Meisterplan offers several additional configuration elements to help you prioritize your projects and identify the right people to work on them.
We already showed you how to set up projects, roles, custom fields, resource skills and project portfolios in our tutorial video Configure Meisterplan for Your Business.
While you do not have to use all of the following configuration elements, we recommend you take a look and consider which ones might help you.
Overview
Projects
Project Settings - Configure your project settings. Determine which project details should be maintained, and how they should be organized.
Project Phases – Visualize the structure of your projects. You’ll have a better overview when planning the workload.
Business Goals – Link your projects with business goals. They help you manage the strategic structure of your portfolios and sub-portfolios, and control your workload and cost investments.
Resources
Calendars – Maintain public holidays and specific work time models. This will make your capacity planning more precise.
Hours per Day – Change the number of hours per person day, if it differs from the default setting of 8 hours. This ensures an accurate calculation of hours to person days and vice versa.
Other
Currency – Your currency is not US Dollar? Change the currency to your preferred value to have it correctly displayed for all cost and benefit fields.
Reports – Reports allow you to analyze portfolio data from different perspectives and create visual charts for meetings with management. This will improve your next portfolio preparation and help you drive the right decisions.
How to Configure Project Settings
Where to Find:
Click Project Settings in the left sidebar to configure the view.
How to Configure:
Add new sections by clicking Add Section, or drag and drop them to another position. Delete a section by clicking the trash can icon which appears when hovering over that section.
Click the Add Project Field button to add fields. Drag and drop them from one custom section to another. Delete fields by clicking the X symbol.
Result:
The fields and details you selected will then be displayed in the project detail view.
More info:
Find more information on configuring project settings in our Configuring Project Settings article.
How to Set up Project Phases
Where to Find:
Click General Settings in the left sidebar menu.
How to Configure:
Click the Add Phase button to create phases or the Edit Icon to change existing entries.
How to Use:
Right-click a Milestone to edit and link it with a Project Phase.
Click Settings to open the Portfolio Designer options.
Color the Gantt chart by Project Phase via the Settings menu to have a better visual of the different Project Phases.
Result:
More Info:
Find more info in our Milestones, Project Phases and Dependencies article.
How to Set up Business Goals
Where to Find:
Click Goals in the sidebar menu for an overview of strategic goals and their supporting projects.
How to Configure:
Click the title to change the name of the goal. Click the plus icon at Add New Business Goal to enter a new goal.
How to Use:
Link your projects with a business goal by dragging and dropping it into the respective box.
Result:
The pie chart details your portfolio's strategic structure.
More Info:
Find more info in our Goals View article.
How to Set up Calendars
Where to Find:
In Resource Pool click Calendars.
How to Configure:
Choose a calendar and click Exceptions to maintain public holidays.
Add specific work time models derived from parent calendar.
How to Use:
Assign specific calendars to your resources in the Resource Pool under Calendar.
Result:
Meisterplan calculates the resource capacity depending on the assigned calendar.
More Info:
Find more info in our Managing Calendars article.
How to Set up Hours per Day
Where to Find:
Click General Settings in the sidebar menu.
How to Configure:
Enter the number of hours that equals one person day in the Person Day in Hours field.
How to Use:
Meisterplan uses your settings to convert days to hours and vice versa.
More Info:
Find more info on the dependence of FTE, Days and Hours in our Time Units-FAQ.
How to Set up Currency
Where to Find:
Click General Settings in the sidebar menu.
How to Configure:
Select your preferred currency under Currency.
Result:
All financial values will now be displayed in the selected currency, for example under Project Finances.
How to Set up Reports
Where to Find:
Click Reports in the sidebar menu.
You can add new reports or templates, or use preconfigured reports. Open a report by clicking the Arrow Icon next to its name.
How to Configure:
Configure your report by defining which fields, allocation and time units, and charts you want to include in your report.
You can change the title and give specific users access to the report by clicking the Edit Icon next to the report.
How to Use:
All pivot reports can be changed interactively for example by rearranging project fields, choosing different charts or drilling down into specific data lines or columns by clicking them.
More Info:
Find more info on reports in our Reports View and Integrated Reports article.
Best Practice Hints:
- Only configure as much as needed and as little as possible. Your colleagues will appreciate the lack of complexity.
- Do not create redundancies. For example, do not try to remodel your project status report in Meisterplan. Rather, link the original document with a URL field.
- The more data you enter, the more data you need to maintain, which makes things more complicated than necessary.