Plan On The Net .com provides the ultimate in collaborative project planning, project costing resource analysis and issue tracking. If you have access to the web, all of your users have access to your project plans ... anywhere, anytime.

This user guide provides the instructions on how to use the many features of Plan On The Net .com.

The table of contents for the user guide also serves as a list of features. We also have a features summary that is located from our home page.  

When you see text like this, it refers to a link or button on one of our screens. Within the user guide, the link is not active, but is shown in a different font for ease of communication.

When you see text like home page login user admin, then we are attempting to indicate an approximate nagivation path through the various screens of Plan On The Net .com.  

In addition, comprehensive data is provided for resource analysis; data is readily exportable to MS Excel for further analysis.

Plan On The Net .com gives your team access to project data anytime, from anyplace.  

For more information on Earned Value Project Management, please see non-affiliated site:
Earned Value Management Web Site.  

The Analysis page shows CPM DRAG as described in Total Project Control and the book "Total Project Control" by Stephen A. Devaux (Wiley) 1999 ISBN 0-471-32859-6.

For tasks not on a critical path, the analysis page shows how much a task can slip (total float or slack) and the latest start and finish times for a task, without the task affecting the planned completion date of a project.  

Collaboration is easily extended to your corporate partners that also need access to current project plans.
Great for teams distributed across cities, states and countries.
Very useful for teams from different corporate or organizational entities.
Eliminates cost of PC-based applications installed on every workstation.
Reduces software version problems.  

Please also review the rest of the user guide to fully appreciate all of the features and benefits.

In the following descriptions, we'll use program office to refer to the first page that you see after a successful login. The full navigation path will be shown for clarity, but in practice this will not be required most of the time.  

program office vacation days all projects or pick project.

In addition you can add vacation days for a specific resource. You do this by changing the properties of a resource: program office pick project modify, then select the "pen" icon of the resource that you'd like to modify.  

program office pick project view full gantt chart.

You won't see anything useful on the Gantt chart until you have added assignments and duration to a task.  

A program office is used to represent your corporation; a program office can hold multiple separate projects, but all with a common administrator and the ability to do cross-project reporting and analysis.  

You should use the name of your primary corporate internet domain. This provides an easy way for your users to remember the name, as well as avoiding naming conflicts with other organizations. Try not to choose a long or complicated program office name as this makes it difficult for your users to login since the name must be typed in exactly as registered.  

Enter the first and last names. These are not the names used for login, so you can make them as complete as possible.  

There is only one administrator for a program office. Other users and their names will be added by the administrator using the administration facilities of Plan On The Net .com.  

Enter the same password again in the following field. This will confirm that you have not mistyped the password.  

Registration is generally immediate. If the login screen is presented then your registration has succeeded. The system will verify your e-mail address after registration has completed successfully; in the meantime you may continue to use the site.  

The system does not check the validity of this password nor does it store it within the database.

If you change the project encryption password when you login, then your project data will have multiple keys and multiple encryption codes. This is not what most users want because projects with different keys will not function the way you intend them to. Also, to do analysis across projects, they must all have the same project key.

Unless you specifically intend these side-effects, you should always use the same project encryption key or do not use one at all.

If you forget your project encryption password, we will not be able to assist you to recover your encrypted project data!  

We call this the program office page because it acts like a home page for your program office.  

The logout link will not be displayed if you logged in via a third party login screen. For example, sites that are self-hosted may elect to authenticate users with their own login screen and bypass our login screen. In this case, we are unable to provide a logout function. The most secure way to logout of the application is to close all browsers that are logged into the application.  

Only the project office administrator can change the date format.

To change the date, please see project office home page date format

From this page, select one of the available format choices.  

After adding a new project you should update the access permissions of your users that need to access your new project.  

program office change profile.

Changing a user profile allows the name, login and/or the password of a user to be changed.  

Select program office pick a project user access or program office pick a project group access. The system will provide an access matrix for each user or group.

To change access, select the change access link. From there simply check (or uncheck) access permissions and select submit.  

Groups can be global or private. Global groups are created by the administrator and can be seen by all users within a program office. Private groups are created by individial users and can only be seen by the original creator of the group.  

One or more resource assignments and dependencies can also be added to a task. A task does not have to have assignments; however, if a task does have assignments and the duration of the assignments exceed the duration of the task, then the duration of the task will be extended to that of the assignments.  

An assignment has a duration, resource and creates project effort and costs.

A task may have multiple resource assignments.  

A task can also depend on a task folder. This is another way of stating: "Do not start this task until another whole group of tasks has completed.  

Tasks are always added to the "Task" section of a project plan: To add a task, select the "T" icon of a task folder. The system will create a new task called "New Task". Select the "pen" icon to modify the task name.  

You can set the "earliest start" to override the system calculated date. In effect, you can specify "do not start this task before this date".

The software allows you to change the task name and set an earliest start date:  

To add an assignment, select the "resource" icon of the task:  

You can select a specific resource or if that has not been decided yet, you can select the department of the resource.  

Percent complete should reflect your assessment of how complete an assignment is. This usually is independent of how much effort has been expended on an assignment.  

All reports and data are available at any level of resource or task.
All reports and data are exportable back to your computer.
Import data directly into MS Excel for further analysis.
Choose any combination of report data.

The following reports and analysis are available:

Tasks by resource.
Resources by task.
Critical path tasks identified.
Original planned days, utilization, cost and quantity.
Calculated schedule for cost, start, finish and effort.
CPM DRAG analysis: late start, late finish, total float, project DRAG.
Percentage contribution by cost, by effort.
Quick track: actual start, percentage complete, actual effort and cost.
Earned value details: date of report, percentage complete and actual effort.
Projected completion date and cost.

You can select the reports and analysis that you wish to view by toggling the appropriate report selector:  

Select the level of report detail by opening the appropriate sections of the project plan:  

Late Start: The latest a task can start without affecting the project.

Late Finish: The latest a task can complete without affecting the project.

Total Float: Also known as Total Slack: how much a task can slip without delaying the end of the project.

DRAG: (Devaux's Removed Activity Gauge) The amount of time a project is adding to the total length of the project. Only tasks on the Critical Path will have a non-zero DRAG. A task that reduces it's DRAG to zero will come off the critical path, moving another task onto the critical path.

For more information on the CPM DRAG metrics please see the non-affiliated site Total Project Control .  

For a single project or
The global project that covers all projects within a program office.
You can select the level of resources that you wish view.
Histograms always reflect the latest project status.

Plan On The Net .com displays the results as a set of stacked histograms by time, with one histogram for each selected (opened) resource. An example of a resource loading graph is:  

The resource utilization reflects the latest project data (as of the last browser page refresh). If a project plan is being updated by another user, you simply need to refresh your browser page and the utilization graphs will be updated.

You can access the report for a particular project by: program office pick project loading analysis.  

Plan On The Net .com provides a unique and invaluable email capability. Email is automatically sent out to project resources as tasks are scheduled to start or become due for completion. The project manager is able to configure these messages and how far in advance they should be sent.  

There are just a few steps required to email enabling a project plan.
Configure the project plan email parameters.
Associate email addresses to resources.

In addition, there are some supporting features:
Ad-hoc triggering of email processing.
Reviewing recently emailed messages.
Sending test email messages to resources.  

program office pick project plan email enable

Toggle the "Enable email" checkbox.

Toggle the start reminder resource checkbox if you want email messages to be sent before tasks are about to start. Indicate how many (calendar) days in advance email should be sent.

Toggle the end reminder resource checkbox if you want email messages to be sent before tasks are about to become due. Indicate how many (calendar) days in advance email should be sent.

In the additional project message area, enter a project specific message. This text will be added to each email that is sent to each resource.

Select Submit for the updates to be saved.  

When you enter the email enable screen, a list of recently emailed messages will be displayed (the last message sent will be displayed first). To refresh the list or to jump to this screen: program office pick project plan email enable  

In the event that you wish for email to be sent immediately, the "Resend" button can be used. The "Resend" button will ignore the fact that a message may have been previously sent; this is useful in the case that email messages have been lost or you wish to test the project plan.  

Each resource must be associated with an email address. Any resources that are not associated with email addresses will not be emailed. When setting up a resource, you can send test email in order to verify that the system is able to successfully send email to that person.

Navigate to the project plan worksheet:

program office pick project plan modify plan

Open the resource you wish to modify: Under the "Resources" folder, locate the resource. Select the "pen" icon and the resource modify screen will be presented.

Toggle the "Send Email" tag if you want the resource to receive email.

Enter an email address.

You can test the email address by select the "Test Email" button. A test email message will be immediately sent.

Note: One common cause of email transmission error, is that the "From" email address is not valid. The "From" email address is taken from your login ID.  

EVM also provides the project manager a tool for measuring actual worked performed against the planned (budgeted) work schedule as well as indicating cost or effort overruns against budgeted cost or effort schedules.

If you are not familiar with EVM, you can review some of the many excellent web sites on EVM. As a reference, we provide the following link (not affiliated with this site): Earned Value Management Web Site.  

There are two main activities: (1) Entering tracking data and (2) Reviewing the analysis.  

The most important aspect of this data entry, is to correctly assess the percentage completion of an assignment. You should not enter percentage completion based upon hours expended or money spent. Enter an assessment of how complete the assignment is.

The software keeps track of previous entries and so an automatic trend dataset is maintained.

To enter tracking data, go to the project worksheet and select the "pen" icon next to the task assignment that you want to update: program office pick project plan modify open tasks pick pen icon of task assignment  

program office pick project plan earned value.

The following image shows a sample histogram.  

The schedule variance indicates how much ahead (or behind) the project is, based upon the actual real progress made.  

The cost variance indicates how much over (or under) spending is currently taking place, relative to the planned spending schedule.  

From the EVM analysis page (see navigation in section above), select the export current view link. You will be prompted to save the data in a file or opened with your spreadsheet program. Due to different PC configurations, we suggest that you first save the file and then open with your spreadsheet program.

The following image shows some EVM data plotted on a graph using MS Excel.  

While most of ours user have high speed connections to the Internet, we ensure that our site can be well accessed via dial-up Internet access.

We have also designed our pages with extra features to help you get faster page response.

The rest of this section describes how you can use these features to make best use of the site.  

In particular, use the "Easy Open All" toggle sparingly. Use it when you genuinely need to review the whole project plan; turn off when no longer needed.

Use the "Easy Open All" toggle sparingly:  

By using the pushpin, a small portion of the plan will be transmitted to your browser resulting in a dramatic improvement in page refresh.

The pushpin can be activated by selecting the "pin hole" icon at the very left hand side of a row:  

Use the column toggles to hide unused columns:  

The issues tracking let you decide how much detail you want to see. For example, if you are only working on "Open Issues", make that it the first sort field and don't open the other categories of issues.

To speed up page refresh when using issue tracking, use the "Easy Open" toggles sparingly:  

The date filter reduces the number of filters that you see:  

	Mark an item for "cut". The item will not be moved until a "paste" action occurs.
	Indicates the currently selected cut item.
	Mark an item for "copy". The item will not be copied until a "paste" action occurs.
	Indicates the currently selected item for copying.
	Indicates a paste location. The cut item will be moved to the selected position or the copy item will be copied to the selected position. Note: This icon only appears if there is currently an item marked for cut or copy; also, the system will not display the paste icon on items that cannot be pasted to.
	Mark an item for deletion. Item will remain in plan but not take part in the scheduling (plan will behave as though the item is deleted). Item can be recovered (see below).
	Finalize a delete operation. The item will actually be deleted from the plan (and cannot be recovered).
	Recover item. An item previously marked for deletion will be permanently deleted.
CP	Item is on critical path.
	Add resource or task assignment.
	Add task.
	Add task dependency.
	Add folder.
	Modify resource, task, assignment, dependency or folder (change name, cost, etc.).
	Task contents are hidden. Select to open task and reveal assignments and dependencies.
	Task contents are displayed. Select to hide contents.
	Folder is closed. Select to open folder.
	Folder is opened. Select to close folder.
	Select to set the page anchor. Reduces the amount of plan displayed and speeds up page display.
	Page anchor has been set. Select to remove page anchor.