We are happy to announce another update to our software, which is now live for all our existing as well as new customers.
Why We added Project and Role Budgets
We know, your time and work is very valuable. When experts are asked to work on common tasks, the time or team size often has to be limited due to internal reasons or client requirements. With iCombine, it now becomes even more easy to plan your projects and teams accordingly.
iCombine introduces project and role budgets to help project planners meet the expectations of their stakeholders and keep track of the planning status. At the same time, every team member will be informed about underlaying constraints. With the new feature, we help you to answer the following questions:
How can we create transparency about the planning capacity and expected headcount of our projects?
How do we know if we meet budgets or where we still have planning needs?
What has to be changed when we exceed or fail to meet our budget?
Our new release includes the following options:
Set Total Project Budgets
In every project, you can now define a total project budget that should be met by the people who plan your project.
With one click on the drop down icon, you can open the project budget panel.
As a project budget, you can set total hours, total headcount, or a combination of both.
Set Project Role Budgets
Once you created project roles, you can break down the total project budget by defining role budgets.
Set a role budget by also defining total hours and headcount of each role that will be staffed.
See Budget Conflicts and Take Action
In case a project planner exceeds the total budget due to assigning excessive role budgets, iCombine will highlight the conflict and encourage a change.
iCombine shows the issues between role budget and total budget.
When project planners start staffing the team, iCombine will inform them about the planning status. Since total project budget and role budgets are connected to each other, conflicts are indicated on each affected level.
iCombine shows the related conflicts and quantifies all issues.
Keep an Updated Overview of your Planning Status
In the project overview, you can keep track of your overall project planning. Now, you will also see the project budgets, how well you meet the requirements, and how much planned time has already been spend on the project (worked).
Project overview with new budget information and conflict indication.
Start now with our free trial to experience the new release right away. If you want to learn more about this and other features, feel free to visit our knowledge base or book a virtual appointment with us.
We want to thank our current users for all the inspiration to build this feature. With this release and the addition of project budgets, we show again how feedback can shape the product vision of iCombine. Also, we believe our customers can now make better planning decisions and enable even more transparency in the planning process. Stay tuned for more updates in the future!