Waterfall Template
This template is great for Project Managers who would like to plan and execute their work using the full power of traditional Gantt Chart and critical path planning and tracking.
Overview
Generally, requirements are gathered from the stakeholders/customers at the beginning, and then a sequential project plan is created to build, test and deliver the requirements. It is named as “Waterfall” because each phase of the project starts only after the previous phase ends, thus flowing cascading down like a waterfall.
Who should use it:
This template serves the purpose well for Project Managers who would like to execute their work using the waterfall methodology. For example, teams that have a predefined set of requirements and standard process through which development needs to be completed in one-go can opt for this template.
Supporting features in the template:
- We provide an Activity Matrix containing the default set of Practices, Phases and corresponding Activities that should be part of a typical work breakdown structure (WBS). This way, you can jump-start your task plan with a default set of tasks and tweak it further as per your needs. You also have the flexibility to build your own task plan as per your needs.
- We provide the ability to create multiple Task Plans so that parts of requirements can be created, developed and managed independently. This especially comes in handy when you have separate teams working on independent requirements or need to fulfill new requirements at regular intervals.
- We provide standard task planning capabilities that help you schedule, baseline task plan and assign resources to them so that they can log time against them to report progress. And if you have chosen our Enterprise package, we offer advanced task planning capabilities usually seen in Microsoft Project such as multiple task types, dependencies, constraints, critical path tracking and so on.
- In order to monitor work progress, we have also provided a default dashboard with a predefined set of widgets that help you assess the overall Schedule Deviation, Effort Deviation and even do Earned Value Analysis. Apart from the dashboard, you can monitor the progress of tasks visually as cards on the Execution Board that shows Tasks that are scheduled to start in near future, Tasks that are currently in-progress and Tasks that were recently completed.
Benefits:
With the above mentioned capabilities you can jump-start to plan, execute and monitor work executed based on waterfall methodology easily. The default activity matrix will help you kick-start your work-plan in a jiffy and the task planning capabilities will help you plan not just one but many task plans independently as and when new requirements need to be met. With a host of advanced task planning capabilities will allow you to do advanced scheduling of your tasks. And finally, the default dashboard having widgets to help you track deviations in terms of schedule and effort as well as do earned value analysis will help you stay on top of things always.
