Are You Benefiting from the OpenAir Project Center?

The OpenAir Project Center offers a range of benefits tailored to the needs of project managers. It is a comprehensive project management solution that streamlines various aspects of project planning, execution, monitoring, and reporting.

This article discusses the ins and outs of the Project Center along with highlighting some of the more recent enhancements. We’ll help you uncover the full power of Project Center and how you can get the most out of it.

Functions: Project Outline View

The Project Outline View is the foundation of the Project Center and allows you to create and modify project plans. Here you can manage your bookings and project plans on a single screen. The project outline lets you:

• Add resource bookings at either task or project level
• View, enter, or update resource bookings using inline-editing
• Add built-in and custom fields for the booking entity as columns to the project outline

Inline Editing

OpenAir has a notes field on project tasks where users can store additional information. These fields can be brought into the task view by enabling Project Center. Not only that, but the feature also lets you inline edit those notes without having to drill down into each task.

Project Planning

You have additional creation options within the project view where you can add new tasks, phases, or milestones and lots of flexibility to reorganize your project plan. Within the view, you also get inline editing dates. This feature saves you time and the number of clicks in opening multiple forms.

Resource Management

Regarding resource management, the system lets you schedule down to the task or project level without opening the booking form or going into the booking module. So, when you enable the inline editing function, you can enter bookings. Initially, you could only do weekly bookings, but this has since been modified to allow for monthly bookings, a helpful addition since many users make their bookings every month.

Should you have multiple streams of bookings to run, the system lets you do that. You can add different booking types with different characteristics within the Project Center. Another benefit of the multiple booking capability is that you don’t have to enter your bookings period by period. Instead, with Project Center, include start and end dates and adjust hours on a period-by-period basis in the same worksheet view.

Project Center Date Management

You have two options as far as date management in Project Center is concerned – weekly and monthly. Please note that you could have some wonky numbers once you select one option and later switch to the other option. For example, if you set up your bookings every month and then start updating weekly, you’re likely to end up with some odd decimal numbers in your bookings.

Bookings are created and based on granularity and will evenly spread the hours to the first to the last day of the period. So, if you book monthly, Project Center will spread the hours evenly throughout the month.

The last release came with usability enhancement, a more enhanced date picker. It lets you select an entire week or month, based on the chosen duration, instead of a single date. With the usability enhancement tool, you also can use shortcuts to select absolute frames, i.e., this week or month, previous week or month, etc.

Booking Dates

Another feature of the recent update is the ability to use bookings to control project plans. How this works is when using the booking worksheet in the Project Center and the custom field to drive task dates from bookings, the calculated start and finish dates are automatically updated based on the bookings associated with those tasks.

Project Center Groupings and Other Options

Grouping is another enhancement in the Project Center that allows for a consolidated view of a single data line per resource. It lets you freeze task columns to scroll on either side, show availability, and enable booking warnings.

The subtotals option lets you summarize bookings at phase and project levels. Not only that, but this feature is also under your control; the ability to turn on and off the project level subtotals and phase/task level subtotals at will.

Another great addition to the Project Center feature is Actuals – designed to show read-only hours sourced from timesheets for past periods. Actuals, which you can turn on and off at will, can come in handy when you’re interested in estimate at complete (EAC) and estimate to complete (ETC) detail. It’s worth noting that Actuals will only show worked hours regardless of timesheet status.

Scrolling was also added to the Project Center feature to allow users to scroll through larger projects seamlessly. It addresses the complexities of dealing with massive project plans with extensive datasets. The Scrolling option lets you have complete visibility into everything in the project.

The usability enhancement came out with the latest Project Center update and aimed to distinguish generic resources from named resources with different icons.

Bottom Line

In essence, the OpenAir Project Center provides project managers with a comprehensive set of tools to manage all aspects of their projects, from initial planning to execution, monitoring, and reporting. Its features enable project managers to optimize resource utilization, ensure timely completion of tasks, and make informed decisions to achieve project success.

We hope you took away some new knowledge about how to use the project center to help you be more efficient and productive in your day-to-day responsibilities.

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