New Special Column: Auto-Numbering

We have added a new special column to the tool: auto-numbering. With this column each row in your project schedule will be numbered. It can be very handy to use as a reference when discussing the schedule with your team or client.

To access special columns, right click in the column area and go to 'columns' and choose 'insert special column'. The special column will automatically be added to your schedule. 

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New Special Column: Traffic Lights

We have a new Special Column: Traffic Lights. Add them to your schedule if you want to indicate the status of a task or group. The traffic lights can be turned to green, orange or red. For example, a green light can indicate that everything is going according to plan, orange could mean that there are still some issues to resolve and red would signify problems that prevent you from proceeding according to plan.

You can choose how you want the column to be displayed: all the traffic lights visible (green, orange or red) or not visible so you can add them manually.

In the column area right click for the menu and  click though to Special Columns.

You can choose how you want the column to be displayed in your schedule.

In this case we have chosen to have all traffic lights display a green light.

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Why Plan? Project Planning Part 2 by Martin Webster

In my last post – Why Plan | Project Planning, part 1 – I explained how project planning helps us to predict and prepare for difficulties.

To recap, project planning is an essential management activity that provides everyone involved in a project with information – understanding – on:

• What is required
• How it is done
• Who does what
• When things will happen

When starting a project we tend to think about it in terms of a journey: going on a quest or walking in the fog. Whilst this analogy is useful in helping us to understand the type of project we’re starting we should not dwell on the journey.

Planning is about the destination – what the project will deliver. Therefore, we have much to gain if we focus on the products that must be produced.

A Product Based Approach to Planning
           
           || Planning is essential regardless of the size or type of project.

Let’s turn planning on its head for a moment! As I’ve already said, the project plan comprises of cost and resources plans plus a schedule plan or Gantt chart. However, this does not mean we start assigning tasks or activities to people by diving up the available time. No! Effective planning begins with an understanding of project scope.

Accordingly, we first describe the quality of the products the project must deliver. Products are simply milestones or deliverables that contribute to the success of the project.

In contrast, activities consume time and effort that should contribute to the delivery of specific products and ultimately business benefits.

Examples products could include:

• A business case
• An invitation to tender
• A test strategy
• The contract
• Trained users
• A test plan

The product-based planning technique – defined in the PRINCE2 handbook – makes it easier to estimate effort, resources and time needed to deliver the project. Moreover, product based planning puts quality at the heart of planning because each completely and unambiguously defined. Planning is essential regardless of the size or type of project.

The rest of this article demonstrates how product based planning is performed by starting with the product breakdown structure. The product flow diagram and product description shall be covered in the last part of this series.

The Product Breakdown Structure
The product breakdown structure defines and documents project scope: everything the project will produce to meet its objective. The product breakdown structure – or PBS – is a simple hierarchical tree diagram.

Whilst there are many ways to prepare a PBS I shall describe the approach that works for me: a team activity which brings together the project team in a facilitated workshop. This allow the project manager to personally contribute to the planning process.

Moreover, make it interactive and get everyone involved! If you read my blog (Martin Webster, Esq.) you’ll learn that I encourage participation and often make use of Post-It notes and flip charts. But remember this; it is the responsibility of the project manager (or facilitator) to keep people focused on project outputs not inputs.

Let’s start with a simple example: organising and delivering a successful event. The first product describes what the project intends to achieve in its entirety. This is the starting point of the PBS. Make this absolutely clear. Remember it’s all about the destination!

So what is needed to deliver a successful event? Ask your audience. Encourage participation and let ideas to flow freely. Allow people write anything that comes to mind on a Post-It note. This will include physical functional, and conceptual products. But limit this activity to 5 or 10 minutes depending on the size and complexity of the project.

You’ll end up with lots of ideas. Many will cover the same topic. Others will be unique. My guess is that some of the following key components will be identified:

• Administration
• Promotion
• Financial
• Logistics
• Registration
• Speakers
• Sponsors

Next, group the Post-It notes into similar product categories. Don’t worry if they aren’t clearly defined products or outputs at this stage. Now agree the component parts of the project and place these on a separate flip chart. In the example we have the beginnings of a product breakdown structure

Initial PBS

Continue breaking down the products into more detail. Once again, limit the amount of time to 5 or 10 minutes for each iteration.

Also, as you decompose the project into its constituent parts you will begin to notice that some products are redundant because they are better described by those that come later. For instance, promotion is better defined as an advertising campaign and marketing products.

Product Breakdown Structure

Likewise, you will eventually find it difficult to subdivide further. If that’s the case, stop where you are. The job is done.

What started as a single description of the project is now a more compete list of the parts that describe the project. Document this information and use it to create the product flow diagram and project descriptions.

Thanks for reading.


*****
Martin Webster is Solution Design and Commissioning Manager at Leicestershire County Council. He has over ten years project and programme management experience. Martin regularly writes on leadership, business change and project management topics. Read more at Martin Webster, Esq.

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New Feature: Introducing Plugins

One of the reasons Tom's Planner is so easy to use, is that we keep the number of functionalities to the essential minimum. But the number of users is growing by the day and we get more and more requests for all sorts of functionalities and most of the time we think these ideas are great!

So as of today we are introducing plugins into Tom's Planner. A plugin is a part of Tom's Planner that you can turn on or off. If you want to keep Tom's Planner as simple as possible just keep them turned off. However if you need some more advanced functionalities be sure to check them out. You can find plugins by clicking on the 'Settings & Plugins' button in the top toolbar and select the plugin tab.

More plugins will be added to Tom's Planner in the coming weeks and months.

The first two plugins that we've built are: 
1. Special Columns
2. Showing Total Duration in Group Headers

1.  A new schedule always contains three standard text columns on the left side of the grid. By turning on the special columns plugin you get access to a number of other types of columns. You can add them through the plugin settings panel or by right clicking one of the columns and choosing the ‘insert column’ option in the menu that appears. To start there are three additional column types: start date, end date and duration. In the coming weeks and months more special columns will be added to this feature.

In the top toolbar click on the Settings & Plugins button, select the Plugin tab and select which plugins you want to be visible in the tool.

Tom's Planner will automatically calculate the start & end date and duration of periods/ activities that have already been entered in the chart. Tom's Planner doesn't restrict you, you can build your chart by adding visual elements and by entering data in the column area, which ever is more intuitive for you.

You can also quick access the columns settings by clicking on the top row of the column area:

2. In the Plugin Settings window, you can also select to show or hide the total duration in group headers. When closing a group, you will still be able to see the total duration of the periods/ activities in that group. If there are periods/ activities in the header of a group, the total duration will not be shown. 

We will keep you posted when new plugins will be introduced!

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Stress Free Holiday Cooking with the iPad

The combination Tom's Planner and the iPad is great to help you manage extensive and important project plans on site. In the kitchen it will help you oversee (stress full) projects like Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners!

To help you get started we have created this free Christmas Dinner Chart! We have included links in the chart to the best rated recipes for classic dishes. Of course you can customize your dinner, just plan your cooking a few days ahead of time in Tom's Planner. On Christmas day open your plan on the iPad, have it at hand in the kitchen and cooking will be a piece of cake!

Impress your in-laws, extended family and friends with perfectly roasted beef, side dishes cooked just right and beautiful moist cakes and cookies! You will be ensured of the perfect stress free Christmas dinner!

To use this Christmas dinner template you only need a Personal (free) Tom's Planner account and you're good to go.

Happy Christmas!

The Tom's Planner Team

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Why Plan? Project Planning part 1 by Martin Webster

Many people get hung up on project planning. Some say they don’t have the time to prepare one. Others think they are unnecessary. They assume the project plan is a complex document; one that accounts for every minutes of every day.

In this series of posts I aim to dispel these myths. I will show you that project planning is an essential activity that happens to result in some really useful documents – documents that will help you to achieve your goals.

 || plan vb. to make plans; to have in mind as a purpose; intend

Project planning helps us form the basis of understanding. In other words, planning is an aid to predict and prepare for difficulties, and to identify what needs to be done to succeed in our endeavours.

What’s more, project planning helps us to answer a variety of questions with confidence. For instance:

• Can it be done?
• Will it be finished on time?
• How much will it cost?
• Is it viable?
• Will it work?
• How can we be sure if it will deliver the right benefits?
• What if we change something?
• How much progress have we made?
• What if someone is ill or unavailable?

If you’re still not convinced of the value of project planning let me remind you of the main reasons projects fail. If you think it has something to do with complexity or the use of technology you’d be wrong. In fact projects fail because

1. Their scope isn’t managed effectively – poor project planning
2. People lose sight of the original goal – a weak business case
3. Top management aren’t supportive – little engagement with stakeholders

Effective planning provides a foundation for your project and tackles these pitfalls head on. Project planning is about defining scope – what will be done (and by who) and what will be left out. What’s more, project planning, if started early enough, will support an assessment of value – the business benefits – and help work up ideas into the business case. Likewise, the project plan is the basis for communication and gaining senior management support.

What’s In the Plan?
The project plan is a management document. It is prepared by the project manager during the earliest stages of the project and refined as the project proceeds. The plan should include the following information along with resources and costs.

• Stages – periods of a project when work is done
• Work packages – a grouping of activities with defined scope, time-scale and cost that only one person is responsible for delivering
• Activities – components of work that must be delivered to complete the project
• Milestones – major events with zero duration that normally depict the start of a stage
• Deliverables (products) – output produced by the project and defined in the business case
• Reviews – a checkpoint where a deliverable (or the entire project) is evaluated against the business goals
• Interdependencies – when a deliverable can only be achieved when a deliverable from another work package (or project) is completed.

Typically cost and resource plans are presented in tabular format. In contrast, project schedules are most conveniently presented as Gantt charts.

The project schedule provides a detailed view for the day-to-day management of the project and a summary view for presenting to the project sponsor and senior management.

In the next part I will show you how the elements of the plan may be built up from a list of products to be produced by the project. Once this is done, and dependencies between activities are readily identified, the resources needed to carry out the activities may be scheduled.

*****
Martin Webster is Solution Design and Commissioning Manager at Leicestershire County Council. He has over ten years project and programme management experience. Martin regularly writes on leadership, business change and project management topics. Read more at Martin Webster, Esq.

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Product-Based Project Planning by Susanne Madsen

An Introduction to Product-Based Planning 

In this blog post Susanne Madsen explains the importance of project planning and introduces five steps to producing an outline plan during the planning and initiation phase. The outline plan is based on the principles of product-based planning.

The value of your role as a project manager and the success of your project are heavily dependent on how well you plan and initiate the project you are responsible for. In the words of time management expert Alan Lakein, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” If you start to execute a project without planning what is to be done, you may actively contribute to its failure. The same holds true if you do not adjust or change the project’s plans if they are no longer accurate or do not work.

The purpose of planning is not to create a map that is set in stone but to think through the project’s critical elements and steps before you make irreversible commitments and take irrevocable actions.

When you take the time to establish the project’s scope and analyze the requirements, problem domain, and solution up front, you are much more likely to understand the project’s core challenges and recognize what it takes to address them and deliver a quality product to the client.

Up-front planning is required for all types of projects because the organization and customer need you to estimate the project’s size, cost, and completion date before they fully commit to undertaking it. Likewise, as the project manager, you need to understand the exact scope of what your team is expected to deliver and how you plan to deliver it.

Having said that, the extent to which you plan a project in detail during the planning and initiation phase depends on the specific domain and nature of your project as well as the chosen methodology. Some projects are large, complex, and volatile, while others are smaller and much simpler to define, plan, and deliver. For the purpose of this blog post we will assume that your project is somewhere in between: a medium-sized project of medium complexity, with a project methodology that is neither rigid nor extremely flexible. As a result, you may plan the project at a high level during the initiation phase and subsequently refine and adjust the plan as you move through the execution of the project.

Creating an Outline Plan

There are many different ways of creating a plan. One of them is a product-based planning technique. With product-based planning, your focus is first and foremost on the products that need to be delivered as opposed to the activities the project needs to undertake. It means that you plan the project from the client’s and user’s perspective, because you put the focus on tangible deliverables and outcomes.

Note that the plans you produce during the initiation phase will mostly be high level, unless you operate within a domain where your plans for some reason must be fixed and contain a minimum amount of uncertainty. Under most circumstances, though, I would recommend that you only plan in detail for as far ahead as is sensible. Keep your plans realistic yet simple. It is better to be broadly right than precisely wrong.

Do not attempt to plan your project in isolation, but seek assistance from your team members. You need them to help you break down high-level products into subproducts, tasks, and activities with durations and dependencies.

Use the below tips and techniques to help you create a high-level product-based plan. Note that you will only be able to produce the plan once you have a reasonable understanding of what the requirements are and once you have estimated these requirements. Planning is an iterative process, so do not worry if you do not have all of the detailed information up front. Create a high-level plan and refine it as you go along.

1. Create a product breakdown structure
The first step in creating a product-based plan is to create a product breakdown structure in hierarchical format, similar to one you would use to build an organizational chart. It should contain all of the major products (i.e., components and deliverables) you plan to produce and deliver.

• At the top of the hierarchy, you depict the final product—the finished system, building, or deliverable.
• In the level below, you document its constituent parts. This could consist of two, ten, or more subproducts depending on your project. 
• On the third level of the hierarchy, you break down the subproducts even further. 

Continue breaking down your products and deliverables to a level that makes sense for the project. The product breakdown structure does not contain any dependencies or activities but is a pure representation of what the users need and how their needs break down into sub-subdeliverables.

2. Create a product flow diagram
The next step is to turn the product breakdown structure into a product flow diagram, which is a view of the sequence in which the different products are likely to be delivered. Use the products and subproducts from the product breakdown structure, and rearrange them according to their priorities and dependencies. Make the diagram flow from left to right, ending up with the final product on the far right side. Use your knowledge of interdependencies between the subproducts and their relative business priority to create the diagram.

3. Produce a high-level plan
Use the product flow diagram as the guide for creating a road map and a straw-model scenario that you can use to jump-start more in-depth planning conversations and activities. In the early stages of the planning process, you may have to make many assumptions and use approximate durations and timings. Determine the sequence in which you aim to deliver the products, then arrange them into phases with clearly defined milestones. Aim to deliver the core and most critical part of the solution first.

Once you know what the distinct phases are, focus on the first phase and break down its subdeliverables into as much detail as you can, preferably until you have individual tasks and activities that would take days, rather than weeks, for a team member to execute. Continue breaking down the subsequent phases of the project, but use a broader brush for the later phases, where you might not yet have full understanding of the detailed activities that need to be carried out.

4. Assign resources
Start assigning resources to your plan, and tighten up the estimated duration of individual tasks. In order to do that, you must understand which resources are available and also plan for the possibility of their being unavailable. Play around with different resource levels to get a good feel for when the project might complete.

When doing so, identify and pay special attention to the project’s critical path. The critical path is the longest sequence of dependent activities in your schedule that must be completed by the due date in order for the project to be on time. It is the critical path that will determine the actual duration of the project, as all other activities can be scheduled in parallel. More than anything, it is the critical path that you must pay close attention to throughout the execution of the project to make sure that the overall project time line does not slip.

5. Present the plan
Before you provide your sponsor and steering committee with the outline plan, review it one last time with members of the team, and make sure you have added sufficient contingency to the critical path. Remember that it is better to under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around.

Once stakeholders see a schedule, they have a tendency to think it is set in stone. Plan for worst-case scenarios, and provide a range of dates within which you expect to deliver the project, as opposed to just one fixed date. Explain to your stakeholders what your planning assumptions, risks, and issues are, and make it very clear that events are not set in stone. Explain that you will update and refine the plan frequently as you move through the project and that you will keep them informed of any changes.


***
Susanne Madsen is a project and program manager, mentor and coach with over 15 years experience in managing and rolling out large change programs for the financial sector. She is a qualified Corporate and Executive coach and a PRINCE2 and MSP practitioner. Her book, The Project Management Coach, will be published in January by Management Concepts. You can visit Susanne’s website or follow her on Twitter: @SusanneMadsen.

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