Re: [Planner] Hello... requests, questions.. Critical Chain processing?

[linuxg33k <linuxg33k shaw ca>]

Great post.

I agree mostly.

Although I don't necessarily agree with the fundamental weakness of 
project management.

I believe the fundamental weakness in project management is lack of team 
member and process integration. 

If a project manager is the only one using the software, gantt charts 
and forecasting and so forth are nothing more than postit boards to 
track arbitrary process.

However, if you tie something like Planner with something like 
GnotimeTracker with something like Evolution (obviously one can get 
insanely complicated), all of a sudden you have a self managing 
production line.  Project would be overviewed by the project manager, 
all tasks and todo lists would properly propagate down to the proper 
tools for each of those tasks, team members would clock in various tasks 
and can complete various items in non linear ways, and all of this 
information would flow back up the chain to update gant charts, resource 
lists, etc.  One can then really start making some usefull decisions and 
see real time change.

MsProject tries to do this in strange strange ways, as do many other tools.

I think the only way to bridge this divide is with open source tools and 
glue code, I've seen many paltforms come and go that tried to tie all 
the pieces together into a one unified whole.

The field of project management also needs more study.  Everything I've 
read so far on the subject has not been very usefull, so i'll dig into 
your linkage as I've not run accross that before.

Thanks.

Roberto Leibman wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been managing technical projects on and off for a while now, and 
> everytime I find myself in such a position I start working on my own 
> project management tool because frankly all out there suck. They suck 
> in very essential ways; there are fixes and add-ons to some of them 
> which make them better, but even with that they just don't work. I was 
> even beta tester for a while for both MS Project and one of the tools 
> on the market (ProChain).
> Have any of you looked at Theory of Constraints type project 
> management? I believe that it holds a big key into things that would 
> really make planner stand out from everything else, without the need 
> of making it overly complex or add every feature under the sun.
>
> I love the simplicity of Planner, and I really think it would be a 
> great starting point for the kind of thing I have in mind.
>
> The number one mistake that  current tools make, according to Critical 
> Chain thinking is that they all make a very basic assumption that is 
> VERY wrong: tasks always take a fixed duration (or fixed work). In 
> reality all tasks are much better modeled as a probability of a task 
> completing in a given amount of time. Though the Gantt chart (such a 
> powerful visualization tool) as we know it would have to change 
> significantly to reflect this change, and as it stands now it is a Bad 
> Thing (Gantt Chart considered harmful).
>
> Critical Chain project management solves, in a very elegant way, the 
> whole problem with resource leveling, the self-fulfilling-prophecy 
> task padding everyone seems to use and I've found that it makes 
> project management much more focused (you end up looking at very few 
> numbers, buffers to see how a project is doing), but there aren't any 
> tools to ease the pain, and shoe-horning current tools is such a 
> bother I end up using excel (or these days ooffice) to manage.
>
> Here's a good textbook on the subject:
>
>    
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1574441957/ref=pd_sbs_b_1/002-6900978-8236061?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance 
>
>
> I've found that I can take the leveling algorithms it provides and 
> manually level (plus calculate and automatically insert buffer tasks) 
> by hand, it shouldn't be too hard to use it to level resources.
>
> I also like the approach ProChain (a MS Project add-on I used briefly) 
> takes to update project progress, instead of asking about percentages, 
> everytime the manager sits to update the project he/she uses a wizard 
> and updates the number of days remaining on each task currently in the 
> pipeline (i.e. those not done but whose predecessors are all done), 
> since new knowledge comes in every day, this number is not always what 
> you expect, but it is used to update the project in a much more 
> accurate way.
>
> Anyway, enough of my rant... have these ideas been considered at all?
>
> I'm not doing much management these days, and I only remembered 
> because I opened up planner for a small project I'm working on alone 
> (which negates the need for critical chain leveling) and decided to 
> write this note after a cursory glance to the list archives to see if 
> this has been addressed.
>
> Perhaps I've picqued some developer's interest, or perhaps next time 
> I'm managing projects I'll go through the trouble of hacking into 
> Planner to get it to do what I want.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Roberto
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