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 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 Set up Project Phases

Find:

Click on General Settings in the Sidebar Menu.

Configure:

Click on the Add Phase button to create phases or on the Edit Icon to change existing entries.

Use:

Right-click on a Milestone to edit and link it with a Project Phase.

Click on 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

Find:

Click on Goals in the sidebar menu for an overview of strategic goals and their supporting projects.

Configure:

Click on the title to change the name of the goal. Click on the Plus-Icon at Add New Business Goal to enter a new goal. 

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

Find:

In Resource Pool click on Calendars.

Configure:

Choose a calendar and click on Exceptions to maintain public holidays.

Add specific work time models derived from parent calendar.

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

Find:

Click on General Settings in the Sidebar menu.

Configure:

Enter the number of hours that equals one person day in the Person Day in Hours field.

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

Find:

Click on General Settings in the Sidebar menu.

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

Find:

Click on Reports in the Sidebar menu.

You can add new reports or templates, or use preconfigured reports. Open a report by clicking on the Arrow Icon next to its name.

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 on the Edit Icon next to the report.

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 on 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.