Which Scheduling Tool is Right for Me?

Building/Maintaining the Schedule
It is easy to create a plan or schedule using Microsoft Project, but it’s not as easy to keep it up-to-date once the project starts. It is even more difficult when you consider loading resources into your schedule. Updating progress in your schedule should be easier than doing the actual work on the project. Unfortunately with Microsoft Project’s internal rules that try to balance time and work, it is frequently difficult to do so. Oftentimes you update the percent complete and the hours change. Or you fix the hours and then the dates move. It can be an endless, frustrating exercise just to progress your plan so you have an accurate forecast.

With Deltek Open Plan, the progress you enter is respected and properly used during analysis, making quick work of your updating effort (which really should be the easiest part of your project!). There are also user defined validations and conditional formatting that help to prevent or highlight potential data entry errors. The bottom line is, your scheduling tool should help, not hinder you.

Resource Modeling
Resource Modeling, especially during planning stage, requires the ability to use planning resources – labor, skill level, groups of people, labor categories, etc. – until you know who will be performing actual work. As plans begin, you frequently don’t know who will be performing the actual work, but you want to get an idea of the effort required to perform on the project. Being able to assign planning-level resources or pools of people or skills allows flexibility to plan and refine the details later. Other tools often make it difficult to build a realistic plan.

In Open Plan you can define resources to meet the needs of your plan. You can easily share resource files across a project, as well as manage definitions with a robust security model. Additionally, Open Plan allows for a resource breakdown structure (a hierarchical approach to developing resources). This allows you to do the same level of reporting and analysis that you would be able to do when you have a work breakdown structure, or any other hierarchal structure. You simply don’t have that ability with Microsoft Project.

At any point in time, Open Plan will also provides you with the ability to see the total demand of the resources on your project, rolled up by labor categories, pools, skills, etc., and use that to make informed management decisions. All of this lets you easily plan, without requiring creative work arounds based on the limitations of the scheduling tool.

Working with Planned and In Progress Activities
In Microsoft Project, planned work is left in place until the user takes an action to update logic, progress the activities, or select the “Update Project” option to reschedule uncompleted work to start after the status date. This creates a problem because it imposes constraints on the uncompleted work, allowing for various violations of schedule quality metrics.

In Open Plan, all of the planned or remaining work for in progress tasks is automatically scheduled to start on or after the status date. No constraints are imposed, so you don’t trip metrics because of the limitations of the tool. Also, if you record actual dates in the future, Open Plan will flag these as warnings/errors when you run your time date calculations so they can easily be identified for future resolution. With Microsoft Project, these are treated as an actual start date in the future. That’s kind of a cool trick to say “We completed this work 3 days from now”, but in reality, that shouldn’t be allowed.

Risk
Finally, Open Plan has a native Monte Carlo simulation engine built right into the tool. The user enters optimistic/pessimistic durations on each of the activities that will be included in the simulation along with the distribution profile. Open Plan then overlays the results of the simulation right on the schedule, making it easy to immediately see the impacts to your plan. Microsoft Project and other similar tools need 3rd party add-ons to accomplish this same task.

During a recent White Board Wednesday, Deltek’s resident cost management and schedule authority went into greater detail about some of the differences highlighted above. I encourage you to check out the presentation (it’s only 20 minutes) and contact us to learn more about making the switch to Deltek Open Plan.