Mavenlink's New Resource Planning Tool Helps You Think Long-Term

Mavenlink has unveiled a fully revamped project management (PM) solution, the company's Founder and CEO, Ray Grainger, told PCMag. The update is built to deliver an end-to-stop resource direction tool that tin span capacity planning, opportunity management, forecasting, scheduling, and time tracking, amongst other PM disciplines. The tool, dubbed Mavenlink Resource Planning and Management, intends to treat your projects and resources as interconnected cyclical processes more akin to enterprise resource planning (ERP) rather than one-off tasks.

This pivot is designed to give managers and planners the ability to address company changes that might affect multiple projection timelines, budgets, and profitability. The solution spans the service lifecycle from sales commitment to project commitment and postmortem analysis. Your projects are broken downward into four phases: Estimate, Plan, Execute, and Analyze & Optimise.

"When you lot look at long-term planning, you typically plan for things like the amount of people you have, the acquirement planning cycle," said Grainger. "That [blazon of planning] is okay when I had long-running projects and when things didn't change that much. Today, projects are much faster. The resources I need might only be necessary for a part of the project, and existent-time planning is much more than astute."

How It Works

The Estimate phase of the tool helps you rails what resources you lot'll demand to complete a projection. The tool provides you lot with an assortment of project templates to help you get started chop-chop, part-based scheduling to help y'all oversee when and where staff will be deployed, and resources request and blessing forms that let yous brainstorm the process of securing project needs.

The tool'southward Planning phase gives you a infinite to oversee the requirements, deliverables, resource, and schedules associated with the project. Included in this phase are a new master planning dashboard and a visual resource planning widget that lets you lot envisage when, where, and how resource are deployed.

Should yous be awarded a projection, the tool's Execute phase gives y'all a breakdown of the projection's structure, tasks, subtasks, and timelines. You'll also exist able to access a configurable weekly schedule view and a management workflow chart to encounter how your resource are being deployed.

Analyze & Optimise is the tool'southward analytics and business intelligence (BI) portal. Here, you'll be able to review completed projects in order to meliorate processes and templates. Reports include: Projected vs. Actual Utilisation, Planned & Scheduled Availability; Total Utilisation by Role, Function, Region, and More than; Daily Schedule for Billable VS Non-billable Scheduled Hours, and Billable Chapters Forecasting.

How to Get It

Existing Mavenlink customers will be able to admission the tool as part of their ongoing subscription this week. The tool volition automatically pull in whatever information yous take in your Mavenlink software, and so there will exist no demand to transfer data from the current version of the tool to the updated version. There volition exist no change in pricing for any Mavenlink customers.

Grainger said the tool is ideal for companies with more than than xv users. "Even a 15-person visitor volition be more highly utilized and they'll see more margin expansion [because of the tool]," he shared. "Information technology continues to scale for large organizations, organisations with multi-g users, and even organizations in the tens of thousands."

Mavenlink is available in v different pricing tiers: a free plan, a The states$nineteen-per-calendar month plan for up to v users, a U.s.$39-per-month per user plan, and two custom pricing plans for larger and more complex PM needs. The company, founded in 2008, recently secured US$39 million in a Serial D round that Goldman Sachs had taken the lead for, bringing its total funding to Us$84 million.