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Posted 6 February 2019 by
Geert Vanhove
Co-Founder & EVP, Binocs

Finally a full demand picture

Business context 

We work with Planisware as a Project Portfolio Management platform. Although quite complex, our PMO and project managers succeed in keeping an overview of the most important projects. The delivery teams have no access to Planisware.

It helps for the prioritization and decision making, except when resources are concerned. Planisware can express the resource demand, but as we only cover part of the projects and we do not enter non-project work, this is not complete. For some teams, the work in Planisware only covers 30% of their activity.

Improvement potential 

We work in a multi-project and multi-team organization. Our Planisware PPM platform is helpful for the project managers and PMO, but the teams do not succeed in completing the full picture without escaping to Excel sheets. All teams approach this in a different way, with their own Excel.

For most of the teams, skills, competencies and qualifications are critical for their planning. They do not succeed in planning resource assignments correctly in order to get a view of the required need for competences. Therefore they cannot anticipate resources capacity issues.

 

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How Binocs helped 

About 60% of the work demand for the delivery teams comes from projects that are defined in Planisware.

We use the interface between Binocs and Planisware to synchronize the Planisware PPM projects with Binocs.

Binocs comes with an Operating Model based demand generator. Based on the Work Package characteristics and the milestones, Binocs automatically generates work sequences for each team. The work demand is based on standardized work items that are pre-defined in Binocs.

This way, all teams have an on-source-of-the truth view on all projected demand.

In order to complete the demand picture, each team adds their own demand channels for other work than the Planisware projects. These are internal projects, maintenance, training, qualifications and the like.

This way, each team has a complete picture of their capacity requirements. 

As Binocs uses a constraint-based planning algorithm, the teams have now immediate insights in the capacity issues they will really face. They take that information to the capacity meetings to find collaborative solutions for the projected capacity problems.

A planning algorithm that considers competences is the only way to promise delivery.