5 Moovila Perfect Project Features that Make MSPs Say, “Wow! I Need That!” 

Sometimes you don’t know how much a tool can change the way you work until someone invents it. Once you see it, you know you can’t go without it. That’s how MSPs feel about these 5 project management features in Moovila. 

1. Critical Path Engine 

Most people managing projects at MSPs don’t realize that the tools they are using to visualize work are the reason for missed deadlines and lack of project profitability. When they see their projects automatically organized in a clear timeline in the Critical Path view, they tend to whisper, “Wow,” in awe.  

Instead of work piled into a ticket with a single deadline, the Critical Path uses dependencies to laces tasks and milestones together on a path toward completion. The Critical Path Engine  considers the work estimates, durations and dependencies of each task to generate start and completion dates. First, set your project start date, estimate how many hours each task will take, then how many days you’ll allow the assigned resource to work on it. From there, the Critical Path Engine will do the math to generate this powerful visualization.   

According to one Moovila customer, and ConnectWise user, on Reddit, the Critical Path engine “will help provide much more realistic project timelines – taking all projects into consideration.”  

This level of visibility into work, people’s schedules, and how changes impact delivery dates give you fast, easy, scheduling discipline. With this kind of clarity, you can uncover bottlenecks, see where time is being wasted, and give your clients completion dates – for every project in your portfolio – you know you can meet.  

2. Modularized Templates  

The time your team spends on manual project crafting and updates is time that could be spent delivering work for clients. You do not want to spend hours building various one-off project plans. That’s why we encourage teams to turn their project plans into templates. Even better, turn the phases of those plans into template modules and, when building a project, snap the templates together like LEGO bricks.  

A help desk buildout for one client might not look much like a network update for another. But many phases of those projects are the same. Onboarding, firewall installation, cloud migrations, workstation buildouts, and network installations are all offerings you execute with different clients again and again.  

Once you save these offerings as template modules, creating a work plan is a matter of picking pieces from a drop-down menu, stitching them together, and giving them a start date. That work plan is likely to be beautifully scoped, too, because it is built from template modules that you have used, tested, and corrected. This makes building out a complex plan so fast that the work planning phase of a new project becomes trivial.  

3. Smart Schedule

Once you have created a project plan, Smart Schedule helps you schedule the work quickly, eliminating the labor of determining which resource has the time and skills to do the job.  

Smart Schedule doesn’t rely on self-reporting or personal preferences. It hunts through each person’s work assignments, meeting schedules, tickets, and capacity to calculate when they have availability within that particular project timeline. It considers, too, who has the skills for the work. Then it ranks the team in order of who is best suited for this assignment.  

“We're in the middle of onboarding Moovila right now,” said one customer on Reddit. “Every session we have, I'm blown away by a new feature… When you create a project, it will search your available resources with that skill set and match a resource based on skillset and availability.”  

A few clicks later, the work is assigned to the right people. Those people can see the assignment and accept it. The job lands on their calendar automatically and syncs that commitment with your integrated tools.  

4. Capacity Forecasting  

Most project planners struggle with the future. Who will be busy next month? How about the month after? What does the backlog of work look like? How soon can we start this new project?  

Because forecasting involves crunching an impossible amount of data, people guess. Instead of using real data for capacity planning, they trust a gut feeling. Our mathematical engine has no problem turning complex data into clear visuals, though. When you can see, at a glance, who is doing what when, you can easily see which resources are over-allocated, who has time to take on more work, and when – in the future – you might need to bring in additional help.  

Since these visualizations are live, you can drill into the workload of a particular person that is over capacity, then address brewing problems by increasing the duration of the project. PMs also have the option to reschedule demanding work to a resource with more bandwidth using the capacity conflict manager. If, for example, you see that one team member has an unreasonable workload a few weeks from now, you can click into that work and reassign it to another capable team member before the project falls behind or your team member gets burned out. The same screen might show you that someone else is under-allocated in that same timeframe. You can fix this with a few clicks and watch as the visualization changes to show a balanced workload. This “saves us so much time in planning, assigning resources and capacity planning,” said one customer on Reddit.  

5. Template Analytics  

Template Analytics is the tool that will fine-tune your estimates so that you can always scope projects accurately. It is your margin protection tool. It tracks your work estimates against actual time spent completing each task and flags mismatches you might never discover on your own. 

Let’s say that you estimate it takes your team eight hours to install your go-to firewall. You often plug this estimate into project plans. However, you have noticed that your teams are working long hours to hit some of your delivery dates. You don’t know why that is. Pull up the template analytics dashboard to find out! 

A quick glance tells you that firewall installations often go over your estimate. In some cases, it takes your team as much as 15 hours with one person consistently completing the work in 12. Is your estimate off or did something happen? You read logged notes under this task and learn that the installation has become more complicated with a recent product release. Now, your team has sufficient information to decide which updates your project template needs to improve your scope accuracy and margins in the future. 

Ready to experience the “Wow!” features that will transform your project planning? Sign up for a personalized demo.