The project home is your starting point when jumping into your project on the nPlan platform. It will give you an instant view of how your project is doing.
You will be presented with notifications of any new insights that are available to review, any pending actions in your risk register and also a link to your project’s fact file.
When you initially get started you will have a blank canvas, you will have the ability to set-up your dashboard with a few different widgets, the widgets available are the following:
- Forecasted Project Duration - With this metric you can select an individual P-Value to track the duration that nPlan has forecasted for your project. The duration is calculated from the start of the project (i.e. the earliest activity in the schedule file) to the milestone that you have chosen as a target. You can use it in a line chart to see how the duration forecast is trending between revisions of your file. If the line is trending upwards, this is an early warning sign of increasing threats to delivery of your project.
- Planned Project Duration - We calculate planned project duration as the difference in dates between the milestone that you have chosen as a target for forecast and the earliest start date that we have found in the schedule file. A line chart of the planned project duration can help you identify unwanted changes in scope as the schedule file is updated. The planned duration is a good baseline to interpret the forecasted duration. For example, if both your forecasted duration and planned duration are increasing at the same rate, this could mean that the overall risk is not increasing, but your scope is and consequently the likelihood to meet your desired end date could be lower.
- Project progress percentage - Progress in the project is measured as the proportion of activities that have been actualised in the project. We normally recommend to use this metric to make sure that the project is progressing at the same rate as you expect it to. Sometimes a portion of the schedule can gain a large amount of detail which can affect our forecast, this would show as a sharp decrease in this metric.
- Tasks with Long Duration - We define “long duration” as per the DCMA-14 standard as any activity that has a planned duration longer than 60 consecutive days or that has a planned duration that is longer than 10% of the total project duration. Because of the lacking detail, activities with long duration tend to have high uncertainty and make it hard for you to implement efficient mitigation strategies. We recommend that no more than 5% of your activities have long durations. We provide this metric both as a percentage and as a total count.
💡 Tip! You can add multiple of the same widgets! We advised adding at least three widgets showing the forecasted project duration at different P-Values.