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Working with Planner for Project Controls

Planner provides you with a tool for collecting and managing your project controls data.  Depending on how you choose to set up and use Planner it can support the following:

• Plans with Tasks
• Cost and Resources
• Risks
• Issues
• Actions and Decisions

Comprehensive video tutorials are provided as Planner Help and you can find them here, these pages are intended to provide guidance on the best practice use of Planner as it is set up in default configuration.

Separate guidance is provided for each of the three main Planner modes or tabs from the ‘Guidance’ button at the footer of the appropriate data form as follows:

Tasks - This tab allows you to assemble your project plan which consists of a set of tasks.  Tasks may have duration information and also resource and cost information associated with them.

Risks - This tab allows you to assemble your risk register and associated response actions.

Issues - This tab allows you to collect issues for your project and their associated responses.  The list of Issue types often includes Actions and Decisions.

Planner file configuration

Depending on its purpose the Planner file you open may have all three tabs visible  or some other combinations.  Typical combinations are as follows:

Small project - Combined Planner file supports all three tabs for full data collection.

Large project - separate files for Schedule/Plan, Risks and Issues, possible also separate Decisions and Action Registers.  Possible that Plan isn’t used and an MS Project plan or some other file type is used instead.

Other - use as a RAID log is quite common with just Risk and Issue tabs in use.  A separate Plan file either in Planner of another format is used.

The appropriate tab combination can be set up in the Options-Program View area of Planner (unless this has been locked by the template generator, note it will be open in standard PIAB templates).

Customising Planner

Planner is designed with personalisation in mind, users can (if the file hasn’t been locked) change the resource model, mode of % complete calculation, risk and issue types, categories and calculation basis.  This can be changed in individual files and also in your template versions of files so that the same personalisation's are used every time on each new project.

Thats great in terms of getting Planner to work the way that you want it to and the same applies to this guidance.  You can produce your own guidance and host it yourself on an intranet site, Sharepoint or something similar and then in Planner just change the link location that the Guidance button should point to.

You can find the link locations in Options - Preferences (assuming they haven’t been locked by the template producer).

‘This basic scheduling and risk management package provides all of the functionality that many users require.  And its free!’

Steve Cotterell, Project Manager Today

Read the full review here: PMT July 2012

The perfect companion planning tool simple to layout, schedule your projects and even resource them. Then share the files with anyone you want.  Easy to pick up and use even if you haven’t used MS Project before...if you have..well it’s like MS Project made easy.

Simple Plan Features

It does the following for free!

• Transfer your plan from MSProject
• Transfer your plan to MSProject
• Task name and further details
• Unique duration setting by fixed dates, start plus days or predecessor plus dates
• Add resources and allocation %
• Creates project resource list
• % complete by task
• Group tasks into summaries
• Auto calc  summary dates and %
• Task budget and cost control
• Task colours, comments and tags
• Move and copy tasks
• View interactive Gantt
• Click to edit and custom order tasks
• Alter display time frame
• Gantt as image in one click
• Save your plan and share for free
• Bundled with Community Edition
• Upload into PROJECT in a box to integrated into organisation wide resource and task management
• Risk logging, management, analysis and communications
• Issue logging, management, analysis and communications
• Import or export risks via Excel
• Completely FREE!

Or view full PIAB product matrix