Volume 21: Goodbye, Summer! Planning for Q4

Are you ready to put away the sunblock and take out the suit and tie? September officially ends in September and it’s time to focus on the end of the year. That final quarter can make or break a business so it’s crucial to start planning.

ProjectManager has the planning tools you need to deliver projects and business plans successfully. Here’s a sampling of how we can help you stay on track and meet your deadlines and budget constraints.

But first, here are some free resources to get you started.

• Free Project Calendar Template for Excel
• Capacity Planning: Strategies, Benefits & Best Practices
• What Is a Business Budget? Business Budgeting Basics

Plan Using Powerful Resource Management Tools

Plans and projects alike are merely concepts until they’re executed. Completing the tasks that'll lead to your deliverables requires having the right resources when you need them. Our software makes it easy to set team availability, including PTO, vacations and even global holidays if you’re working with distributed teams.

Use Gantt charts to manage resources and schedule them with specific tasks. You can even balance workload with our color-coded workload chart that shows your team’s allocation and lets you reallocate resources right from that chart.

Estimate Your Budget and Track Your Costs

Of course, this will cost money. The first step is to secure funding and our Gantt charts can help. Use a work breakdown structure to determine your project deliverables and from there you can estimate the cost of the resources needed to complete those tasks. This allows you to create a budget. Once you have one, set a baseline on the Gantt chart to track your planned costs against your actual costs in real time. You can even set guidelines and control procedures to ensure you don’t go over budget.

Schedule Work to Meet Your Deadlines

You’re already using the Gantt chart to organize your resources and costs. Now you can make sure that all your work is scheduled to meet your deadlines. Not only can you organize your tasks, but link all four types of task dependencies to avoid delays, filter for the critical path to identify which tasks are essential and which aren’t and then set the baseline to track your schedule in real time.

Our Gantt charts can be shared with stakeholders and your project team, easily edited by dragging and dropping tasks to new dates—and all impacted tasks are automatically adjusted. Have a stakeholder who prefers working with a paper copy? Don’t worry, our Gantt chart can be printed for them.

Get Started With a Free 30-Day Trial

If you're not currently a ProjectManager customer, we'd love to have you! Get started with a free 30-day trial of our software to see how we can help you plan projects, build workflows and manage resources with powerful features your whole team can use.