The course was actually in Wellington, which is a very pleasant city although I recommend that you undertake professional endurance training before attempting the steep hills carrying  a laptop and a full compliment of PRINCE2 manuals and course materials.

As always, the highlight for me  of the 5 day PRINCE2 training course was the opportunity to discuss the projects with my clients. As has become increasingly common, what started as a conversation about pure project management quickly veered into people and change management. This once again shows how PRINCE2 and Change Management Training are very complementary.

I recommend a stroll down Cuba St on a sunny  Saturday morning, but an enduring memory will be the sublime fish and chips in the clients’s staff canteen at Friday lunchtime. Access is through security gates so it is not possible for many people to experience this, but if it were publicly available it would probably win international awards.

Liquid Planner is one of  growing number of online services that allow collaboration on projects across the internet. Unlike  many of these services, this one comes with a strong planning tool and uses this as focus for its structure.  Basically this solves the problem above; managing a complex plan between several sites. It brings other features as well, but is it just too clever?

The core of Liquid Planner is it’s sophisticated planning tool.  I consider myself to be reasonably competent with planning tools but I am no expert. To me,  Liquid Planner seems to have all the features you could possible want in a collaborative planning tool but I have not made  an exhaustive list. It provides a rich feature set for sharing the creation and management of the project plan, groups of tasks  or individual tasks.

In addition, files can be uploaded as attachments and shared.

The interface is smooth and attractive and there is plenty of material to assist the new user, such as videos, downloadable guides, and a forum. So what could be wrong with this?

• First the price. There is a 30 day free trial version, then it moves to US$25 a month per user if you pre-pay 12 months in advance. Since it’s main point is sharing between users, this will mount up pretty fast.
• Then we have version control. My experience is that sharing between multiple sites requires strong version control of all project documentation. Liquid Planner did not seem to offer anything in this area. Even the main project plan did not seem to have any form of version control. I suspect that this could render the whole exercise  useless.
• Finally, like all sophisticated planning tools, I could see a reasonably steep learning curve ahead. But so many projects do not really need this complexity so why would people with those projects bother to tackle the curve? In my experience, rather than come up with complex lists of tasks,  the Project Manager’s time would be better spent developing a product based plan with fewer but well thought through products (that’s deliverables to those of yo who have yet to complete the PRINCE2 course).

However, I ave been watching Liquid Planner for a while and will continue to do so. It is still developing a quite a rate.

I might be a bit slow, but I have just connected the dots……this is an important, perhaps critical, skill for  Project Managers. How often do we lead wokshops  for planning, risk analysis, problem solving etc? If you count up all the person hours, workshops can be expensive and we need to make them as effective as possible.

Facilitation is about setting clear objectives, selecting the right processes and using the combined intelligence and experience of the group to reach those objectives. If done well, it is hugely powerful in solving problems, creating ownership and building the team. If done badly, it will lead to frustration, disunity and poor problem solving.

There is a lot out there written about good facilitation but how many Project Managers know that is exists?

This is the process we use at Project Laneways. We lso use it as the basis for our training in facilitation.

Read more about Prince 2 Training

You will have heard of and, possibly used, MSProject. This is Microsoft’s project planning tool. It allows you to enter a series of activities, describe who can do them, how long they will take, and whether they need to come in a certain order (dependencies). In other words you can use it to create a project plan.

However, there are a number of free to use project planning tools available on the Internet. Here are a few of them.

Before you choose a planning tool, consider these aspects:-

• Have you got the time to learn a new and complex piece of software?
• How complex will your project plan be?
• Will you need to work on the plan with other people?

The following tools use an Excel spreadsheet to produce the Gantt chart and the plan. This means that no extra software is required and you can share plans with others who have Excel.

XL-EasyGantt – fairly sophisticated

excel nexus - simpler and easy to use

PIPEtalk 2.0 Excel Gantt Schedule is perhaps the most complex of them all.

In our opinion, if the excel nexus spreadsheet is not good enough for your needs, then you should probably be thinking about a proper planning package like:-

OpenProj is a free open source project management planning package for your PC. Its still new, green, and a bit rough around the edges. Designed as a MSproject replacement, it is promising but, at this stage, only really suitable for open source enthusiasts who don’t mind wrestling a bit with their software. it will read files created by MSProject.

Ganttproject is another free open source alternative to MSproject. It has only a subset of the functionality of MSProject but that may be enough for most people. We have used this a few times for real and find it easy to use and quite effective. It will read files created by MSProject.

Remember, these are tools. A great pen does not make you a great writer. Great planning software does not make you a great planner. If you need advice or help with planning then please feel free to Contact Us

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