About PMPal

PMPal^© is a Full Feature, Integrated, Collaborative and High Value project management product developed by and for software project managers. Geared toward software development firms, but applicable to any software development environment, it helps software teams, project managers, quality managers, and senior managers to gain a better handle on estimating, quality, and progress.

For the Project Team, it helps coordinate the day to day activities connected with developing the software, reducing confusion along the way. With integrated information, including the project's work breakdown structure, resource allocations, and execution activities, team communication becomes much easier.

For the Project Manager, it removes the burden of calculating complex project metrics and developing and distributing reports, as PMPal has built-in metrics reporting. It also provides better visibility of the completion of tangible work, as opposed to merely time spent on tasks.

For Senior Management, it makes all the relevant information available at their finger tips through a variety of analytical reports, enabling them to base their decisions on sound, evidence-based data. They can view high level information, or explore the supporting details.

For the Quality Department/SEPG, it eliminates the need for the tedious collation of metrics and related record keeping. PMPal provides extensive metrics in the areas of Quality (Defect Metrics), Productivity, Effort, and Schedule, keeping all the records necessary for external audits or internal analysis. It's visual graphs and charts facilitate faster course-correction and more informed decision-making.

The ability to estimate effectively is a critical success factor for all software development projects. This module helps developers properly estimate the software size, effort, cost, and schedule for software activities through a variety of methods consistent with SEI CMM Level 5 standards. This includes function point analysis, parametric estimating, analogous estimating, and more.

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is the foundation of any project. It represents the work that must be done to achieve success, and is used to develop the project's schedule and work assignments. This module assists the team in building a work breakdown structure, defining work packages, managing allocation, and updating completion details. It offers templates to assist project managers in planning software construction, review and testing activities.

A variety of status, summary, and resource management reports are also provided, targeted to various levels of staff and management. Thus, reporting is not merely for management, but drives activities for the entire project team.

It is much less expensive to correct defects during development that it is after a system goes live. Defect Manager assists in capturing and reporting software defects before they reach the end user. It enables analysis, allocation, correction, and testing of defects, and maintains a defect register for auditability. At any time, team management can see the completion status, pending allocation, and overall summary of the defects in the project. And since this is visible to all authorized users, it simplifies communication activities for the project manager and maintains a hightened awareness of defects for the project team.

This module makes it difficult to ignore a Reported-Defect, and will save money by insuring defects are caught early.

The only thing certain about software projects is uncertainty. Despite the best planning, changes are bound to happen as a project progresses and new discoveries are made. Change Manager assists the project team in capturing and reporting project changes, including changes to the scope or design. It facilitates the full lifecycle of the change, including impact analysis, assignment, execution of the change, testing, and review/approval. For auditability, it maintains a Change Register as well.

As with Defect Manager, any authorized user can view the status of change requests, offering value to both the project team and senior management.

PMPal offers an easy-to-use online timesheet, which enables project team members to report time against activities and software components. Since the time is pegged to specific components, it allows for better productivity reporting. Furthermore, there are over 300 pre-defined software development activities grouped into seventeen software development phases. In addition, there are 100 pre-defined activities for supporting services, such as HR, Quality Management, and more. All of these activities are highly configurable, and your own activities can be easily added.

For simplicity, our time sheet module is mostly based on selecting and clicking data to minimize entry for the user. The minimum time slot is a half hour, it allows for reporting more than 8 hours in a day, and there is no restriction on how many entries per day can be made. Reporting makes it easy for team management to view the timesheet for any or all team members.

Many project management tools fall severely short when it comes to project metrics. This is especially so when it comes to tracking software quality and the completion of actual work. This is where PMPal shines. PMPal offers a wealth of metrics reports in the following categories:

Suffice it say that these metrics will help your organization achieve and maintain a maturity level at SEI-CMM Level 5!! Try a demo version of PMPal today, risk free. Visit our Downloads page.