Project Widgets has created powerful, easy to use “widgets” that extend the capabilities of Microsoft Project and make the overall project and portfolio management process more intuitive and streamlined. Most importantly, these solutions have been designed to build integrity and governance into your project plans, thereby providing a solid foundation for significant decision-making that these uncertain times demand.

This article will provide a brief overview of some of the widgets currently available. These Project Widgets products, all of which work with Project Online and Project Server, will allow you to take project management with Microsoft Project to the next level!

Scenario Builder Widget

As we prepare for an ever-changing future, the need for reliable “what-if” scenarios has never been more critical. Project Widgets has focused on this problem for a long time, and we have created a tool that leverages Microsoft Project to create trustworthy scenario plans that support key business decisions. The Scenario Builder Widget allows leaders to make confident portfolio decisions by better understanding the downstream impact of the available options.

The Scenario Builder Widget allows you to create unlimited scenario versions of a project. As the Scenario Builder Widget has been seamlessly integrated with OnePager Pro by Chronicle Graphics, you can create visually stunning reports that compare different scenarios to each other, as well as to the active project on which they are based.

Project Initiation Widget

It is often challenging to ensure that project managers create schedules that follow organizational standards and best practices. To solve this problem, Project Widgets’ Project Initiation Widget automates the new project creation process, ensuring uniformity across your enterprise by leveraging existing project templates and enforcing a standard naming convention. The Project Initiation Widget’s user interface is template-driven and dynamic. Types and quantities of tasks included in a new project are determined by the user’s response to prompts. You can even create multiple projects for an entire program at the same time!

The Project Initiation Widget is integrated with MasterLink from Matan and will automatically create links between projects upon their creation based upon your template configuration. This eliminates the need to manually create inter-project dependencies between projects!

Project Details Portal

The Project Details Portal provides an intuitive, modern user interface that enables you to capture critical project information that can then be used for reporting purposes throughout the life of a project. This includes:

Project Metadata
Objectives and Assumptions
Risks, Issues, and Actions
Project Status
Key Decisions
Stakeholders

The Project Details Portal stores this information in a central repository that is integrated with Project Online or Project Server.

SnapIt!

SnapIt! allows you to create “snapshots” of important project information across your portfolio. This information includes schedule-related information such as key task and milestone dates, as well as information captured in our Project Details Portal such as metadata, key assumptions, and risks.

Similar in concept to saving a project baseline, SnapIt! provides the ability to capture unlimited snapshots as a centralized function of your PMO. SnapIt! will automatically highlight variances of key tasks and milestones from one reporting period to another so that nothing slips through the cracks!

Interested in Learning More?

I dive deeper into these widgets and their capabilities in my on-demand MPUG session, Where There’s a Widget, There’s a Way: Unleashing the Power of Microsoft Project. It’s part of MPUG’s Vendor Showcase 2020.

The above article is a sponsored contribution. We thank Project Widgets for being a community sponsor of MPUG.