More transparency and improved project controlling across different departments and locations
More structured and exact task planning and resource management
Time tracking and status feedback directly through contributors
Improved documentation due to automatic project reports
EVVA is an Austrian family business and one of the leading European security technology manufacturers using both mechanical and electrical systems. EVVA provides integrated total packages to meet the most varied protection requirements.
They are a global provider of state-of-the-art access solutions for hotels, office buildings, commercial centers, public buildings, educational facilities, museums, airports, residential buildings, and logistic, commercial, retail, and industrial premises. Since 1919, EVVA has been standing out due to innovation and innovative products forming a long and successful history.
As you can imagine, cross-departmental and multi-site product development projects are of particular importance to EVVA.
Besides the excellent know-how, experience, and creativity of engineers and designers, the planning and handling of such large, company-wide projects is challenging, if not outright impossible, without project and product management on a highly professional level.
For many years, EVVA has continuously strived to strengthen project management, carry out comprehensive group training, and implement a company-specific project management handbook.
Furthermore, it appeared reasonable to standardize the software used for project management and to choose a product enabling teamwork on projects with up to 50 different contributors and employees across different departments and locations.
To support these objectives, a project management office was established in the organization development department to support the standardization efforts, secure project know-how, and facilitate reuse.
At the launch of Planforge the emphasis was to ensure the achievement of the goals „in time“, „in budget“ und „in quality“ for our internal product development projects. With Planforge we came a significant step closer to this goals, and at the same time we got the chance to learn from our projects in mid term and to become better and better.
— Thomas Steininger
Division Manager Quality Management & Organizational Development
Right from the start, Planforge was on the evaluation shortlist since EVVA had previously used the project management software's free trial version for an internal firmware development project.
The use of additional features like project controlling, availability schedule, and risk management was also something EVVA was looking forward to. Moreover, the appealing user interface, the central access to project plans and tasks, and the resulting possibility of common concurrent usage were very convincing.
Of course, the attractively priced user license model, the short reaction time of the professional user support and the minimal installation effort on the employees' PCs due to the use of standard browsers were also crucial for the choice.
One of the most significant advantages Planforge holds against all competitors is the intuitive operation which resulted in little training effort.
During training sessions for either a half or a whole day, the project team refreshed the relevant project management basics for efficient use, practiced typical software application cases, and reviewed some specific use cases.
After the training was over, the real work started, and more than 80 project and subproject managers use Planforge every day. EVVA employees appreciate the advantages of handling their tasks to plan and control projects and their entire life cycles in a single project management software solution.
One essential aspect of this is controlling the project progress, as shown in the following screenshot.
Similar views can be found once on the project level and the activity/task level. These enable a quick overview of a project portfolio's status or an individual project or subproject.
Example: The unique Project Pipeline in Planforge
After using Planforge for just six months, it was also introduced to departments like research & development, product management, production transition, marketing, sales, service & support, internal IT service, and organization development.
Besides the already mentioned progress tracking on the project level, the increase in transparency across the individual project tasks, resource assignment, and easier coordination are also central parts of this success story.
Besides, the time tracking function allows for more exact documentation of the actual effort and supports project managers' experience-based learning.
It becomes possible to create more and more reliable project plans for certain subprojects over time by generating reusable project templates.
The benefit of the standardized project management platform also becomes apparent in the simplified project controlling enabled by the controlling option since project status reports can now be created reliably and quickly at the push of a button.
In the medium term, EVVA intends to gradually increase the use of all possibilities for cost planning and cost control and involve project sales to verify the functions supporting invoicing for customer projects.
Finally, it has become a lot easier to coordinate the project steps across different departments and locations.
Not for that reason alone, but also because other features such as the project checklist, the project pipeline, and risk management Planforge can be described as coherent and well-balanced project management solution.
Example: The Gantt chart in Planforge
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