A+ for Meisterplans Project Timeline Modifications and Resourcing

Meisterplan Review by Barry Cousins of Info-Tech Research Group

Barry Cousins, Senior Director, PMO Practice at Info-Tech Research Group specializes in project portfolio management 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 PPM”, a lighter and more top-down approach to portfolio management."

On Granular Task Management vs. Higher Level Resource Management

"Portfolio reports based on calculated 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 management 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 allocations of people to projects. 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 resource histogram 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 scenario.

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 PPM Solution” users with resource management 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 resource 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.