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Planning architecture is hard.
For the past four months, our team has been working closely with our customers to rebuild how architects plan, budget, and allocate resources across their projects to make the back-office much simpler to manage. Thank you everyone for sharing your process over chats, email, and shared spreadsheets!
Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce the Project Planner! Welcome to the most versatile and customizable way to build a project. With the Project Planner, you can use either a Top-Down or Bottom's Up approach, allocate the appropriate budget, and assign your team members to roles with individual billing rates. Project Planner removes the need for several spreadsheets to clutter up your workflows.
A Better Work Plan
We introduced the ability to build budgets from a top-down approach last year in order to simplify how time and money was allocated across all the phases of a project. Many people enjoyed the flexibility we provided through even distribution and simple percentage based allocation of time. Judging by the messages in our inbox, though, people wanted more. “Hey, love the way we can build budgets on here! When will it be do it bottom's up?” was a common refrain.
On the surface, then, it looked like all we needed to do was build a version of the Budget Planner that could allow for individual hours as opposed to percentages.
However, when we asked people how they currently build budgets and work plans, we uncovered a range of needs and an even larger range of spreadsheets. People thought that it would be the answer to much more flexible client scenarios. They also thought it would be the answer to better projections of time and resources. Better forecasting.
So while people were asking for a tool for creating projects, what they really needed was a Swiss army knife that made it easy to construct the timeline of a project, as well as the budget, allocate that budget, and assign roles to individuals with their own billing rates. That’s why we created Project Planner, an integrated approach to project planning.
Meet Project Planner
Building a project plan with various spreadsheets is a tedious task and we want your teams to feel like they can get more done with less overhead.
The Project Planner is the smoothest, most versatile way to construct holistic project plans that your teams are going to love. It has a few qualities that makes it extremely powerful and effective:
Bottom-Up or Top Down
Whether you want to start with a known estimated budget or build a hybrid proposal, Monograph provides you with the tools to build a project plan that works for you and your client.
Calculate Your Complete Budget
When starting to build out your projects, our integrated budget calculator makes it easy to build-in appropriate contingencies, including consultant fees and profit percentage.
Allocate Hours to Individuals
Previously in Monograph, you would allocate time by Role and percentage without the option to drill down to specific hourly allocation. Now the Project Planner preferences hours over percentages and allows you to build up a budget and fee from hours.
For a detailed walkthrough on how to create a new project with the Project Planner please visit our support center.
While architecture is still hard, we hope that Monograph and the Project Planner help to make planning and forecasting just a little bit easier.
