Deltek announced the latest release of their industry leading Earned Value engine Cobra 5.1.3 at the Deltek Insight conference this week and its immediate availability. In addition to the usual maintenance updates to the software, the latest release includes a number of new capabilities. The new functionality look to be mainly focused on enhancing the usability, expanding the integration capabilities and improvements in the security management.
Usability Improvements
In the usability area, Cobra 5.1.3 will include:
- Include Fix Dates in the standard UI – In previous versions of Cobra it wasn’t always the easiest thing to deal with changes to the fiscal calendar assigned to a project. If the period end dates were changed you could be left with detailed records with portions of their budgets misaligned with the new fiscal calendar. This new functionality fixes this issue with an easy to use interface and lets Cobra clean up any outliers.
- New utility to zero out data – This feature will allow you to quickly zero out budget or actual values easily. The functionality allows you to focus your updates from the total project level down to the work package level and narrow the impact to a specific time frame.
- Add ability to scroll through projects within the project information dialog – When reviewing projects at the portfolio level it wasn’t always easy to review the project information across multiple projects. This new capability makes the Project Information dialog modal and provides a drop down list to quickly jump from one project’s information to another without having to close the dialog.
- Report improvements – Deltek continues to add to the reporting capabilities in Cobra 5.x with additional data tags that are available:
{CriteriaN.<CodeAsg[N]><.Description>} – displays the description for a code assignment.
{WorkingDays[CostProject.StatusDate, Month]} – displays the number of working days on the 533M report.
Adding the last 5 reports run by the user to the Report menu in Deltek Cobra should be a big time saver for those of us who run similar reports.
Access and Security Management
In the access/security management area, they’ve added the following capabilities:
- Add ability to see who is in a project – Finally, from within Deltek Cobra itself you’ll be able to see who you need to call to get out of a particular file. No more having to find someone with access to the EPM Security Manager. This will be nice in those large enterprise implementations.
- Add ability to delegate Ownership rights for individual entities – Ever get stuck doing administrative responsibilities for a Deltek Cobra project when you realize the guy who owns a project goes on vacation? Now there is an easy way for those owners to delegate their ownership responsibilities. As well they should, they’re on vacation after all!
Deltek Cobra Integration
Finally, in the recognition that your Earned Value engine is a tool in the toolbox, Deltek continues to enhance Cobra’s ability to more tightly integrate with the other tools in the same project controls box.
- Support of Microsoft Project 2013 – A no brainer as we get ready to ring in 2015, but nice that Deltek Cobra is at the front of the adoption wave of the latest version of Microsoft Project. We still don’t see a ton of Microsoft Project 2013 but you know its coming. We’re glad to see it won’t be an issue.
- Import user fields via the Integration Wizard – This adds tons of flexibility to the import of data from your schedules. Scheduling engines have always allowed for lots of extra data fields in the schedule, to be able to easily map that business information into the project accounting tool makes that functionality all the more valuable.
- Add ability to load resources from Microsoft Project using resource text field or code rather than Resource Name – We love this. The truth is there isn’t a lot of discipline enforced by Microsoft Project when it comes to how resources are applied to individual activities. The ability to on the one hand leverage the flexibility of Microsoft Project but apply discipline on the import of the data is a great way to mesh the rigor of a good earned value system with the user friendliness of Microsoft Project.
- Add ability to collapse all rolling wave periods in a project via the API – Enhancing Cobra’s ability to more tightly integrate with automating business process might not be the sexiest of enhancements, but ability to leverage the power of Deltek Cobra’s features, like Rolling Wave Calendars, with automating business processes has a real world impact. We look forward to leveraging this kind of process step automation with our clients so they can focus more time on managing their projects.
- Add EVT/EVM to the wInsight export – The new wInsight 7.0 is fantastic when it comes to presenting project data so anything that enables that capability the better.
- Enhance Integration option “Apply historical changes as an adjusting entry in the current status period” to apply to forecast – Keeping the “accounting” side of Earned Value in line with your process can be difficult within the realm of the earned value engine. This capability allows you to clean up the data from the source data so you stay in compliance with your system description.
- Support of Windows Server 2012 – Did we mention the adoption of the latest and greatest Microsoft Project can be slow? Hello Windows Server 2012!
Summary
As you can probably tell, we’re pretty excited about this release and look forward to checking out some of these new features and capabilities in more detail. Stay tuned folks!