1. Place resources at the center of your planning process

PlanningForce places your resources at the center of your planning process to help you have a successful human resource strategy for: Recruiting, training, motivating and rewarding your staff.

In PlanningForce, your resources are described through their specific roles, skills, levels, efficiency, and calendars, so everyone can be scheduled and used consistently and efficiently according to their capacity.

PlanningForce scheduling engine balances task timing and resource selection to create an optimal resource plan, and shows you how efficiently the resources are used.

You can easily create variations and re-plan to compare and choose the best scenario (which also contains the best resource plan).

Now that you have an engine that allows you to plan and re-plan in seconds, you can start doing things that are not feasible with other products on the market: you can test new working scenarios and therefore create the optimal workforce.

2. Find the right balance in your workforce

Benefit from the most suitable resources at the right price and keep them happy and productive!

How to optimize the costs of your workforce with PlanningForce?

1. 1° Qualify and quantify, with the PlanningForce tools and methodology, the optimal workforce in light of your project portfolio;
2. 2° Compare this optimum with the existing workforce (both internal and external);
3. 3° Imagine and test scenarios that match task requirements and resource offers through simple HR techniques: recruitment, dismissal, training, use of contractors and temporary workers;
4. 4° Set the optimal cost based on estimated realistic productivity and adapt the salary package accordingly.
5. 5° Implement your decisions and monitor their effectiveness.

1. Give more importance to the marginal effect of a project

Planning is a concurrent process: new projects compete with existing ones for the use of limited resources.

As a consequence, a particular project doesn't necessarily have a positive effect on the entire portfolio, even if its expected income seems very attractive.

That's why we give more importance to the marginal effect of a project than to its income or its theoretical profit.

So, before adding a new project to an existing project portfolio, we use the following methodology that helps us answer this crucial question: Is the real added-value of this additional project positive?'

• Calculate the expected revenues generated by our existing project portfolio
• Imagine and test several planning simulations incorporating this additional project
• Compare the revenue forecasts of each of these simulations to the initial revenue forecast
• Reject this project if, at the end of the project, the cumulated CF has not been increased
• Or modify the composition of the existing portfolio to make it globally more profitable with the new project than without it.

As a result, you are able to concentrate solely on the really profitable projects.

2. Encourage 'Project Darwnism'

Among the reasons that explain why so many projects fail, one of the most important is certainly the lack of memory and/or transmission of previous experience.

We propose you to use PlanningForce to encourage what could be seen as 'Project Darwinism', but is nothing else than using all available data to learn, test, retain and diffuse the best practices.

• Create project templates and task group templates
• Create standard resource profiles
• Use a competence matrix and define levels of efficiency
• Use historical data to estimate risks (staff absences, project delays – task difficulty, ...)
• Review your project lifecycle after completion and understand the reasons for divergence
• Create benchmarks between similar projects and retain the best planned / achieved
• Don't consider projects in isolation from others, but calculate their marginal effect

1. Anticipate the incidence of recurring problems and incorporate them into your plan

In PlanningForce, we will anticipate the incidence of recurring problems by using the concept of risk coefficients.

Indeed, risks, such as illnesses, days off, unplanned tasks, longer tasks, changes, and interruptions are frequent throughout the life of the plan.

These events are so frequent that we often have statistics on their occurrence.

That's why we will model their occurrence and incorporate their effect into our plans.

By doing so, we'll improve the reliability of the delivery dates, and certainly the cohesion of the team, the quality of the work and therefore the profits.

The PlanningForce planning methodology coupled to a unique scheduling engine will help you produce reliable planning dates and will strengthen your management.

2. Simulate, compare, and sort planning scenarios to choose the most realistic plan

With PlanningForce, you can generate as many planning variations as you wish for the same Project Portfolio.

Indeed, in PlanningForce, you can change any information and get a new adjusted plan immediately.

Variations can be organized into scenarios or simulations that can be compared easily.

This allows you to:

• run what-if analyses to assess the possible impact of risks or new opportunities
• develop best case / worst case scenarios

Then, compare KPIs, apply score cards and display radar views, and, finally, deliver the most realistic plan considering your assumptions, your goals and constraints. And all this in just a few minutes!

With PlanningForce, producing realistic plans becomes the rule!

1. Be as flexible as your business requires

Developing a resource-constrained schedule is often a complex and lengthy process.

As a result, a plan is often made once and never change, or it is oversimplified with rough estimates.

You can get so much more from an agile planning process!

Winning the TTM battle is question of agility. PlanningForce allows you to re-plan parts of the project portfolio that are not frozen, and to re-balance and optimize your plans as often as required by your business.

PlanningForce scheduling engine will automatically generate new plans and schedules, while also taking account of progress statuses, changes in your projects and resources, and changes in your delivery dates and priorities.

PlanningForce is as agile as you need to be to win the TTM battle

2. Be prepared to the worst

"If you expect the worst, you'll never be disappointed".

By helping you prepare your plan in the best way and by anticipating many different scenarios, you'll be able to commit on realistic delivery dates and to face problems with calm if they appear.

Preparation of the plan

In PlanningForce, the preparation phase is similar to the modeling of your PLM organization.

To do this, PlanningForce offers you all the tools you need to benefit from a complete laboratory (the model of your organization) in which you will be able to simulate any kind of scenarios.

Anticipation

Once your model is ready, you can start testing all the scenarios you can imagine. In just a few seconds, PlanningForce will calculate the impact of these on your plan.

For example, you can test the impact on the delivery dates of:

• loosing some critical resources
• changing some of the project priorities or target end dates
• adding unforeseen activities or facing longer and more difficult tasks
• encountering delays in some critical supplies

These scenarios will show you how strong your organization is and how realistic your commitments are. You now have the means to understand what to do to reinforce your organization and how to communicate to reinforce your credibility.

1. Keep track and learn from your project portfolio history

The final state of a plan is the result of events throughout its life:

• the initial construction of the plan
• the scenarios you assessed
• the simulations you tested
• the successive progress statuses
• the events that forced you to change course

All these different stages are a piece of the history PlanningForce keeps to help you better understand your organization and its environment and feed your learning curve.

This material is priceless when you have to share your planning expertise or when you re-visit a specific moment of the plan and test the relevancy of alternative working configurations.

2. Profit from the information your plan holds

Increase your turnover and your profits

Planning is much more than allocating resources to tasks or predicting project ending dates.

Actually, planning can be seen as one of the most powerful methodologies for performing SWOT analyses.

From such SWOT analyses, you can start elaborating and implementing strategies not just to reduce costs, but also to increase your turnover and your profits.

What you learn from your planning system will thus help you set up a large variety of strategies:

Increase turnover (or activity)

• Create or find buffer activities
• Use buffer resources
• Anticipate and counter declines in activity
• Anticipate and counter disruptions

Increase profits

• Specialize your activities
• Specialize your resources
• Adapt your pricing dynamically
• Adapt third-party agreements

1. Stop time-consuming manual planning work!

PlanningForce scheduling engine builds an optimized plan in seconds.

The first phase of a project, the development of the project plan, typically demands a lot of your time.

Even more work is required when you want to allocate resources efficiently, or when you want to change your 'ideal' plan to a 'realistic' one.

PlanningForce focuses on drastically reducing the planning work and improving the quality of the plan. Its planning engine builds an optimized plan in seconds, whether it is a single project or a portfolio of hundreds of projects.

When you have to re-plan, just hit the ‘Scheduling button' and a new optimized plan is delivered immediately!

2. Save time and concentrate on strategic tasks

Because your time is precious, quick responses from your planning system are priceless!

In which areas does PlanningForce help you save time?

1. By using PlanningForce engine

• Scalability: manage dozens or thousands of tasks and resources with the same ease
• Scheduling: build an optimized schedule in seconds from short to long-term
• Re-planning: take account of progress and changes and re-plan on the spot
• Reports: generate and read intelligent reports as clear summaries, not novels

2. While working

• Project creation: use project and task group templates
• Encodings: experiment innovative ergonomics to speed up your encodings
• Navigation: find, sort, read or edit any data in just one or two clicks
• Exports: save any kind of data in a click and use it in other programs

1. Encourage "one version of the truth" across the organization

One of the goals of the PLM/PMO organization is to make sure everyone will be able to share and understand the informations the system provides. Here are some basic recommendations:

• Define your competence matrix in light of the project requirements, not from HR lists
• Define and apply project templates as much as possible and avoid 'free style' project definition
• Avoid named-resource requirements and encourage the use of skill requirements instead
• Stop duration-driven task definition and use the effort-driven one instead
• Do not estimate the effort required by a task in relationship with the capacity of a specific resource, but do it as it was handled by an average-skilled person

The better you implement these basic rules at the PLM/PMO organization scale, the bigger the return of using PlanningForce will be.

2. Break the walls between departments and layers

Increase the collaboration between every parcel of your PLM/PMO organization.

Collaboration inside the PLM/PMO organization depends on two factors:

• The harmonization of the planning techniques
• The sharing of resources

How to harmonize the planning techniques?

• Have one single competence matrix for all the departments
• Unify the competence assessment procedures
• Use one central repository as PM tool
• Apply our recommendations for having "one version of the truth"

How to increase the sharing of resources?

• Look for internal solutions first
• Compose "flying teams" able and willing to work in different departments
• Encourage the transparency about how and where resources are used
• Moderate the influence of the PMs in the organization
• Give to everyone the same importance int the negociation processes