Top 6 Features to Look for in a Project Planner Software
Project planning software is the ally of successful projects. It centralizes the management of all the elements allowing the proper execution of your missions. In addition, a good planning tool can help you stay on top of your finances.
To guide you in your choice, here is our checklist of the essential features of a project planning software.
Why Invest in a Project Planner Software?
Just as a craftsman cannot work without tools, project management is a much more flourishing art when the teams involved are equipped.
What are the challenges for service companies?
The adoption of project planning software responds to three main challenges :
- visibility,
- productivity,
- profitability.
This holy trinity of project management must be met in order to ensure the sustainability of your company.
Optimizing the allocation of your resources is a rewarding challenge, since it allows you to increase your margins thanks to a tenfold increase in productivity. But to do this, access to visibility into what resources and skills are available – and at what level – is essential.
This is where project planning software comes in. The data is updated regularly and allows an equal level of information for all stakeholders. At least, provided that the tool chosen is collaborative enough to connect teams and management.
Excel for project management: sufficient or obsolete?
While Excel is a good companion for starting a business, it quickly becomes a burden. Worse, an obstacle to your growth.
The reason for this is a lack of automation that forces you to carry out manual operations, and a probable double entry on your work software. This is not only time-consuming, but also a source of risk. Excel does not natively integrate changes in planning or budget, for example. An oversight or an input error can cause a snowball effect that you would gladly do without...
Finally, a project planning on Excel or Google Sheets requires you to constantly keep an eye on the planning. And beware of you and your colleagues! A lack of communication leads to confusion – and delays, since your employees may not be notified of planned changes.
Use Case: the benefits of adopting a project planning software
Youmeo is an innovation consulting firm with about twenty employees.
The company used Excel to manage their missions, in particular concerning the following:
- resources,
- expense reports,
- leave.
On the invoicing side, the company wrote them manually.
A less than optimal situation, which ended up having consequences. Work not invoiced, expenses not processed... Administrative tasks were taking up too much space, but they didn't guarantee an error-free result.
By choosing Stafiz as your scheduling software, Youmeo has managed to improve its profitability through better management. So why not you?
The time of an experienced employee is finally used for another assignment. He or she is then replaced by a junior profile with equal skills. The forecast, the profitability report and the load schedule are then automatically updated.
Centralized data is more reliable because it is constantly updated. You save time and reduce administrative tasks: your teams are more engaged!
Multi-project management
Planning your projects shouldn't jeopardize your portfolio management. So opt for software with visibility into the project portfolio.
Stafiz allows you to visualize your profitability both across the entire portfolio, but also mission by mission. This vision allows you to strategically manage the priorities to be made.
This way, you can make better decisions about the scheduling of certain projects – and switch employees for example – but also keep control over costs in order to secure your margins and cash flow.
Feature 2: Resource Management and Real-Time Visibility
Visibility into workload and availability
A good planning software allows you to have immediate visibility on the available resources, and allows you to search (by skill, experience) to identify the most suitable profiles. Good visibility on the load to identify underload and overload issues.
On the project team and consultants' side, this allows them to better anticipate their own workload and avoid last-minute re-planning that can lead to delays.
Availability and absence tracking
Certain parameters, such as being able to block the allocation of resources on unavailable time, help to keep the right level of information accessible. This reduces the risk of resource conflicts and promotes overall resource management.
The chosen software must then integrate a leave and absence management system, but not only. Stafiz offers in particular a daily quota setting. Thus, an employee with a 35-hour contract cannot be assigned to tasks beyond the limit of 7 hours per day. This allows you to adapt your project planning to your different types of contracts, even part-time contracts.
Discover leave management in Stafiz
Allocation of human resources on projects
To assign your resources more quickly to your tasks or projects, choose software with a search engine.
- The search engine
Stafiz's is highly customizable: all fields filled in in CVs or user profiles can become keywords.
Thus, when allocating resources, you just have to type in the skill you are looking for and fill in the expected level.
You can then save your search as a need to use it later.
- Requirements management
As seen earlier, integrating requirements management with planning software is a huge bonus.
Requirements management in Stafiz
By registering a skill requirement from the search engine or directly in the mission, you are able to anticipate capacity planning. This long-term approach is an asset for your business. You are better able to predict the forecasting of resource needs, and consequently, to win more business opportunities.
- The pre-resource planning
This feature allows you to pre-position consultants before finalizing the resource planning. This allows you to plan several profiles for the same need, offering you more flexibility. In addition, as the load analysis is recalculated, it will be easier for you to arbitrate on the positioning by optimizing the occupancy.
In some cases, it can also be used in pre-sales, for example as a support for proposals to the customer. Common among IT Services, this practice reassures the prospect about the expected quality and deadlines.
- Scenario simulation
What could be more reliable than data-driven analysis? A project planning software with a simulation tool will save you many meetings!
Stafiz's Scenario Builder is a powerful technology. It offers different assignment scenarios to help you find the most profitable solution. It is based on needs (in tasks, and therefore in skills), and resources.
The best scenario will then be elected according to 4 criteria: margin, overload days, billable utilization rate at 3 and 6 months.
Example of a resource allocation scenario simulation in Stafiz
- Outsourcing Integration
Working with freelancers often goes beyond the boundaries of your work tools. However, this collaboration could be simplified.
Check that the chosen software offers to integrate your subcontracting into your work processes, through the creation of temporary user profiles, or with different levels of access. You will gain in speed and efficiency.
- Workload management
The lack of visibility on the load is a real challenge. You should be able to see the current and future workload of the employees you assign to assignments. If your current software doesn't allow it, it's time to upgrade!
Here is a team schedule in Stafiz. Employees with a weekly workload of more than 100% are shown in red. Similarly, an undercharged employee will appear in a lighter blue. These load indications are available at any planning time.
You can also balance the workload directly from this screen. Simply scroll down a user to get the details of their load distribution.
By monitoring the load closely, you maximize the occupancy of your teams to ensure an optimal occupancy rate and reduce non-billable time. This is a good way to anticipate recruitment needs and prevent burnout.
Feature 3: Track Deliverables and Milestones
Clarity of expected deliverables
The management of project deliverables is a real common thread. Often associated with milestones, they formalize the transition to another phase or task.
A good project planning tool has built-in document management to make it easier to share deliverables. Stafiz goes further and offers you to configure your deliverables as a milestone. As a result, when a deliverable is shared and declared as complete, it allows certain processes to be automatically activated, such as moving to the next phase, or triggering an invoice.
Definition of deadlines, managers, status
Clear follow-up requires clear indications.
Your project planning platform should highlight task or phase deadlines. Similarly, assigning them a manager is a way of indicating to the different parties the contact person to be favoured in case of need.
This way, each team member is clear about their own missions, and with the general progress of the project.
Feature 4: Collaboration and Notifications
Your workday will be much more efficient if your tools lend themselves to collaboration. The aim is to reduce meetings and their duration as much as possible, as well as email exchanges, which sometimes go unnoticed and lead to confusion.
In-app communications
So choose a tool that can be used as a channel of exchange.
Features such as instant messaging or adding comments are not negligible to avoid communication silos.
Being able to share a task or a screen directly through a link also makes the work more fluid and allows you to give context. If this sounds like something to you, opt for SaaS planning software instead.
Alert systems
Being able to be notified in the event of a schedule change is also a great way to automate collaboration, but not only. Indeed, software like Stafiz allows you a high level of customization of alerts in order to offload your monitoring.
For example, you can be alerted to upcoming deviations in production, lead times and costs. You then benefit from constant monitoring, while reducing the time spent analyzing and monitoring your dashboards.
Better synchronization between project team and management
The comings and goings of documents to be validated are common, and quickly become a hindrance to productivity.
Your tool should be able to integrate validation workflows that can be customized to your needs. This will significantly reduce the response time between validation and delivery.
Feature n°5: Reporting and Management Indicators
Customizable dashboards
When planning a project, you want to be able to track load distribution, project status, and budget consumption.
Make sure your tool has the following features for your project dashboards :
- support for the appropriate billing model (time management, flat rate or both),
- Forward-looking and real-time monitoring of projects,
- a modular interface that adapts to your different types of projects,
- different access rights, to protect sensitive data and avoid overloading the display of unaffected employees.
Deviation tracking
Project planning is never really finished. That's why your software should include deviation tracking features. This way, you can analyze deviations live or before they occur, and adjust schedules to optimize your margin.
This allows you to identify what has been a problem and secure profitability. For your future projects, you will be able to learn from previous failures in order to retain only the best.
Essential KPIs for project and finance departments
Finally, for your dashboards to be activated, the software must be able to calculate and display different types of KPIs.
- Profitability KPIs
These are the financial indicators related to a project.
| Gross amount sold | Official amount of the mission, normally the sum of purchase orders |
| Invoiced share | Invoiced amount divided by gross amount sold |
| Remaining to be invoiced | Gross amount sold, minus invoiced amount |
| Gross margin | Gross margin at the end of the engagement, including the resource planning |
| Expected margin | Expected margin at the end of the mission, including the future |
| Days completed | Number of days of time completed, including subcontractor days and products |
| Days of resource planning | Number of days of resource planning, including subcontractor days and products |
| Completed not invoiced | Valuation of time worked (including subcontractors and products) for the past, minus the amount invoiced. This uninvoiced realisation corresponds to FAE / PCA (invoicing to be issued / deferred revenues) |
| Value of the time achieved | Valuation of time achieved (including subcontractors and products) for the past |
- Project KPIs
| Completion rate | Measuring the profitability of a fixed-price mission by comparing the amount sold to what it should have been to achieve the set objective |
| Gross amount sold | Official amount of the mission, normally the sum of purchase orders |
| CA | Total sales made by a company, calculated according to fixed-price and time-based assignments |
| Remaining to be produced | Amount sold minus valued past production, multiplied by the completion rate |
| Production invoiced in advance | Valued Production× Completion Rate |
| Total Billed | Total before tax of invoices issued on the assignment |
| Advancement | Percentage of completion of a mission in relation to its final objective |
| Valued production | Time valuation based on production plan rates |
- Financial management KPIs
| Income statement | Vision of the turnover, calculated on the basis of the invoiced for the missions under direct management and on the progress by the costs for the fixed-price missions |
| Production report | Valuation of all days on each project, based on the rates set out in the production plan |
| Order Report | Signed purchase orders, broken down by official sales or project dates |
Feature n°6: Integrations with Your Business Tools
The final criterion for choosing your planning tool is the integrations it offers. Whether it's APIs or native connectors, these are essential for making your software communicate with each other.
Consider the following possibilities:
- integration with CRM,
- integration with the ERP,
- integration with HRIS and other HR tools,
- Integration with your calendars.
Transversal qualities to look for in a project planning tool
Beyond the need for technical features, the selected tool must also tick certain boxes to convince and facilitate its adoption.
Its user interface must be designed to facilitate collaboration. The more intuitive and easy a tool is to use, the more you limit the risk of rejection.
Which features or modules keep you proactive ? Delegate certain tasks through automation? The idea is above all to find software that can adapt to your methods, in a changing environment.
Good planning software should therefore contain features:
- visualization,
- resource management,
- time management and tracking,
- collaboration,
- reporting.
- integrations.
It must be able to adapt not only to changing planning over the course of the assignment, but also to the types of projects you could win.
Questions:
Planning allows you to anticipate, organize and monitor the completion of tasks, resources and deadlines in a project. It aims to optimize the allocation of resources (time, skills, budgets), visualize dependencies between activities, identify risks, and ensure that deliverables will be produced on time.
The right software depends on the specific needs of the company: number of projects to be managed, volume of human resources, complexity of schedules, multi-team collaboration, integration with other tools (invoicing, CRM, HR, etc.). Prioritize key features such as Gantt visualization, multi-project planning, load alerts, or automatic reporting.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but for service companies (consulting, IT Services, agencies), the best tools are those that combine mission planning, employee workload management, time monitoring and profitability. Solutions such as Stafiz, Forecast.app, Scoro or Monday.com are often cited for their project management and resource planning.
No, but it can be part of it. Scheduling software focuses on managing time, resources, and schedules. A project management tool is broader: it includes planning but also the management of risks, budgets, deliverables, communication and overall management. Some software integrates both components.
It allows you to gain visibility on all ongoing projects, anticipate resource conflicts, improve productivity and better meet deadlines. For service companies, it is also a lever for profitability thanks to the optimization of billable time and talent planning.
