What software do you use to plan stuff? Microsoft project?
How do you go about your day to day planning & communicating your plan with others?

I'm fairly new to planning on this scale but I'm in charge of planning labour and vehicles at the moment, with a little production planning too.
Currently using excel to create the plans but struggling to create something that ticks all the boxes while remaining flexible. I'm trying to avoid duplicating work and ideally would like one central master document to work from.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Microsoft Project is one of the best tools you can use. A lot of people hate it but if it is set up correctly then it is great and low maintenance to keep running.

I have used many different ways of communicating the plan including:

Filtered views of the plan based on task, commodity, critical path, etc etc (can take a bit of explanation)

Summaries in word or powerpoint of key dates etc. (high maintenance to keep updating).

I have in the past created an excel spreadsheet where you can take a dump out of project, pop it into excel and with the use of some macros etc show a colour coded view of the project tasks, start and finish dates and whether you are on track or behind schedule. Its a good visual to use.

Each to their own at the end of the day.

This is free http://live.gnome.org/Planner/

But Project is better

After a good few years as a Project Manager the best all-round package I found was indeed Microsoft Project. If you dig into Project you will find a few "nice" things to help with running a project.
On communication, the best I found was was often but short (in my case via conference call as most were international teams.) I tried to get all participants to give me yes/no answers and keep "discussion" to an absolute minimum.
Good luck.
Phil

Thanks guys, in terms of communicating the plan, basically I have to let our labour know what they are doing on a weekly basis, at the moment this is using a basic Excel chart – with names and days as the column and row headers – with a month on a notice board for them to view. In project can you create weekly lists that you can issue to each individual showing their work and movements?

I shall have to buy myself a project how to book, but say for example i had Fri 23rd as a date, can I allocate what event is being setup, Labour and vehicles to that date and display it clearly other than in Gantt Chart format?

I have a demo version of project but its just knowing how i want to implement my planning!

Apologies if i sound like a novice!!

Text Fields are your friend.

You need to ensure you create a fully resourced plan, so have the names in the plan against each line item. This will also enable you to view resource loading nice and easily and identify any over or under loading.

Using text fields you can essentially create custom filter lists which you can use to filter on say components / jobs / resource whatever you like really, so you can create individual views as you want to see them.

Project allows you to create all sorts of manual dumps of information too so instead of sharing the project file you can create pdf views for each named resource so that they can quickly see tasks and assignments and dates and durations.

Satan's thread!

My two pence –

MSP probably sounds about right for what you need it for.

I find it is a terrible tool for communication, not bad for a pm to plan and to run various scenarios and see impacts if you have all your dependancies right but that's it.

Personally I haven't bothered with a formal project tool for a year or so of running pretty large projects (£1m) and I don't feel the projects have suffered

Best feedback I had recently to do with planning was when me & my team were parachuted into a project which need a webapp built in 3 weeks, as a team we created a project plan/timeline on the whiteboard and then as every day went by we crossed it off in the daily standups. Worked really well to focus everyone on what they needed to do.

Depending on how professional your org / people are I find the main challenge isn't creating a plan, but getting people to buy into it. If they don't buy into it doesn't matter what dates you put down, they won't do it. Creating the plan in conjunction with the guys who will do the work (or even asking them to do it for you) seems to be the best way of achieving a realistic and doable plan imo

So for me – whiteboard, marker pens, lots of postit notes. Do some googling on Agile project management, kanban charts for some 'different' ideas to using MSP