In today’s business environment, project management has never been more critical to the success of any organization. Time, resources and costs are all key elements that must be managed together if you want to make sure your project is a success.
We’ve injected significant effort into the latest PSA release of our cloud-based PSA solution, aimed at improving efficiency for managing resources and projects. In this post, we take a bit of time to go deeper into the new functionality of the professional service automation software, including HTML 5 compatibility, so it now works with any modern browser.
Project List
A perfect way to start your day as a Project Manager is having at-a-glance information about your projects: an overview of the overall state of your projects, all housed under one page, to give you enough information to be well informed and focused on your most important activities. Thinking about your needs, we are thrilled to say PSA 2018 R1 sets the first steps towards role-driven Home Pages. Therefore, we have put together at-a-glance information about Projects in our newly-added Home Page.
The new Home Page gives you instant access to relevant information in a simple format and in real time, through lists and visual graphs. Making it easy to track how much budgeted time is remaining on the project, upcoming milestones, the project overall health and much more.
Resource Management
Earlier this year we revealed a fresh look to our Resource Management module using a modern style and simplified experience for your project and resource managers to work with. This time around we’ve made some updates to put more data in their hands and to control how to visualize it so they can make more informed decisions when reviewing their work plans.
Of all the changes, the most significant is the ability to select multiple projects and groups when using our scheduling views; previously a manager needed to work within a single project/group at a time unless they had multiple windows open. We’ve changed this such that when you’re picking items you can now choose more than one item and see all the data at once. This should facilitate a user’s ability to get a larger picture of the supply and demand of their items.
A request that came up often from the PSA community was for a way to represent bookings for a project, summarized by project. I’m happy to announce this is available in 2018 R1. We’ve added a new option in the views that controls whether the bookings should be grouped by resource (as it is today) or by project. This means you can also see period totals by project on all fields that can be used as a column.
Also included in updates to Resource Management are a variety of items originating from our Enhancement Request process. This release introduced soft booking email notifications as well as more options to configure the condition for automated notifications, an improved export to Excel where you can specify the date range you wish to export, updates to the Chart View and more! Your requests and feedback enabled us to improve the product, keep it coming!
Project Planning
If you’re a project manager who loves using GANTT charts to plan your projects, this release introduces new functionality to the Upland Project Planner, reducing the effort needed to set up and manage your projects.
New to this version is an integration to PSA Time Budgets at the Project, Task and Assignment levels. This release includes mapping options to allow you to select which fields you wish to use for generating budgets, be it allocated or planned work or even values from a previously saved baseline. We’ve included Financial budget data in read-only mode as well, with the intent of adding mapping options in the near future.
One item that was requested from many customers was the ability to undo a change within a project plan. Simple in theory, right? Well, turns out the amount of impact a single change can have when you’re talking about a project plan is pretty big. That said, you can now undo (and redo) modifications to your plan. This includes minor edits like name changes or task properties, or large changes like rescheduling a task with dependencies. We’ve put a soft cap of 10 undo actions for initial launch but we’re listening to feedback to see if we should increase that cap (or remove it entirely). Let us know!
We’ve also empowered you to override the percent complete calculation of a Task to a value that you specify. This can be useful if you feel like progress isn’t to the level you expected based on the actuals, or for tracking progress on tasks being worked on by external resources you’re not tracking within PSA. All the reporting options have been updated to either calculate the proper value or retrieve the percentage you inputted so your reports will reflect your overridden amount.
Customer-driven Development
A request we get pretty often is to update our Invoice Batch wizard to include more filtering options so that users don’t need to sort through a laundry list of clients in order to select those with particular values (billing cycle, country, etc). We’re excited to be including new options to our Invoice Batches so you can define filter criteria in a batch template which will pre-filter your selections based on those criteria.
Product Foundations & More
Every release we bring in updates to our back-end infrastructure so that we can offer you even greater stability and performance, but also new tools that allows you to work with PSA in a simpler fashion.
Continuing with our investment in the Upland Integration Platform, new objects have been added to the PSA REST API web services to allow for integrating with more parts of the application. This also includes updates to existing objects to add more endpoints.
We’ve also updated our Workflow Designer engine to be HTML-5 compliant. This means you are no longer burdened to using Internet Explorer when designing your workflows but are welcome to do so in any browser that supports HTML-5, including Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari for Mac.
If you’d like to learn more about PSA 2018 R1, visit our feature highlights page, or request a personalized demo.
Authors
This post was written by PSA Product Managers: Alexander D’Aquila & Alexandra Luna.