The integration with Google Drive was upgraded to the latest V3 version in order to comply with the latest Google security requirements.

For those customers that need to perform micro management for projects we have added a minutes/seconds timescale. For graphical performance reasons this feature is not active by default and needs to be enabled within the application. This is just a visual feature that helps project managers to easily plan very small projects with task durations up to seconds... It is worth noted that the project scheduling algorithm behind RationalPlan works with data up to mili-seconds with high efficiency even for multi year projects.