Early Preview of Project Management Software: ZilicusPM 8.3

Zilicus, online collaboration solution provider of the best project management software – ZilicusPM, will be releasing new and enhanced version ZilicusPM 8.3.

I am happy to share a preview of ZilicusPM 8.3 here. This version of ZilicusPM will make team members more productive by helping them identify project tasks and quickly submit timesheet entries against those tasks, control who-should-see-what for clients and team members, also making it useful and effective for project manager to track resources, timesheet, project progress.

Major Update

You decide what should your customers and team members see
Let them know when you are not working on projects

Enhancements

Choose your start of your working week in ZilicusPM
Quickly enter timesheet for tasks scheduled in this week
Easily track – how many hours are remaining to work on a task assigned to you
Report : Change filter parameters and re-run report
Organize project listing : View list of projects grouped by project manager, portfolio

You decide what should you customer and team members view in project

Now project manager in ZilicusPM project management software can configure what should a customer should be able to view and what information of customer should team members be able to view. ZilicusPM has introduced configuration/preference settings for following

Show/hide project schedule (Gantt chart) and project dashboard to project customers
Show/hide project team members’ list to customer users
Show/hide project customer information page to all team member

Configure access for clients in project management software – ZilicusPM

Let them know when you are not working on projects

We understand that you are not working on projects for 100% of your time in office. There can be training, workshop, meetings and other activities which are not related to projects. But as you would be busy in such non-project activities, project managers should know that you would not be available to take up project activities. Thus making it transparent for everyone to know when you are available or busy for scheduling project tasks and assigning those to you.

Any regular user in ZilicusPM can enter non-working activity by selecting days and hours. This activity is then listed in resource load chart. These non-available hours are included in Total Load (Hrs) and the same is shown against a given user whenever tasks are assigned to him/her.

Add Non project activity

Screen below shows how non-project activities are shown in my calendar.

Non Project Activity In Calendar

Similarly, these hours against non-project activities are shown in resource load chart as well.

Non Project Activity Resource Load Chart

Choose a starting day of your working week – whether Monday, Sunday or Saturday

Since customers in different countries have different days as start of a working week e.g. for United States, Sunday is start of a week whereas for many European countries, Monday is considered start of a week. ZilicusPM now allows you to configure your starting day of a week. This preference is significant for European customers as it reflects working week while submitting timesheet entries as well as in project schedule i.e. Gantt chart view.

Configure Start of a Week

Quickly enter timesheet for tasks scheduled in this week

In order to make super easy for our customers to enter timesheet against project tasks, this version of ZilicusPM project management software will pre-populate timesheet entries for tasks scheduled in current week across multiple projects.

Add Timesheet Activites for Tasks Scheduled This Week

Of course, beside these tasks scheduled in current week, users can include other tasks, issues, risks and ad-hoc activities.

Easily track how many hours are remaining to work on tasks assigned to you

The timesheet view will show how many hours are planned and remaining to work on a task while submitting timesheet entries. I’d like to quote one our customer’s expectation for this enhancement. This feature enables two things for project team members

Reminds them of the tasks that they are supposed to be working on, in case they get tunnel-vision or forget about other higher priority tasks
Allows them to more accurately account for their weekly work efforts

Submit Timesheet Planned, Remaining Hours

Organize project listing: View list of projects grouped by project manager, portfolio

Now project manager, team members can organize project listing in better way. They can see project grouped by project owners or portfolio. Interestingly, if you have list type of custom field, you can also view group-by view for the values of such custom field.

Organize Project Listing GroupBy ProjectOwner

Other enhancements, bug fixes which are going to be part of this release are

Allow comments to timesheet from home page
Reassigning an issue to user itself, will change the status of a given issue
MS Project import – update existing schedule

If you would like to manage projects effectively, ZilicusPM is the right solution; not just for you as a project manager (for its completeness) but also for your team members (for its simplicity & ease of use), as well as executive management (dashboard, reports). Sign up for 30-days risk free trial.

About Zilicus

Zilicus offers the best project portfolio management tool ZilicusPM, with robust project management tools capabilities and easy ways to track project management KPI,

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