TMx and Information-Based Planning

A project-managers needs to create a plan for each of the various projects that senior management assigns to the project-manager.  Some project-managers know how to create good plans.  These project-managers are the people who have a great deal of experience in their particular industries.  The reason that they can create good plans is that they’ve managed very similar projects for many years.  These project-managers already have the good plans in their heads, as a result of their many years of experience, and they just write their good plans down on paper, or they type their good plans into something like Microsoft Project.

However, the number of project-managers that have this sort of experience is relatively small.  Most of the people who are in a project-management role don’t have very many years of experience; they don’t have the good plans in their heads, for their respective industries; and they can’t simply copy good plans from their heads to MS-Project, like the few very experienced people can do. 

The number of project-managers in this latter group is much, much larger than the number of very experienced project-managers.  Consequently, most companies can end up working with project-plans that are not good, because the people who create the plans don’t have a PROCESS for creating plans.  The consequences can be dire, for these companies.  Bad plans cause delays and, ultimately, diminished cash-flow.

Early in 1997, Tony Rizzo, our expert in information-based planning, became involved with the first critical-chain, single-project effort in Bell Labs.  This was his first exposure to the use of the critical-chain process in a real project, and he discovered on day‑1 that he had a serious problem.  He didn’t know how to create a project-plan.  Worse!  No one else involved with the project knew how to create a project-plan either. 

Fortunately, Tony winged it, and he got lucky.  In an effort to pull information out of the heads of the developers, he finally got around to asking a key question:  “What do you need  in order to do what you do?”  Tony didn’t know at the time that this was a key question, but he realized later that the answer to this question was invaluable to creating good project-plans.  That’s when he was able to define a rigorous PROCESS for creating good project-plans systematically.  This rigorous process is called Information-Based Project-Planning.

TMx is a software package designed to support Information-Based Project-Planning.  It greatly simplifies the project-planning process, which normally is done with dozens of large sheets of white paper that are hung on the walls of a Project-Office.  The large sheets inevitably become covered with hundreds of little post-it notes that describe the project's tasks, the resources, the handoffs, and countless other items of project-related information.

With TMx, a project-manager builds a plan by starting with the last person/resource that touches the project before the project is handed off to the customer. TMx asks the questions:

• What do you do?

• What do you need?

• Where do you get it?

That's it, except for a few details that address things like clarity, sufficiency, templates, and the automated transfer of plans to MS-Project. 

Yes, at completion you have a project-plan that has clarity, that has a superior degree of sufficiency, that serves as a source of templates, that TMx can transfer to MS-Project automatically, that cc-Pulse can convert to a critical-chain plan automatically, and that cc-MPulse can integrate properly into the multi-project model of your entire business. 

With information-based project-planning, you can create extremely good plans consistently.  You just have to follow the process.  With TMx, you can create extremely good plans much faster, with much less effort, locally or remotely, and the results of your good work remain available as graphical templates that you can copy, share, or edit readily for use with future projects.

Installing TMx

top