The most frequently reasons of project, programme and portfolio management failures are:

• incoherence and lack of proper information when it is required,
• overload of information caused by redundancy of data,
• difficulties with planning and coordination of resource usage in multiple projects,
• difficulties with teamwork,
• problems with assigning and sending work packages for execution and tracking their progress,
• difficulties with creation of consistent reports,
• erroneous, incoherent and ineffective plans,
• difficulties with communication between project management teams, team members, suppliers and stakeholders.

Integrated project management systems allow to minimise these negative problems and even eliminate most of them, save a lot of time and work effort and above all ensure plan coherence and increase quality of project, programme and portfolio management. Instead of changing project data multiple times in many places, each single change updates automatically other related objects and relations between them. Even in small organisations it can lead to substantial saving in time and costs.

A particular advantage of integrated project management systems built with P2ware Planner Server is that it can be built gradually, developed and adjusted to actual organisation requirements and its actual maturity level that is why benefits from using it substantially exceed costs of its deployment.

The most basic integrated project management system can be built using a server with installed P2ware Planner Server, personal computers with installed desktop applications P2ware Planner Enterprise or Planner for PSO and computers with web browsers.

Integrated systems may also be more complicated and developed (according to requirements) and can be integrated with ERP-like systems, Microsoft SharePoint and other frequently used enterprise applications, forming a coherent and integrated management system for the whole organisation.

If your firm or organisation

• executes multiple projects simultaneously using usually the same resources,
• manages project as programmes and/or portfolios,
• would like to promote a teamwork and to easily and effectively enforce project management best practices,
• would like to attain a higher level of project, programme and portfolio maturity level with low investment costs,
• plans to build an integrated project management system but would like to avoid risks related to large investment in a software,
• would like to take advantages of the product-based planning,

or if your company or organisation wants to

• implement a project, programme and/or portfolio management method (also when there is more than one method or standard such as PRINCE2® or PMBOK®),
• ensure that managers have access to up-to-date and structured information about project and programme progress, risks and issues,
• share with stakeholders only project data relevant to their authority,
• provide your team with a particularly effective tool with functionalities not present in other project management applications available on the market,
• increase productivity of people managing projects and better use of its resources,

...then integrated P2ware project management systems are for your company or organization.

Integrated project management systems built with P2ware Planner Suite has various unique functionalities unavailable in many systems on the market.

With P2ware Planner in an integrated system you may

• create a product breakdown structure in a form of diagram or dotted list,
• describe products and other plan objects avoiding entering the same information multiple times,
• create a product flow diagram,
• generate a network diagram and a Gantt chart based on the product flow diagram automatically,
• create the Gantt chart with sub-activities and breaks in activities and automatically computed critical path,
• plan resources usage and control their load level,
• level resources load using the critical chain method,
• create specific work week templates,
• define individual calendars for projects, activities and resources,
• present activities in a form of schedule,
• maintain a risk register and manage risks,
• maintain an issue register,
• save lessons learned in lessons log,
• maintain a daily log,
• create work packages and assign checkpoints,
• save plan parts and use them again in other plans,
• visualise planned and actual costs and the earned value,
• link plan objects with documents and other data available in a network,
• generate reports using built-in report templates,
• create your own report templates from scratch or by editing existing,
• use advanced tabular features,
• print and export images and tables,
• create snapshots, i.e. save a state of a plan at the time of a snapshot creation,
• import or export data from/to various popular applications and data formats (e.g. Microsoft Excel, text files, Microsoft Project, xml and other),
• use templates created with P2ware Planner Premium or P2ware Planner for PSO - versions allowing for adding new properties and formulas.

If there is at least one license for P2ware Planner Premium or P2ware Planner for PSO available, your organisation can create plan templates adjusted and customised to individual requirements of the organization, project, programme or portfolio. Users of Planner Server, Planner Enterprise and other version of P2ware Planner will be able to use plan templates created with Planner Premium or Planner for PSO.