Copyright Auspicia AB
You might have noticed that there are quite a few project planning and project management tools to choose from. Different tools match different needs for different projects and organizations at different levels. To help you save time in your search for the ultimate tool, here are a few points to see if The PlanMinder is the tool for you.
If you're reading this, you probably need to plan one or more projects. If that means you need to coordinate a multidisciplinary team, where different experts do work at different stages, The PlanMinder is an excellent tool.
If you have a rigid specification and a hard deadline, then you need to plan and monitor to make sure you will reach your deadline on time. The PlanMinder is built for that, with automatic feedback from time reports, deadline probability calculations and tools to help you identify and mitigate problems when they arise.
On the other hand, if your specifications and priorities tend to change and deadlines are more flexible, coordination becomes even more critical to avoid bottlenecks, wasted time, and chaos. That’s all the more reason to take advantage of The PlanMinder’s automatic scheduling and uncertainty modeling.
However, if you’ve adopted a framework like Scrum and are satisfied with it, working with a homogeneous team where anyone can tackle any task, and goals shift every one- or two- week sprint, then The PlanMinder may not be the best fit. (If you are not satisfied with your Scrum implementation, consider reading When to plan and when to scrum.)
The PlanMinder is most useful when you need to plan at least a few months ahead. The PlanMinder can handle tasks of any size, but is designed for projects where you mostly plan activities that take days to complete. The PlanMinder also stands out for its ability to manage risk and uncertainty in task estimation.
If you're running a PR agency with a steady stream of small, similar client projects, and the main purpose of the planning tool is to assign tasks to people and track their progress, then a collaboration app like Trello or Monday may be better suited. If you are outgrowing your task management model, read the article Switching from task management to The PlanMinder.
Now that we have saved time for those who don’t need The PlanMinder, here are five reasons why The PlanMinder is the tool you need.
Making plans is an effort. Keeping plans up to date is a tedious effort. If you do not keep your plan up to date as the project progresses, it will soon be quite useless.
The PlanMinder will save you time by automating much of the work associated with keeping the plan up to date. Scheduling tasks is automated, so the plan will be adjusted as things change. Project participants will report the work they do, and update their time estimates, directly in the tool, giving automatic feedback to the timeline.
As a manager, you can focus on monitoring progress and solving problems as they arise, or even before they do. Your plan stays current, helping you make informed decisions at every stage.
When things change, you can immediately see how it affects plans and milestones. When someone asks “Can we …” or “What if …” you can easily visualize the consequences.
All time estimates are associated with some uncertainty. The PlanMinder takes the accumulated uncertainties into account, and lets you see them.
When you estimate time in The PlanMinder, you also estimate the uncertainty. When you define a deadline, The PlanMinder calculates the probability that it will be reached in time. Besides the uncertainty in time estimates, you can provide The PlanMinder with information about other risks that could affect the project plan.
In an organization with a portfolio of projects, running both concurrently and sequentially sharing resources, The PlanMinder takes into account the accumulated uncertainties of all the projects it handles. Your project may be running flawlessly. But if Greg from IT does not do his small part in time, your project will grind to a halt. The PlanMinder will know about the risk that he will be busy solving problems in this other high priority project.
As the project progresses and encounters problems, the calculated probability of reaching a deadline will drop. You can plan countermeasures before it gets too late. Countermeasures such as finding someone other than Greg to do the crucial work.
The PlanMinder’s automatic scheduling and visualization tools help you optimize your plans, whether you're focused on resource utilization, time to market, cost, or a balance of all three.
You can easily share resources across projects, see who’s doing what and when, and quickly test the impact of changes. Experiment and see what will happen to the timeline if you reassign, add, or remove people from projects, change priorities, add or remove tasks or even whole projects. You can do so in separate scenarios and compare alternative solutions before making a decision. You can even keep such a solution ready as a plan B, ready to activate if it becomes necessary.
Things will always change. With The PlanMinder, you can embrace change and uncertainty, and with little effort see what the consequences may be.
A traditional way to plan projects is to estimate time, add some buffer based on experience, and sprinkle deadlines along the timeline. When asking people if they will be done in time, human nature tends to make people say yes, until it is too late and the answer is obviously no. This results in an exhausting and expensive crunch time to meet arbitrary deadlines.
With The PlanMinder, which only asks how much work and uncertainty is left on a specific task, the calculated probability of missing a deadline will gradually change. Countermeasures can be planned much earlier and be more effective. A missed deadline not part of a critical path, not affecting the ultimate important deadline, may safely be ignored. And if it is not actually important, it does not need to be a deadline at all.
As The PlanMinder relies on all participants reporting work done and updating time estimates, you will get a good record of how the project progressed. You can track when problems were discovered, and how they were handled. This will give you good data for your lessons-learned conclusions when the project is evaluated. Written records beat subjective memory every time.
With time you will build a bank of information from past projects. You can compare upcoming tasks with similar tasks done before, making your time estimates better and improving your ability to anticipate risks.
The fifth reason to use The PlanMinder: it is easy to get started. The PlanMinder is a tool for project planning. It does not require or encourage you to change your existing routines for document handling, communication, reporting, requirements handling, or any other aspects of your projects. You can start using it for a single project to see the benefits.
Over time, you may find that some routines can be streamlined by utilizing The PlanMinder functionality. But that is something that you will discover naturally later. You can experience and show the benefits on a small scale first, then unlock even greater benefits by applying it across all your projects.
There are more than five good reasons to use The PlanMinder, but as this article set out to save you time, five will have to do.
Download The PlanMinder and try it out yourself, or check out the other resources to learn more.