Have you ever needed a planing tool taking care of all the tedoius stuff placing all the individual activities at a certain time after you have made the necesary list of activities and their relations?
In my opinion planning should be the task of making a list of activities
left to do, link them together (activity A and B must be completed before
activity C can begin, assign resource(s) and of course guess the necesary
time to complete them.
Planning should not be the tedious task of assigning each activity a time
when it should be done, a coumputer should be able to do that.
Replanning and changing the plans, this is even more frustrating if I have to do the tedious assigning of times for each task because of some small change somewhare in the beginning of the plan. In my opinion a project plan should be live data, not static data.
Further: guessing the time needed is hard (at least if you want to make the right guess), The result will of course be that each activity take any time except the guessed one. I would like to guess at the shortest possible and longest possible time, and assign a probability for the task to be completed at each day/hour/whatever by some std. function between those times. The computer could then calculate the probablility for each project (and each task) to be completed at a certain day.
And even furter: Do you have more than one project? Need to plan those together in order to optimize resource usage? No problem with this, you just put them al together, assign deadlines to some important milestones and their relative priority and the program optimizes the plan to meet those milestones with as high probablility as possible (with respect to priority). Once the raw data for a project is entered it is a matter of minutes or less to test what will happen if the priorities and deadlines are changed in order to get the products out in the optimal order. It is of course also really easy to insert a new project and see what effect it have to already running projects and from that decide how to do.
Would anyone like a program doing this? I am in the process of making one.
My first main goal is completed, a program making a plan approximately the way I wanted. I might not always like the output from the program, but that have actually not anything to do with the program itself but rather what is possible to make with availiable resources (ie the input to the program).
That is right I am actually using it now in my day job to plan my and some of my co-workers time.
The program is so far hard to use (see limitations), but yet several hundred times more useful to me than any planning tool I have ever seen (and I spent several weeks looking for one a year ago or so, testing a lot of them)
Current limitations:
No GUI, not even close to a GUI. Input and output is text files.
User friendy: No! These first step was in order to make the planning engine
work, and work well. The rest simply have to wait!
The developement is currently done in a mix of Windows and Linux, the program is (at least so far) written in plain C and will be runnable at virtually any plattform that have a C compiler I have yet to decide (together woth my work) if this is going to be a closed up "not to sell to anybody" application, if it is going to be a commerical product, or it is going to be GPL and open source. I surely hope it could be some of the two later since I seriously think this could help more people live better. It might be quite possible to persuade me, and whatever it will be I would need either to get paid at work for developing (they said it is quite possible) or get help from others if I am going to do it in my spare time.
You can contact me at qwerty_42@hotmail.com
My homepage.
This page is last updated 2001-01-27