Re: [Planner] Planner reference installations?

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 12:39 +0200, Richard Hult wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi Richard,

> We'd like to know a bit more about our current Planner users, and your 
> experiences with Planner. We'd be interested in hearing back from any of 
> you who are using it for real projects of all sizes, how many 
> installations of Planner you have, for how long have you been using Planner?
> 
> Also, it would be interesting to see what you see as the most important 
> missing feature in Planner.
> 
> Feel free to answer me personally or to the list.

Guess I should answer this, since I use Planner a fair bit in my day
job. Not sure exactly when I started to play with it (early 2003 maybe?
Certainly in the MrProject days).

These days, I use Planner when I'm wearing my project manager hat for a
team of half a dozen people, plus another dozen or so in the clients'
teams overseas. I mostly use it for internal (within my team) display,
but sometimes the HTML views are good to put up for the clients and our
upper management to see.

My typical projects tend to have about 50 sub-tasks and maybe ten
resources in them, so it is all fairly manageable speedwise, even on my
not particularly snappy desktop machine at home.

The things I miss mostly are the ability to do reliable resource
levelling and the ability to do any kind of "what if" experiments: often
I would like to see if things work better if we blow away a particular
task or move it six months into the future. Having to remove the task
and then re-add it later is fiddly (when the task might contain a few
sub-tasks). Being able to trigger a property along the lines of "ignore
this for now" would be good -- but that is mostly useful in the context
of resource levelling again. I would also like the ability to avoid
over-committing a resource: if I could say something like "this person
can work up to 120% of a full load, but no more" and then I was unable
to add them to a task if it took them over the load, that would be
easier than adding to the task, then selecting the resource usage view
and seeing where the red bits are.

But most of my "complaints" are things that would be "nice to have" and
would make life a bit easier, rather than show-stoppers. I already use
Planner a lot and wish I could find the time to contribute to it. The
code is nice, it's pretty usable and it helps me to do my job and keep
my managers informed and happy (which helps me keep my job, so I like
that).

Cheers,
Malcolm