Switching from task management to The PlanMinder
You are working in projects. You are using some kind of task management tool. You are considering The PlanMinder.
What would change, and why would you switch?
Purpose
The PlanMinder is a project planning and management tool. It is designed to help teams plan projects, and to keep those plans up to date. It is designed to schedule activities, coordinate projects with shared resources and handle all the changes that will inevitable occur along the way. It will help you predict when you will reach goals, warn you when you risk missing deadlines and help you find ways to mitigate risks and solve problems.
Task management tools are often built on a "sticky notes on a board" analogy. This works well for shorter well defined repeating processes, like YouTube video production or marketing campaign workflows. For larger projects and long term planning they are insufficient
Your current task management tool may even have project management aspects, but they are not helping you enough width the administration needed to keep plans up to date, and requires more effort to use than it gives back for its advanced features.
Less Work – Better Plans
The PlanMinder uses automation to make it easy to keep project plans up to date, with automatic scheduling and automatic feedback from time reports. It runs simulations to calculate uncertainty and risks. The result is better plans with less work.
Task to Activity
Tasks
A task is usually a small unit of work. It may have a due date, and is assigned to one or more people. It has a description, but usually no visualized relations to other tasks that it may depend on or that depends on its output.
If there is an estimate of work associated with the task some task management tools may be able to generate a warning when you are assigned more work than you can handle. That must then manually be resolved by your manager. Otherwise there is a real risk that you will be overwhelmed by work, to the decrement of the plan, the quality and most importantly your health.
Activities
The PlanMinder handles Activities as units of work. An activity can be as small as a task, but are welcome to be a bit bigger. A week or two of work is not unreasonable. The important thing is that it is a logically scoped unit of work, and that it can be done by one person in one go, without waiting for external input once it has started.
Bigger activities mean fewer activities, less administration and easier to read project plans. You can break down the work you need to do to complete the activity in smaller tasks, and create a to-do list in the description. Other team members do not need to be concerned about this detailed breakdown or in witch order they are completed.
Context and Order
Activities are part of a project plan, where dependencies to other activities and milestones are defined. This gives the activity context, and helps with understanding the scope.
With sticky note style tasks it is easy to accidentally create overlapping or duplicate tasks, and to miss things falling through the cracks. These risks are greatly reduced with the visualization a plan in The PlanMinder provides.
A plan in Kairos* view is independent of when it will be executed. The dependencies in the plan determines if activities must be done in a specific order. When is calculated by the automatic scheduler based on priority and availability. An activity will be scheduled to when all activities it depends on are expected to be finished.
Automation
Time estimates with uncertainty
The automatic scheduler needs to know how much time is needed to complete an activity. You give it an amount expressed in hours of work.
The PlanMinder uses what sometimes is called gamma (Γ) estimation to include information about how uncertain you are about the amount of work needed. You give one number for the best case scenario, for the case where no problems whatsoever are encountered. An estimate that is not impossible, but it is quite unlikely that it will take less time.
The second number is an amount of time you are reasonably sure will be enough. Reasonably sure is defined as seven times out of ten less work is required. It also means that three times out of ten it will take longer.
You can read more about why this is a good way to estimate time in the article “The Art of Estimating Time”. For the scheduler it means that it can run simulations to calculate probabilities of when things will be done and when milestones will be reached.
Time reports and automatic feedback
Things will not go exactly as planned, as you have acknowledged already in your estimate with uncertainty. There is no exact time plan to adhere to. Instead The PlanMinder relies on you telling it what you actually do.
In The PlanMinder you report how much time you spend on scheduled activities every day. This is automatically fed back to the scheduler, so that the work you did not do today will be scheduled for tomorrow instead. The work done is subtracted from your estimate.
As work progresses you will learn more about what it entails, and can make better predictions on how much work remains. When you can, you are encouraged to update the estimate. When the activity is completed, you will update the status in The PlanMinder, so that the scheduler knows that work on dependent activities can begin.
This feedback keeps the plan up to date at all times. If there are delays, you will see them immediately and will see what effect they will have on milestones, deadlines and other team members.
Work Schedule
The scheduler needs to know when you and all other team members can work, and how much time can be spent on scheduled tasks. In the Work Schedule tab the general length of a work day and public holidays are defined. Vacations and other exceptions for individuals are also entered here.
The base modifier defines how much of a normal day or average week you will spend on scheduled tasks. Everyone has some amount of work not tied to a specific project, and not all project activities are scheduled. Project management is one example of an ongoing activity that can not be scheduled.
The goal is to have the base modifier correct as an average. Variations day to day does not matter much, as it will be corrected by time report feedback.
Your time report history will help you adjust the number once you get going.
Priority, optimization and scenarios
The most important input for the scheduler is the priority you set. Every project has at least one milestone designated as a prio-point. Prio-points are ordered in priority order on the priority tab.
Changing priority is a simple drag and drop operation. The scheduler will automatically run and you can immediately see how this affects all your projects and milestones.
This page also give you an overview of how work is assigned on your team over time. The Chronos* view will let you see more details, and will help you reassign work to find the optimal way to allocate your team. Analysis tools can help you find bottlenecks, critical activities or key persons, not only to optimize for time, but also to reduce risks.
After each change, to priority, work assignments or the plans themselves, you can run the scheduler and see the effect. You can start a scenario to test changes before applying them to the active plans. You can even keep a plan B ready in a scenario, and apply it if and when it becomes necessary.
The PlanMinder is not your boss
Do not plan more than you need. There is always uncertainty in plans and this limits how much detail you benefit from.
The scheduler will suggest in what order you do things. It will be a good suggestion based on the information you have given it, but you will know more than The PlanMinder does. For short time planning this mean that you can do things in a different order than The PlanMinder suggests without updating the plan. You instead update the plan with your time reports.
You have all the information available to determine if you can change the order without affecting the overall plan, or if the change is warranted anyway. You can work as a team and solve problems together, even if each activity is assigned to a single person. You are empowered to work towards the overarching goals instead of pursuing individual sub goals. Time report feedback keeps the plan up to date anyway, and the records ensures that you can be appreciated for the work you do, even when you are helping out outside of your assigned responsibilities.
The PlanMinder is a tool to help you, not to force you to follow a strict schedule.
The Benefits
Less stress
The automatic scheduler removes the risk of over-assigning work to individuals. The PlanMinder also reduces the risk of last minute crunch to reach a deadline, as problems can be detected earlier when there still is time to do something about them.
As a project manager, responsible for the project delivering in time and on budget, you will have more control of how it goes, and greater ability to actively course correct. This will help you sleep better at night.
The transparent and detailed information The PlanMinder gives those who rely on project deliveries can also ease their minds and worry.
Higher efficiency
The tools in The PlanMinder will enable you to make the most with the team you have. Not only will you detect problems early for efficient mitigation, you can also discover opportunities.
The way The PlanMinder helps you plan and coordinate projects, you can avoid artificial boundaries and assign people to projects more dynamically. You will no longer need to add extra safety buffers and padding in your plans.
Overall The PlanMinder helps you deliver more value faster.
Adaptability
As The PlanMinder makes it easy to change plans and priorities, you can adapt quickly as the world changes. With automatic scheduling there is no resistance to making changes. Using scenarios you can explore what they mean before making informed decisions.
Risk management and awareness
The PlanMinder handles the risks that comes from uncertain time estimates. It can also model discrete risks. Things that will either happen, or not. Like failing or passing a certification test. The risk of extra work and extra time is handled much more visually and concretely than just entering it in a risk registry document.
The PlanMinder calculates risk accumulated over all projects it handles. Your project may be progressing effortlessly, but if a key person you will need later gets stuck in a higher priority project, it may be doomed anyway. With The PlanMinder you will be aware and can plan countermeasures.
When you have to make promises and set deadlines, with The PlanMinder you can do so with concrete information about what risks you are taking.
History and continuous improvement
The time reports and activity update reports will over time create a valuable source of information.
You can learn from it when estimating time, by comparing with similar things done before. When learning from what was good or bad in a project, the records will show what actually happened. Free from selective and biased memories.
When you do make changes to your routines and how you work, you can use the records to measure if your change lead to the desired effect.
Team Empowerment
As mentioned before, with The PlanMinder the team has access to information about priorities and dependencies, and can make calls on what is most important to do. If you let them, they are empowered to work as a team, over project boundaries, to solve problems and to find the best way to reach goals.
This is not only good for producing maximum value, it also benefits work satisfaction, engagement and health.
Getting started
Videos: The introduction video series is a good starting point to learn what The PlanMinder is about.
Demo: The PlanMinder ships with a Demo mode. It contains some example projects with project history, and lets you experiment locally on your computer without a server.
Manual: The help pages guides you through all the details about The PlanMinder. The question mark button in the app takes you directly to the relevant chapter.
Server: To set up a server for your team, start by reading "The PlanMinder is a self hosted service", with links to more detailed guides.
Setup: The guide "Setting up The PlanMinder for Your Organization" goes through a few things your team needs to consider when starting to use The PlanMinder.
Other valuable guides and articles to read on the Resources Page:
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