[A173]Accounting For Decision Makers

But, the time has certainly come to question whether this is the best way to optimize your project plans, when you have to manage several complex projects concurrently, respect delivery dates and, at the same time, make the most of your costly and qualified resources.

Moreover, how can you ?draw? risks and uncertainties in a Gantt chart? With a red dot or a flashy task?!? Let's be serious for a moment. The market conditions we face today force us to understand, integrate and have control over the disturbances tomorrow holds; not play with pencils!

Practically, we can encounter two types of disturbance or risk: recurring and exceptional ones.

1) Risks, such as illnesses, days off, unplanned tasks, longer tasks, changes, and interruptions are frequent throughout the life of the plan. These events are so frequent that we often have statistics on their occurrence. We also know these will affect the delivery dates, maybe the quality or the profits, and even sometimes the cohesion of the team. So, why not anticipate their incidence in our plans?

2) Some other problems are more exceptional, like contractor bankruptcy or disaster due to a storm or a fire. Maybe, luckily, you have never experienced one of these, but why not imagine that they might also happen to you and prepare yourself for that eventuality? Indeed, why not create several contingency plans?

There are many more reasons to change planning methodology. Discover them here.

We all know that the decisions you take based on the construction and interpretation of your plans have crucial consequences, for the projects themselves, for the people involved and for the profit of your company. Poor planning methodology can only induce wrong or poorly argued decisions.

What is PlanningForce?

PlanningForce has been conceived to help PMOs, and more globally decision-makers, to define and optimize project and resource portfolios thanks to an iterative planning process.

This is the starting point: be sure the plan we produce will allow you to achieve concurrent objectives while correctly assessing the risks; this will be done by using, amongst others, probabilistic distributions, rich resource descriptions, simulation tools, scorecards, KPIs and by imagining contingency plans. Click here for a Product tour of PlanningForce.

Secondly, once you have selected and planned your projects, scheduled the tasks and allocated your resources, PlanningForce will help you re-plan easily to take account of diverging progress statuses and unforeseen events: the goal is to prevent big deviations while adapting the plan smoothly and giving clear instructions in order to keep the actors on board and motivated.

Thirdly, and once you have achieved (or failed) your projects, PlanningForce will help you revise the whole planning process through its successive and recurring phases of simulations ? plan ? progress ? events. The goal here is to have a clearer understanding of what went well, or wrong, and of the real causes of your successes and failures. From that analysis, you can infer new project templates, setup training sessions, adapt your competence matrix or your pricing, find new contractors, dismiss, recruit, specialize, diversify, etc.

In a word, in light of its history, and precisely because you gave it a central role in your decisional process, your plan will help you adapt or conceive strategies which will improve your global performance. See ?Planning process? and ?SWOT & Strategy? for more details.

On the other hand, what does PlanningForce not do? At this point, PlanningForce doesn't focus on online shared calendars or time-tracking whose functions are more dedicated to day-to-day project management.

How does it work?

Technically, PlanningForce is a project planning program using a scheduling engine which produces what are called multi-objective solutions based on a concurrent planning process.

You usually follow a 7-step methodology in which you?

1.Define projects through WBS and task requirements

2.Create resources with profiles and capacities

3.Apply risks and uncertainties to both of them

4.Tune and specify scope, priorities and goals

5.Launch the automatic scheduling and resource leveling

6.Produce simulations, planning scenarios, KPIs and scorecards

7.Select, validate and communicate your plan

This process is iterative, so you can give room to your creativity to improve KPIs, by imagining and testing new working configurations.
This process is living, so you can easily and swiftly adapt one or more dimensions of your plan when changes or unforeseen events occur.
This process has a memory, so you can keep track of the entire decisional context at any stage of your plan, from the first to the last.

PlanningForce-negotiated solutions

The PlanningForce data architecture has been built to create room for negotiation between a demand (the projects and tasks) and an offer (the resources). The match between this demand and offer is made at several levels: competences, availability, and preferences. The solutions are classified according to priorities and goals (makespan and benefits).

This methodology allows the use of the full power of our scheduling engine whose purpose is to calculate some of the best (out of potentially billions) planning solutions while automatically performing resource levelling, and detecting present or future problems.

PlanningForce's current and future versions

PlanningForce is currently available in two versions:
1) the Standard version offers all the functionalities and tools currently in existence and
2) the Express version offers the same functionalities as Standard except the financial ones and the Program Management features. Compare both versions here.

PlanningForce is highly scalable and still presents huge potential for future development, amongst others in the field of artificial intelligence. Discover here what the current round of development is all about. In the near future, our customers will be offered the possibility to determine and vote for some specific demands to be included in the next rounds.

The Collaborative version of PlanningForce is currently under development and its release is planned for the beginning of this summer. This version will mix rich and thin clients to offer both the usability and the versatility required by this type of distributed application. The Collaborative version will stress the consolidation and distribution functions as well as the reporting ones.

PlanningForce runs only on Windows OS (XP and Vista). The good news is that just a few graphical issues keep us from offering PlanningForce to Mac and Linux users. Thanks for your patience!

In March, we'll be launching a new version of this website which will emphasize the community section. Our intention is to favor interactivity between PlanningForce users, so everyone can benefit from more business cases, more templates, more tips, and more articles to improve their performance and make better use of PlanningForce.