Body of knowledge

• Introduction
• Portfolio management
• Project scheduling & planning
• Workable schedules
• Dynamic decision making
• Resource leveling
• Scheduling and Planning
• Project modeling
• Constructive algorithms
• About priorities
• Capacity planning
• Project lifecycle

Other resources

• Video tutorials
• Frequently asked questions
• 8 strategies to improve your plan
• Project management glossary
• Tutorials in PlanningForce

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PlanningForce Body of Knowledge

Plan your Forces, don't force your plan!

How PlanningForce helps you create and plan your projects realistically and efficiently

Optimizing a project plan is very often a tedious, time-consuming and stressful job, because the PMO or the PM has to take account, at the same time, of customers, employees and company requirements.

Many plans are just made for marketing purposes and not for real and effective management

Needless say, such equilibrium is very difficult to obtain, but also to maintain once the projects have started.

Indeed, the tasks are very often more difficult than foreseen and unplanned events, like sickness, occur...

Thus, re-planning is just too hard to be handled regularly.
That's why so many plans are just made for marketing purposes and not for real and effective management.

Increase the efficiency of your project plan

Having comprehensively analyzed these planning processes over the last 9 years, ISC proposes, in PlanningForce, a methodology which will allow PMOs and PMs to increase the efficiency of their project plan dramatically.

This methodology is based on several statements and planning techniques:

• Projects and tasks should preferably be described through the notion of required roles instead of required resources;
• Projects should not be scheduled 'a priori', but have date constraints, goals and priorities;
• Risk factors and uncertainties should be identified and applied to both tasks and resources;
• Different solutions for a same plan to reflect different scenarios should be easily produced;
• The history of a plan should be kept and analyzed to learn from the past;
• And plans should be produced automatically thanks to advanced algorithms and search techniques.

Based on these, PlanningForce delivers planning and scheduling solutions that make efficient use of resources, prevent any over-allocation, and propose realistic task durations.

PlanningForce-negotiated solutions

The PlanningForce data architecture has been built to create room for negotiation between a demand (the projects and tasks) and an offer (the resources).

The match between this demand and offer is made on several levels: competences, availability, and preferences.

The solutions are classified according to priorities and goals (makespan and benefits).

This methodology allows the use of the full power of our scheduling engine whose purpose is to calculate some of the best (out of potentially billions) planning solutions while automatically performing resource leveling, and detecting present or future problems.

Test different scenarios

Furthermore, PlanningForce's scheduling engine produces those solutions so fast that PMOs and PMs can test and compare dozens of different scenarios and be sure to find the optimal one.

And, when unforeseen events occur in the course of the project plan, they can easily re-plan and give new realistic and reliable instructions.

By doing so, PMOs and PMs gain credibility and authority, while at the same time releasing some of the pressure that weighs on their shoulders.

Read articles in this section and learn more about the key concepts of PlanningForce.