**This product is no more available as of February 2022.
General Information
Name: BusiBI Project Manager 2016
Vendor: BusiBI
Options for hosting an iPad
Prices and plans: You can purchase a standalone version for PS3.99 from the UK iTunes Store. In-app purchase of monthly or annual credit packs is possible. You can add a team member for collaboration to your projects for PS7.99 for one year.
Languages: English, German, Spanish, Japanese
Currency: All, but the look and feel of the huge picklist, but you only have one choice.
A tool for managing multiple projects
When I set up BusiBI, the first thing I noticed was that if you only manage one project, many of the features won’t be that useful. It is especially useful when you have to manage multiple projects at once.
Create a New Project
It is easy to create a project. Click on the Projects tab and click Add New. Enter the title, client value, and a brief summary. Next, add the start and end dates. Finally, use the slider to indicate which phase of the project you are in. Finally, you can add a percent completion statement.
You can either allow others to access the project or add their names. You can also add custom fields based on the settings you have made.
Although you don’t need to add all of this information, it took me about a minute to complete it for my project. It’s not difficult.
Task Management
The Actions tab displays your tasks from within your project. This is my opinion, the most limited area of the app. It is impossible to change the order of your tasks. The list’s bottom is the latest task. These are the tasks you see:
BusiBI’s task view when you add them. You can’t hide completed tasks, so if you have a long tasklist you will be scrolling down to see what’s left.
It doesn’t automatically change the percent completion rate if you complete a task. This could be a good thing. However, you must make those changes yourself and do so honestly. There is a chance that your team’s projects may not be completed by the time they are due.
The Bubble Chart
It probably has a proper name, but I’m going with the bubble chart. This is how it looks.
The bubble chart in BusiBI. Remember that I mentioned above that the percent complete does not automatically update? The bubble chart shows that it does. It’s quite cool to drag the bubbles around, and it will change the project’s end date and percent completion. It makes me feel in control!
This screen is very easy to use for reporting at a large picture level. This screen is worth the PS3.99 just for reporting purposes. It takes only a few details to create a portfolio view of all your projects.
The Problem with Value
The project summary is included in the box with the field Value’. This is fine, but it is not how I view my projects. Perhaps you spend a lot time in a consulting environment thinking about the value of each contract. Not in my world where most of my projects are internal.
The best thing about being able change the terminology is that I could rename this field to ‘Priority. This is what I did. I could not give a project a High/Medium/Low ranking because it only allows numeric entries. Instead, I ranked my projects in priority order from 1 to 4.
The bubble chart that displays all projects’ statuses shows them with the priority instead of the financial value. However, the bubbles are still sized according to value. The Portfolio Analysis tab doesn’t update the terminology and my new Priority label still reads: ‘Value. Whatever. It is actually more helpful to filter the portfolio view based on percent complete or end dates to get a real view of what work has been done and what should be. The more projects you have, the better.