The mobile manager - Merlin Project on the iPad
Congratulations, you are not only a Project Manager, you are a mobile manager!
Being a Project Manager (PM) is awesomely challenging. You are responsible for execution, planning, and closure of projects while ensuring them being delivered on time, on budget, and within scope.
Juggling with so many demanding aspects makes this job very interesting and consuming at the same time. Luckily not all matters need your attention equally on every and each phase of the life cycles your projects are in. Some days you are more into issue identification and resolution, on others you need to calculate your budgeting requests or consider your cost estimations. Most of the time you are simply communicating with your team members and key stakeholders. You exchange information on status, progress or problems.
Read more...What is on my computer
Tools and apps I work with - today: Vicky Stamatopoulou
Hello, this is Vicky Stamatopoulou and I am with the support team of ProjectWizards. I support the users of our macOS and iOS apps, test, blog, create how-to videos and compile user manuals.
For my daily work I rely on various little or not so little helpers. These are the essential tools and apps for my work…
Read more...Merlin Project: Resources in full and part-time employment
You use Merlin Project to plan your projects? Then you already know how to set the Project Calendar in Merlin Project.
In case you don't - You'll find the Project Calendar in the Project Settings.
New documents come with following pre-defined calendars: Standard, Night Shift, 24 hours. By default the Standard calendar is selected as project calendar. So the tasks of your project will be scheduled within 8 hours distributed 8am - 12pm and 1pm - 5pm Mondays to Fridays.
How should you proceed when some of your resources are at full-time employment and some others work only 4 hours a day?
Read more...Merlin Project: Use Dependencies, Remove Static Dates, Stay flexible
With Merlin Project you are free to plan your project in any way you find it more suitable. You can plan in Work breakdown with Gantt, as a Mind Map, a Kanban board. Just pick the view you need and customize it to your needs.
While Mind Map is not focusing on time constrains, when viewing the Gantt of your project, you are interested in its scheduling. So you might already intuitively dragged the activity's bar on the Gantt to fix it to a specific time frame, or entered dates in the Given Start column or the Plan inspector.
And we have to admit, there is nothing wrong about that, other than the manual work you are putting into these actions of setting static date constrains and loosing flexibility.
How to stay flexible for scheduling changes in the future?
The answer is easy; use Dependencies
- Merlin Project offers following Dependency types: End to Start, Start to Start, End to End, Start to End
- Dependencies can be combined with a lead or a lag.
- You can define Dependencies graphically, enter the Predecessor's (or Successor's) number in the according outline column, use the inspector, or the Link toolbar icon. Read here more…
Converting a static scheduling into a flexible one
Let's consider following sample project.
Read more...Merlin Project: Report With Project Objective
We received following question just recently:
I’m using the latest version of Merlin Project. I have created a draft project file for a client who has requested regular status report. When I generate a report there’s a field with a heading “Objective” which shows blank on my reports, but is filled-in on the reports from your built-in templates and the help guide. Where can I edit the field in my project as this would be useful to have?
