Asta Powerproject NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0 · 2018-04-12 · NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01...

Asta Powerproject: The power behind successful projects

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Asta Powerproject

NEW FEATURES IN

VERSION 14.0.01


Asta Powerproject now

includes Risk Analysis, which

was previously available as

an extra-cost option, as part

of the standard product.

What is Risk Analysis?

Risk Analysis is a powerful analytical tool that you can use to assess and

identify risks within your Asta Powerproject projects. With this tool you can:

◆ Create more accurate and attainable schedules that are more likely to be

on time and within budget – i.e. projects that are more likely to succeed.

◆ Analyse risk in any Asta Powerproject project. If you manage programmes

of projects, you can choose to analyse risk across the entire programme

or in discrete areas of the programme as required.

◆ Identify the tasks within your projects that are most likely to cause delays

or cost overruns if they are allowed to slip, which enables you to identify

those tasks that you need to monitor most closely.

◆ Assess the likelihood of a project finishing on a particular date, of costing

a certain amount or of generating a certain amount of income.

What is the benefit of using Risk Analysis?

Assessing and analysing risk in your projects helps you to create more

accurate and attainable schedules that are more likely to be on time and

within budget -

i.e. projects that are more likely to succeed.

◆ Every project involves an element of risk. Risk Analysis identifies the most

sensitive tasks within a project - those that are most likely to affect the

project finish date or overall cost if they are not monitored closely.

◆ Risk Analysis also indicates the likelihood of a particular finish date, cost

amount, income amount or margin amount being accurate. Understanding

this enables you to set targets accurately.

◆ To create appropriate contingencies and to negotiate contracts with a

fuller knowledge of the risks involved in your projects.

NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01

Assess and identify risks within projects with Risk Analysis



Specify the likelihood of tasks taking place

If you use Risk Analysis to measure the risks associated

with your projects, you can use the new Task probability

field to specify, in percentage terms, the likelihood of the

task taking place.

Entering a percentage other than 100 in this field makes

a task a “risk event” – ie a task that has a probability of

occurring but that will not definitely occur. For example,

you may want to create a “risk event” task to represent a

possible delay in the delivery of certain items.

When you carry out risk analysis, you can specify whether

to take into account the probabilities that have been

entered against individual tasks. If you choose to do this,

the probability of risk event tasks is taken into account in

each iteration of risk analysis, meaning that the risk event

tasks will be included in some iterations but not in others.

If you specify that a task has an 80% probability of taking

place, the task will appear in – and therefore affect the

duration of – roughly 80% of risk analysis iterations.

The Task probability field appears on the Task tab of the

Bar and Task Properties dialog and on the corresponding

tab of the properties view. You can also add this field to

the spreadsheet.

Specify a risk analysis distribution to apply to

individual tasks

If you use Risk Analysis to measure the risks associated

with your projects, you can use the new Task distribution

field to apply specific distributions to the way in which

the durations of individual tasks are selected during risk

analysis.

If you apply a specific distribution to a task, this

distribution is always used for that particular task when

the duration of tasks is determined during risk analysis,

regardless of the distribution that you select on the Risk

Settings tab of the Risk Analysis dialog.

The Task distribution field appears on the Task tab

of the Bar and Task Properties dialog and on the

corresponding tab of the properties view. You can also

add this field to the spreadsheet.

New features added to Risk Analysis in version 14:



Produce S-curves and Earned Value Analysis projections to get an overall view

of the progress of a project with EVA Reporter

Asta Powerproject now includes

an integral EVA Reporter

What is EVA Reporter?

EVA Reporter is a powerful analytical tool

(previously known as Progress Expert 2)

that you can use to:

◆ gain a clear overall view of the progression

of an Asta Powerproject project.

◆ produce anything from a simple S-curve of

progress to a full EVA projection, broken

down by resource, cost centre or code library.

What is the benefit of using EVA Reporter?

EVA Reporter can help you to ascertain the progress of

a project. EVA Reporter does this by taking a global,

cumulative view of the progress of the project and

comparing this to the progress that should have been

achieved by a certain date, according to a baseline of

the project.

What EVA Report types are there?

◆ Duration-based reports give you a good approximation

of earned value. They produce the same result as that of

a cost-based report for which you had assigned a pound

per hour for every task in the project, but they save you

from having to assign a pound per hour for each task.

◆ Cost-based reports are the most powerful and accurate

form of Earned Value Analysis, but they require you to

do the most work to achieve meaningful results.

◆ Effort-based reports use the number of hours of effort

that have been assigned to each task as the basic

measure of work. Any tasks that have a permanent

resource allocation are given a default effort value of 1

hour of effort per hour of task duration.

◆ Overall percentage complete weighting reports use the

overall percentage complete weighting of tasks as the

basic measure of work. Overall percentage complete

weighting in Asta Powerproject is a way of indicating

the relative importance of different tasks so that some

tasks contribute more towards the progress of their

parent tasks than others.



View project plans in the form of PERT charts

Asta Powerproject now includes

an integral Network Viewer.

What is Network Viewer?

Network Viewer is a powerful analytical tool

that you can use to view project plans in the form of PERT charts. You can use

Network Viewer to view any view within an Asta Powerproject project as a PERT

chart.

◆ The Asta Powerproject bar chart displays projects in the form of Gantt

charts. For the majority of uses, this is the preferred way of viewing projects.

Gantt charts display the tasks involved in a project, accurately depicting their

duration and calendar time, and the relationships - or links - between them.

As tasks are organised by row, additional information relating to each task

can be displayed in a synchronised spreadsheet display.

◆ The Gantt chart’s strength of depicting graphically the duration of tasks

and of the relationships between them can be a hindrance when it comes to

tracing the logic of a project. This is where PERT charts are useful: as they do

not depict graphically duration or calendar time, they are more compact and

easy-to-follow. They are excellent at depicting tasks and the relationships

between them together with a small amount of useful information.

What is the benefit of using PERT charts?

Assessing and analysing risk in your projects helps you to create more accurate

and attainable schedules that are more likely to be on time and within budget.

PERT – which stands for Project\Programme Evaluation and Review Technique –

is a statistical tool that analyses and represents the tasks involved in a project.

PERT analyses the duration of

each task in a project and the

links between tasks to identify

the minimum time needed to

complete the total project.

PERT charts represent the

tasks involved in a project and

the relationships – or links –

between them, making it easy

to identify the link logic.

You may want to view projects

in the form of PERT charts

in order to trace the logic

of a project, or in order to

produce a tender in which a

representation of a project

in the form of a PERT chart is

required.



Save projects and IFC files for viewing in Asta Project Viewer

The free Asta Project Viewer is now BIM enabled.

You can now save Asta Powerproject BIM projects together

with all of the information that is required to open them in

Asta Project Viewer. You may want to do this in order to make

a project available to someone who does not have access to

Asta Powerproject BIM, but who needs to view the project

together with its associated IFC file. This will enable access

to view a project schedule alongside a 3D model, including a

timeline simulation.

You do this by saving the project in PPV format – a format that

includes the following:

◆ The project’s PP file.

◆ The IFC file that corresponds to the IFC model that is open

when the project is saved.

◆ A baseline, if one is referred to in the timeline simulation that is current when the project is saved.

The Asta Project Viewer can be downloaded at http://www.astapowerproject.com/project-viewer



Export Business Intelligence data to Microsoft Excel or to an external database

You can now export Business Intelligence data

from Asta Powerproject projects to an external

spreadsheet or database, in a form that is optimised

for convenient reporting using a reporting tool of

your choice. Asta Powerproject includes a Business

Intelligence export to Microsoft Excel® as standard,

which means that you can use Excel’s reporting

tools to create unique reports on your data. More

advanced users may want to install the Business

Intelligence Controller, an application that enables

you to specify the way in which you want data to be

exported to an external database.

Choose from improved colour selectors

This version sees the

introduction of much-improved

colour selectors to Asta

Powerproject. When choosing

a colour to use prior to this

release, you had to choose

a colour from a pre-defined

selection.

With this release, you can still

choose a colour from the same

pre-defined selection, but in

addition to this, a “More Colours...” link appears at

the bottom of the colour selector.

If you click this link, a new Colours dialog appears,

which you can use to specify a precise colour. For example,

you may wish to specify a particular corporate colour that

you use.

You can use the Standard tab of the dialog to select from

the range of standard Windows colours. You can use the

Custom tab of the dialog to specify a precise colour.



Access rights now controlled by a combination of users and security groups

Prior to this release, you configured user access

rights at the level of individual users, using

the User Properties dialog. Version 14.0.01

introduces a new “security group” object to

Library Explorer, which you now use

in conjunction with users to configure user

access rights.

You can create as many security groups as you

need in Library Explorer, with each security

group configured to determine a different

level of access. Once you have configured

your security groups, you assign users to the

appropriate security group using the Security

group field on the User Properties dialog. You

can assign more than one user to each security

group, but each user can be a member of only

one security group. You should create a security

group for each different level of access that you

want to grant the various users in a project. For

example, the Project Manager may be member

of a security group that gives modify access to

the whole project, but a Line Manager may be

a member of a security group that gives only

read-only access to the sections of the project

that affect the manager and their team.

You may find it useful to create a hierarchy

of security groups that reflects the hierarchy

of your organisation. For example, you could

create a number of security group folders

to represent each department within your

organisation, with individual security group

records within each folder to represent the

different levels of access that people within the

department should have. However, the security

group hierarchy does not have to mirror the

hierarchy of your organisation; nor does it

have to mirror the hierarchy of users within

the project. This disconnection between the

hierarchy of access rights and the hierarchy

of users gives you more flexibility over the

assigning of access rights than before.

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Asta Powerproject NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0 · 2018-04-12 · NEW FEATURES IN VERSION 14.0.01...

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