Planner

accounting + business tools + collaboration

Project & Business PLANNER

As a Financial Director in a long term project based organization, I like many others before me and since, had to juggle with limited resources and unlimited demand for them. Project managers grew into the role based on their technical qualifications rather than any obvious ability or training in project management. And project management software tools, in spite of expensive training courses (and software) were relegated to the dusty tops of filing cabinets at worst, or at best were simply used to draw Gantt charts to make a report look more professional.

From the ‘Front Office’ perspective, ie the project manager’s view, the PLANNER works the way most ‘non specialists’ instinctively work. It is not a ‘project management’ tool in the sense that others claim that title. For example it does not include dependencies and critical path analysis, it does not factor in risk of tasks or calculate lead and lag. What it does is give the project manager the ability to run a project to whatever level of detail the company chooses, through projects, phases and tasks, and to say what resources will be needed for each task and when (money & time).

Projects can be in various stages of completion, for example, from ‘active’ at one end of the scale, to ‘provisional’ or ‘cancelled’ at the other end. Project objectives are assigned and up to five sub objectives. All tasks are expected to contribute towards at lease one sub objective and are assigned to key personnel (not necessarily booked to the task) who have overall responsibility for a collection of tasks.

The Back Office part of the system allows the administrator (eg the Finance Director) to apply rules to the resources such as cash flow timing, taxes, overall budgets, staff availability etc. The result is that the PLANNER not only provides the project manager with what they need, it also consolidates into the most accurate and responsive cash flow forecast and business plan you are ever likely to get for nothing!