Project Planning With Automatic Scheduling
The PlanMinder
Managing project plans should be easy. That is why The PlanMinder is built around automatic scheduling, and automatic feedback from daily work reports. Your plans will always be up to date. When scope, priorities or availability changes, you will immediately see the effect it has on your plans.
Uncertainty calculations will let you know what risks you are taking, and lets you make better decisions. Get early warnings to avoid last minute crunch time or missed deadlines. If you need to plan to coordinate multidisciplinary teams, predict costs and delivery dates, and meet deadlines, The PlanMinder is for you.
Plan Smarter
The PlanMinder separates plan from schedule. Define activities, assign them to people and prioritize them. Make time estimates with uncertainty, and add dependencies between them.
The PlanMinder calculates when, and displays it in a Gantt like chart. Report the work you do, change priorities, time estimates and availability and the schedule is automatically updated. Your plan, that captures the core of the project, needs to be changed much less frequently.
Automatic Scheduling
Embrace Uncertainty
You don't know exactly how long things will take when you start, and what problems you will encounter. In The PlanMinder all time estimates includes an estimated uncertainty. Using Monte Carlo simulation The PlanMinder calculates how this uncertainty accumulates across all scheduled projects for every milestone. Both for calendar dates and budgeted costs.
You can make informed decisions on what risks you are willing to take, and prepare contingency plans to implement if necessary. Monitor how the probabilities change as work progresses to get an early warning, and avoid last minute crunch.
Timeline
Be Agile with Predictive Planning
Responding to change over following a plan is one of the core values in the manifesto for Agile Software Development. With automatic scheduling, there is no penalty for changing the plan. Make the change and see the effect. The world changes, so should your plans. Regardless what disciplines you are working in.
Prio
Empower your Team
A team that can make decisions and solve problems as they arise, without bureaucracy and micromanagement, will be more efficient and motivated. The PlanMinder does not enforce the plan. All team members report the work they do in the project. If the work done does not match the schedule, the schedule will just be updated. The team has all the information about priorities and dependencies to make informed decisions.
Planning with larger activities rather than small tasks also reduces micromanagement, and gives your experts more freedom on how to solve problems.
Push the problem-solving down to the lowest possible level.
“There is a tendency to delegate problems upwards. There, one can eventually be suffocated by the amount of decisions to be made.”
Percy Barnevik, former CEO and chairman of ABB
former chairman of Sandvik, AstraZeneca, Skanska, Investor, board member of DuPont, General Motors, co-funder of Hand in Hand, among many entries.
Quote translated from the book "Jag vill förändra världen", ISBN978-91-7503-124-8 p453.
Learn from your History
As team members report the work they do, and updates estimates for activities, they create a detailed history of what is happening in the project. This is a record that can be searched and referenced in the future. It will help you when estimating time, and risks.
Actual records are more accurate than human memory, that often becomes selective and biased. Records will be available when you need them. People with memories may not be.
History
Keep your secrets safe
Your project plans can contain your most valuable business secrets. The PlanMinder is offered as a self hosted service. You set up a database to store the information yourself, or with a cloud service you trust. The PlanMinder lets you have full control of your data.
What makes The PlanMinder different?
The PlanMinder is completely built around automatic scheduling. It is not an extra feature, it is the core concept. It will save you time.
Automatic scheduling makes Monte Carlo simulations possible. The risk and uncertainty information is always there. Not a complicated and expensive add on tool. Uncertainty information is a natural part of the work flow and decision making.
The PlanMinder is for project planning. It needs to do time tracking, and it allows you to efficiently write project reports. But it does not try to replace all your tools and workflows you are used to. This makes it easy to start using.
