Most enterprises have to deal with many projects that share common resources such as employees, hardware and space.

Traditional approaches fall short
Classic project management solutions like MS Project are largely used to manage individual projects. But when you need to understand how changes in one project may impact other projects; these tools do not suffice.

Project portfolio management applications provide complete packages for dealing with such issues, but they are expensive, intrusive, and require costly training and changes in project management practices. These solutions can be too heavy for many situations, and as with classic project management solutions, integrating project portfolio management applications is often difficult and time consuming.

Custom home solutions
The idea of developing a custom project portfolio management solution may seem costly, but the development effort is considerably shorter when developers rely on off-the-shelf components for the presentation layer, and on databases for the project repository. Several of our large customers have spent less than one man month to develop their solutions for hundreds of projects relying on thousands of resources.

Benefits include:

• Company standard visualization—Define standard visualization for all your projects. All employees can share a common view of a project’s portfolio, the status of each project, and the interactions between projects. Project managers can continue using their preferred project management tools when planning their own project.
• Project portfolio monitoring—Compare the status of each activity and project with the overall plan through visual notation in the Gantt chart provided. Delays in one project will be instantly reflected in the global portfolio, and their impact over other projects will be presented, allowing for faster decision making.
• Standard resources—Retrieve your resource list from your company’s active directory. Because each project will not invent its own resources, consolidation between all projects is possible.
• Common database—Save each project in a common database, which will become the project portfolio. This database will store the exact data model required by the company’s business. Various requests and views can be made from the database in order to compute the impact of each project change to the global portfolio.

ILOG Gantt for .NET
ILOG Gantt for .NET provides the best software components for a versatile project presentation layer. Its flexible data model can be adapted to any project’s data, and it allows for easy implementation of custom project visualization with a sophisticated and intuitive styling mechanism. Gantt for .NET offers task-oriented views, resource-oriented views and resource load charts. Visualizations can be desktop-based using Windows Forms, or Web-based using ASP.NET.

Companies willing to provide their project managers with custom project management tools can rapidly develop their applications with the ILOG Gantt for .NET project management option. This option performs resource leveling based on critical path computations. A pre-built project management application is delivered with its source code and can be used as the root of custom development.

Next steps

• Learn more about ILOG Gant for .NET
• Request an Eval
• Contact ILOG