Is The PlanMinder the Tool for You?
You might have noticed that there are quite a few project planning and project managing tools to choose from. Different tools matches different needs from different projects and organizations at different levels. To help you save time in your search for the ultimate tool for you, here are a few points to see if The PlanMinder is for you.
Features for Project Planning
In The PlanMinder your project plan describes what you will do, and in what order. Not when it will be done. You divide your project into activities, and draw lines to indicate that an activity is dependent on the result of another. You can add milestones and risks to your plan, and connect everything to one or more milestones designated as a prio point. This information is independent of the schedule, and will change much less frequently.
Continuous Project Planning
Continuous Project Planning is a set of core concepts to handle some of the inherent difficulties associated with planning and managing projects. Humans are inherently bad at predicting how long things will take to do. There are many interesting reasons to why. One is that evolution has made us optimists, because it has in evolutionary times been better to try and fail, than certainly fail by not trying. Our optimism and willingness to please results in projects generally taking more time than we originally thought. Even if we would manage to equally wrong in both directions, so that half the tasks takes half the time, and half takes double the time, the average is more than originally anticipated.
The Art of Estimating Time
Estimating time for a task in a project, and for a whole project, is not easy. Projects regularly tends to take more time than expected. In this article I will point out some things that can improve your estimations. And a way to deal with the remaining uncertainty.
Why % Complete is such a bad metric
Reflections on common project report practices. Percent Complete is a common metric on standard project report templates. Either for the project as a whole, or for individual milestones. I will explain why this is a bad metric. RAG- or traffic light status with a red, amber or green color signal is also commonly used on project reports to signal if a project or milestone is on time and budget or not. While simple, this system also has issues. We will discuss how to do better.
Planning Embedded Systems Development Projects
Embedded systems development is one example of multidisciplinary projects that requires many experts at different stages of the project. As a project manager you need a plan to coordinate their efforts. Developing new things mean there is uncertainty. You do not know how long things will take, and you do not know what problems you will encounter. Things will change all the time. As they should. You do want to be agile, right?
