Why Mariner Project & Portfolio Management?
Mariner Project Portfolio Management software gives you the tools to do the right projects– and to do them right. It also tracks the dollar value of the net benefits to your project or category or business as a whole.
No matter whether your project management style is agile or waterfall, Mariner PPM’s helps you manage a tasks and work items for every project or ad hoc body of work in your work structures and hierarchy.
Managing a task plan involves planning, organising, and managing costs, resources, and time so that a task is completed in budget and on time with the right amount of work and quality.
The three most important elements when managing a task plan are time, scope, and cost. Each of them has a limit. These three elements work together to provide boundaries to any task plan and help to determine the success of any project.
If the task plan is to be finished on time, the critical path of a task (or a series of tasks) must be finished on time. The critical path is based on the longest possible sequence of tasks, factoring in their start dates, finish dates, dependencies, and constraints. It compares the calculated finish date of the last task in the sequence to the planned finish date for the task plan.
Mariner PPM shows the critical path in red graphics in your task plan. Any task on the critical path is a critical task and when a critical task is delayed, it nearly always delays the finish of the task plan.
A typical way to measure the performance of a task plan is to calculate earned value, which uses a series of calculations to compare actual and expected costs over the life of the project.
With Mariner PPM, you can use a baseline to compare original costs with actual costs as the project progresses.
All earned value calculations are measured by comparing the dates in the original baseline to a specific date of your choosing, up to the current date.
The most important earned value calculations are actual cost of work performed, budgeted cost of work scheduled, and budgeted cost of work performed.
However, there are many other earned value calculations available for you to use in your task plan. A project that is on track, which finishes on time, under budget, and so on will have healthy early indicators for earned value.