A+ for Meisterplan’s Project Timeline Modifications and Resourcing

Meisterplan Review by Barry Cousins of Info-Tech Research Group

Barry Cousins, Senior Director, PMOPMOSynonym for → Project Management OfficeA Project Management Office (PMO) is a permanent organizational unit responsible for the centralized and coordinated management of all projects. Practice at Info-Tech Research Group specializes in project portfolio managementProject Portfolio ManagementProject portfolio management (PPM) is a process that seeks to select, prioritize, monitor and analyze a company’s projects. and has over 30 years of experience in IT. He recently wrote a review about Meisterplan, and we would like to share some of the highlights from his review.

First Impression of Meisterplan

“It sounds crazy, but Meisterplan seems like a new class of solution…It helps you to reconcile the imbalance between the supply of, and demand for, people’s time.”

“Meisterplan has based their solution on what they call “Lean PPMLean PPMSynonym for → Lean Project Portfolio ManagementLean Project Portfolio Management (Lean PPM) is a lightweight framework for managing an organization’s project portfolio. It helps determine which projects to run, when to run them, and with which…”, a lighter and more top-down approach to portfolio management.”

On Granular Task Management vs. Higher Level Resource Management

“Portfolio reports based on calculated tasksTasksSynonym for → ProjectA project is a time-limited undertaking with defined objectives and resources that delivers unique results and often includes complex tasks. estimates, actuals, and timeline rollups only have value with full and uninterrupted adoption. By everyone. And every project. All day. Every day. Less than global adoption can still help a project, but the portfolio value rapidly approaches zero as the data ages and gaps widen.

This is exactly why we made our templates called “Portfolio Manager”: an Excel-based tool for people who wanted resource managementResource ManagementWhen it comes to resource management, the focus is on the optimal planning, coordination and monitoring of resources. The term “resources” includes things like employees, budgets, materials and time. at a higher level…But the Excel solution has obvious limitations and the trouble starts when you have multiple people trying to edit a complex spreadsheet. Hence our attraction to the Meisterplan idea, since it’s a legitimate multiuser browser-based software solution.”

How Meisterplan Is Different

“Meisterplan doesn’t go below allocationsAllocationAllocating describes the strategic process of identifying the correct resources for projects or individual tasks and assigning them accordingly. of people to projectsProjectA project is a time-limited undertaking with defined objectives and resources that delivers unique results and often includes complex tasks.. Consequently, it’s relatively easy to maintain the data and get useful outputs that show the capacity and availability of your teams. So it should be far more likely that Meisterplan gets adopted. Actually, it doesn’t need to be adopted or even used by the majority of your people in order to yield a useful capacity forecast.

There’s a visually appealing and easy to use interface showing a resourceResourceResources are all the people, places and things that you need to complete projects. The most important resource? Employees, of course! histogramHistogramA histogram in resource management is a graphical representation that helps to keep track of personnel requirements and available capacities. It shows how often certain values (e.g., person days or… in context of the projects in the portfolio. You can get a lot done by dragging project start and end dates around the timeline. And, you can pull projects into and out of the portfolio quite easily, facilitating a pretty useful what-if scenarioScenarioIn project portfolio management (PPM), scenarios are potential ways that your portfolio can look, based on a set of well-defined assumptions and portfolio decisions. Scenario planning is used to forecast….

A tighter set of function has driven a lower cost to make and maintain the software, a lower cost to support it, a lower cost to run it, and ultimately a lower price to the users.”

Barry’s Recommendation

“I bet the majority of our “Grow Your Own PPMPPMSynonym for → Project Portfolio ManagementProject portfolio management (PPM) is a process that seeks to select, prioritize, monitor and analyze a company’s projects. Solution” users with resource managementResource ManagementWhen it comes to resource management, the focus is on the optimal planning, coordination and monitoring of resources. The term “resources” includes things like employees, budgets, materials and time. needs would get further with this approach because they’d spend less time fixing spreadsheets and figuring out how to share the data management burden.

Consider this model if you’ve struggled to forecast resourceResourceResources are all the people, places and things that you need to complete projects. The most important resource? Employees, of course! capacity using spreadsheets or large commercial tools.”

If you’re an Info-Tech member, click here to read Barry’s full review of Meisterplan, or contact an Info-Tech representative. You can also try Meisterplan for yourself for free today.

About Info-Tech Research Group:

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest growing IT research and advisory firm. Founded in 1997, Info-Tech produces unbiased and highly relevant IT research solutions. Since 2010 McLean & Company, a division of Info-Tech, has provided the same, unmatched expertise to HR professionals worldwide.