Learn how to enhance projects using Innoslate's Project Management features such as the Calendar, Gantt Chart, and Kanban Board.
Introduction
Project management is essential for the success of any project, ensuring that tasks are completed on time, resources are efficiently utilized, and goals are met. Innoslate provides a robust set of project management tools on its Project Management Dashboard, which includes the Calendar, Gantt Chart, and Kanban Board. By incorporating Innoslate's Model-Based Systems Engineering approach to Project Management along with its other Systems Engineering features, users can access a comprehensive and efficient all-in-one platform for their project requirements.
This article provides an overview of Innoslate's project management features and demonstrates how they can be used to enhance project management workflows.
- Calendar: This feature in Innoslate allows you to schedule tasks, set deadlines, and visualize your project timeline in a calendar view. All traced to dates and data in the project database ensuring all team members are aware of important dates and deadlines, leading to better time management and coordination.
- Gantt Chart: The Gantt Chart helps you visualize project schedules and track progress. It provides a detailed view of all project activities, dependencies, and milestones, enabling project managers to identify potential downfalls and adjust the project plan. With the Gantt Chart, you can see the start and end dates of tasks, their progress, and how they relate to one another.
- Kanban Board: The Kanban Board helps you manage tasks and workflows using a visual board. Tasks can be categorized into different stages via columns, such as "To Do," "In Progress," and "Completed," allowing engineers to track the status of each task. You can create new Kanban boards, customize columns, and sort tasks to fit your project needs. The Kanban Board view displays issues of the current repository and can be customized to show task attributes, assign tasks to assignees, and track quantitative progress.
To follow along and try out the features mentioned in this walkthrough, click here to instantly download the Project Management Sample Project .INNO File and import it into a new Innoslate project.
Walkthrough Use Case
In Innoslate, you can use the Calendar, Gantt Chart, and Kanban Board to effectively utilize the Project Management Dashboard in sync with one another to appropriately manage your project.
The Calendar feature in Innoslate allows users to track events occurring at defined dates within the Gantt Chart or Timeline diagrams. Whether users add the events manually or automatically find their events on the Calendar through the "Task" entity class, they can help track upcoming event dates or elect to change certain attributes based on their immediate need.
Note: The calendar shows the event at the Due date of the task.
Due to Innoslate's ability to have simultaneous entity tracing throughout the entire project, the same "Task" entities are then used in the Kanban Board to recognize tasking, task phasing, completion percentage tracking, description, and due dates. All of these capabilities allow engineers to best organize their tasks and stay consistent with the project plan.
In the example above, the Kanban Board illustrates how Innoslate's project management features can effectively organize and manage tasks across various stages of a project. The board is divided into columns representing different phases of the project, such as "Project Management," "Analysis & Design," "Build," and "Test." Each column contains tasks that fall under the respective phase, making it easy to track the progress and status of each task.
Each task card provides details such as name, description, due date, and completion percentage:
- "WBS 0.1 Project Plan" under "Project Management" involves creating a Project Management Plan (PMP) for the AV project, due January 28th, 2050, and is 100% completed.
- "WBS 1.2 Define Functional Requirements" in "Analysis & Design" involves defining system functionality, due April 15th, 2050, and is 15% completed.
- The columns represent different project phases, with tasks like "WBS 2.1 Define Implementation Plan" in the "Build" column due July 14th, 2050, at 0% completion, indicating it hasn't started.
Users can also interact with the board by dragging and dropping tasks, updating attributes, and adding new tasks or columns as needed. This flexibility in board management allows for dynamic project management and real-time adjustments, a feature that can help countless engineers and project managers in our industry.
Now that we have explored the capabilities of the Calendar and Kanban Board for managing tasks and tracking project progress, let's now turn our attention to another critical project management tool offered by Innoslate in Gantt Charts.
In the example below, the Gantt Chart illustrates a project timeline with tasks, start and due dates, durations, and dependencies. Each row represents the task in the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) element, such as "WBS 1.1 Mission Needs," "WBS 1.2 Define Functional Requirements," and "WBS 2.1 Define Implementation Plan."
- The chart highlights task duration and schedule by specifying the duration and scheduled start and end dates. For instance, "WBS 1.1 Mission Needs" has a duration of 10.5 days, starting on January 1, 2050, and ending on February 11, 2050.
- The Gantt Chart also clearly shows task dependencies with arrows connecting tasks, such as "WBS 1.2.1 Perform Functional Analysis" depending on "WBS 1.2 Define Functional Requirements," indicating that the former cannot start until the latter is completed.
- The filled portions of the bars indicate the progress of each task, like the partial progress shown for "WBS 1.3 Develop Requirements," helping managers track ongoing work.
Through the Gantt Charts in Innoslate, systems engineers and project managers can gain a clear, comprehensive view of the project timeline, manage dependencies, and ensure that all tasks are completed on schedule, all in sync with other implementations of the same tasks in other views. A change in the Gantt Chart will be reflected in the Calendar and Kanban Board.
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