SharedPlan Connect

SharedPlan Connect, October 23, 2006

"The more things change, the more they remain ... insane."

- Michael Fry and T. Lewis, Over the Hedge

Hello reader,

It has been very busy here at SharedPlan over the last month or two. If you happen to visit our web page with any regularity, you have probably noticed a few changes.

Last month I told all of you about TeamPlanning and TeamServices. We accompanied that announcement with a complete redesign of our website, which many of you checked out. Thank you for doing so.

Since then, we have received many customer comments and monitored other indicators, like our website analytics, and it seemed that we hadn't defined our product offering quite right. We quickly huddled up, reviewed the data, and made a few improvements.

We have supplemented the offering with additional features (but we kept the price the same!). The new offering, named ProPlanning, now includes:

Our premium product management application for managing everything from basic projects to complex, multifaceted undertakings;

An online, private, secure repository for plan information, so everyone working on the project can always access or report the latest status;

Access to the public planning repository to see examples of others' plans; and

Five seats of TeamServices, so those individuals not actively involved with the project but that want to be informed may do so through web reporting and analysis.

New features, new things to check out, same price! ProPlanning is now the most versatile, flexible, and capable project management offering on the market. Are we finished with these changes? I certainly hope so, although we have a new product announcement coming soon that will add another exciting element ... stay tuned!

Probabilistic scheduling and risk

Johanna Rothman recently posted on her blog the description of a unique project management technique, probabilistic scheduling. I like it because it attempts to capture the variability of task completion estimates, although in doing so it quickly introduces so much complexity that any 'plan' becomes meaningless.

Ken Nelson posted a comment on Johanna's post with a pointer to his post on risk metrics. Similar to Johanna, Ken is trying to capture schedule variability as a measure of riskiness.

Both posts raise a real issue with project plans, schedule variability. However, both rely on the planner's knowledge of the variability of the plan's tasks. In Johanna's case, she's the only resource involved so maybe she can do that. But in Ken's case, is it possible to even estimate the project variablity? He presents it as a simple estimate, but it really looks like the result of a Monte Carlo analysis on project plan. Yikes.

Project of the month

We now have over 800 plans that have been posted in the OpenPlanning public repository. 800! My favorite so far is Mark and Asha's wedding plan, including their plan comment, "Woohooo!" (Back in July, Ana Rosa Lima also posted a wedding plan template.)

I love Mark and Asha's plan, not just because soon-to-be newlyweds just make me smile, or that I enjoyed seeing a possible project novice quickly be able to assemble a pretty complex plan, but because it also made me realize a new way one might use OpenPlanning and the repository.

Since OpenPlanning is free of charge and so easy to use, service providers or retailers could use it to drive new business. A wedding planner or bridal store could use OpenPlanning to help their customers through a complex process, offering the happy (but stressed out) couple a free planning template. All involved parties could even use the repository to freely exchange status. Offering this as a free service to potential customers helps differentiate the provider.

We have joined the blogosphere

Two of the SharedPlan team, Roger and I, now have blogs. While both of them deal with entrepreneurial issues (and some personal and family stuff), Roger's has a little more focus on software technical issues, while mine takes a broader business view. Take a look, and let us know what you think.

Thanks for reading,

Tracy