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The answer to professionals' requirements
Professionals who are dealing with
Discover what makes PlanningForce different from competition- complex planning processes
- risks and uncertainties
- frequent plan updates
know that over-simplified, manual, static project planning tools are not the answer to their reality.
Thanks to close collaboration with professionals, PlanningForce is now offering easily accessible planning project methodology that focuses on their main concerns:
1. Save time
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.
2. Get a realistic plan
As our software calculates the plan, additional known (historic or future) factors can be taken into account (like efficiency of tasks and resources, slack, trends, seasons, holidays, employee turn-over, etc.) to generate a realistic plan.
3. Find the best plan
Developing a plan for a project portfolio can be very complex. Many different plans can be created for the same portfolio due to the large number of variables, but most of the time, it is impossible for the human mind to think up or even recognize the optimal plan.
On the other hand, when there are many constraints and when different tasks contend for the same resources, there might be just a few solutions that resolve conflicts, but those are often very hard to find.
In PlanningForce, you can set planning modes or targets. Our planning engine will then give you the best plan, along with values that indicate the quality.
4. Optimize resources
"With the invention of the elevator, we knew it would be easier to go to the top floors of our 4-storey buildings, but now, we realize that its true value lies in allowing us to build 50-storey buildings!"
Now that we have an engine that allows us to plan and re-plan in seconds, we can start doing things that are not feasible with other products in the market. As the workforce is an important cost to most companies, money can be saved by using resources in the most efficient way. PlanningForce allows you to plan for the right combination of resources and skills at the right time to execute your project portfolio targets.
PlanningForce allows you to document your workforce availability, skills, and future changes, e.g. acquisition of additional resources, access to external contractors, lay-offs, training for additional skills.
Our planning engine balances task timing and resource selection to create an optimal 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).
5. Assess different scenarios
You can change any information in PlanningForce and immediately get an adjusted plan. Variations can be organized into scenarios 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
6. Manage change
PlanningForce can be used for short-term project planning as well as for long-term project portfolio and resource planning. However, because things change over time, not many plans are executed exactly as scheduled. PlanningForce allows you to re-plan parts of the project portfolio that are not locked in, to re-balance and optimize your plans.
7. Know real project added value
Adding new projects generates additional direct or indirect income, but it’s a big mistake to calculate these new incomes independently of other projects. Indeed, new projects will inevitably compete with existing ones for the use of resources. As a consequence, they may lead to delays, extra-costs, and other negative effects. But if these additional projects reinforce capacity or allow better use of existing resources, they can also produce positive effects. Calculating the real added value of a project is not an easy job and can be seen as a mysterious process where experience and luck or both can help, but all this remains hazardous at the end if the right tool isn’t used.
PlanningForce is probably the only planning tool that has been conceived to help managers have a clearer idea of the real expected added value of new projects, in relation to the rest of the portfolio.
