What are cockpits in PQFORCE?

Cockpits in web applications are often also called dashboards and usually consist of different components, so-called widgets. The widgets display information and key figures from the system, e.g. in the form of diagrams. In their entirety, the widgets provide a clear overview of all essential information of the web application.

Such an overview is now also available in PQFORCE: With the new release, you can flexibly set up cockpits at project portfolio level with widgets. The selection of widgets ranges from graphical representations, such as the distribution of the budget in the portfolio as a donut diagram, to informative mini-tables, such as the list of projects for which an overrun of the effort is forecast, to cost progressions in the current year. The widgets can be resized, freely arranged and labeled. In addition, settings can be made for each widget, such as filtering the projects by lifecycle status, and exporting the widget content as a graph or CSV.

For a better organization of the widgets, you have the possibility to create several pages on the cockpit, e.g. to set up one cockpit per project type or to view information on efforts and costs separately.

And a big YES: We are already working on offering cockpits on single project level!

Customized cockpits

With this release, you get a selection of standard widgets. However, as an Enterprise customer, you can also benefit from the enormous advantages of a customized configuration for cockpits. So you have the possibility to extend the widget selection, e.g. with a bubble chart with information from the project rating, a line chart with the course of a report indicator or even the visualization of specific key figures from your company.

Please contact your PQFORCE Consultant if you would like to learn more about custom widget capabilities.

More performance thanks to new DB layer

A hidden, but nevertheless noticeable innovation of the 4.12.0 release is the new DB layer. This is a software layer that is located between the database and the application logic of PQFORCE. The DB layer takes care of the conversion of database entries to objects in the application logic and vice versa. In technical terms, this is called ORM (Object-Relational Mapping).
In order to make our software even more performant and thus offer users a more pleasant user experience, our software engineers put their heads together to develop our own DB layer. This is designed to be extremely efficient and optimized for specific data processing challenges at PQFORCE.

And now it's time to try it out!

Further changes, such as the improved loading of the project overview or the extended use of the high-performance PQFORCE grid technology, can be found in the integrated release notes. We are looking forward to your feedback on the new release and to learning how you set up and use the portfolio cockpit. We wish all users a lot of fun and a good work with PQFORCE 4.12.0 - available from April 21, 2023!