As we move into the New Year it is a good time to take a look at what we can expect from Deltek Cobra in 2016. During the Deltek User Conference in late 2015 Deltek made some announcements about what to expect in the road map for this year and there are some big changes coming to the look and feel of Cobra in 2016.
One of the big improvements planned is an improved User Interface for Deltek Cobra in 2016, including the addition of a ribbon for access to functionality similar to what we have all gotten used to in the Microsoft Office suite. The updates make for a more modern look to the tool. Also for anyone using more than Cobra, our understanding is they are standardizing the ribbons across the other tools in the Integrated Project Management suite. The consistency across the tools is a welcome addition.
The other big update to the interface is in the Project View, where they have added a quadrant look with editable spreadsheet sections. This will allow you to quickly see and edit data directly in that view. This is a big step toward making the tool work easier with the data directly in the tool instead of through dialogs or reports. This improvement starts to make the interface similar to the interface of Deltek’s other Earned Value tool, MPM.
Continuing on in the “ease of use” area, they will be adding the ability to add codes to the Control Accounts, Work Packages and Resource Assignments. This ability to easily code data makes the functionality coding offers more available and flexible which will hopefully increase their use in organizations.
Finally, the ability to create new fields based on calculations built on other fields can now be included directly into the Project View. The ability to build custom results and even custom fields has been part of Deltek Cobra before, but the accessibility of those fields has always been difficult. This new capability to not only build more capable calculated fields but to leverage those fields directly in the project view enhances the usability of the tool and ultimately makes Deltek Cobra easier to use!
While there are other functionality updates to come in the new year (we’ll cover more of those in later posts) these are the big hitters in the area of ease of use, which is a big win for all of us that use Deltek Cobra in 2016. We look forward to another year of new capabilities from the team at Deltek.