Like quite a few of you out there, I’ve been doing this planning ’thing’ for a great numbers of years. Those who started off with I&J and the Primvera DOS versions will know what I’m talking about and when.
I know that a tremendous number of people have done these Primavera courses and walked out at the end of the day and call themselves planning engineers and don’t get me wrong, I take my hat off to them all, bless ’em!
However, being self employed and doing consulting, I’m very frequently taken on to sort out programme problems that a compnay’s project is having and usually find that the ’planner’ has not the experience to construct a realistic programme or it doesn’t match the project requirements, etc, etc, This is predominent when insufficient money has been allocted in the project budget for these services.
Over the last say, 5 to 10 years, I’ve come across a clear separation between planning engineers and schedulers. I’ve defined this as, and this is very basic,
A planning engineer will look ahead from today’s date and make the necessary people aware of potential problems and he will also work back from the end date to also make the people aware of needs to be done in order to complete the project on time.
A Scheduler, I’ve found, will manipulate a programme’s logic realtively any-old-how to show the dates as given to him/her by the project team, usually to iclude the results for the up and coming weekly/monthlyt report(s). There is very little or no long term lookahead analysis done to argument with the given dates.
A ’Keyboard Jockey’ needs no further explanation, does it?
The point I’m trying to make here, is that we ’senior’ or ’old lags’ need to take the young and inexperienced planning engineers under our wings to bring them on in the ’real world’ of planning. Yes,I know that we say ’we don’t time for this’ but remember, when we shuffle off into the sunset, these younger people have to take over where we left off.
Another point I want to make is, that we all must remember that Primavera, MSProject and all these other softwares are only a tool, they do not and cannot teach people to become planning engineers, only years of experience and cunning can do this.
I would welcome your views and opinions.
Cheers and don’t forget "Plan the Work, Now Work the Plan"
I know that a tremendous number of people have done these Primavera courses and walked out at the end of the day and call themselves planning engineers and don’t get me wrong, I take my hat off to them all, bless ’em!
However, being self employed and doing consulting, I’m very frequently taken on to sort out programme problems that a compnay’s project is having and usually find that the ’planner’ has not the experience to construct a realistic programme or it doesn’t match the project requirements, etc, etc, This is predominent when insufficient money has been allocted in the project budget for these services.
Over the last say, 5 to 10 years, I’ve come across a clear separation between planning engineers and schedulers. I’ve defined this as, and this is very basic,
A planning engineer will look ahead from today’s date and make the necessary people aware of potential problems and he will also work back from the end date to also make the people aware of needs to be done in order to complete the project on time.
A Scheduler, I’ve found, will manipulate a programme’s logic realtively any-old-how to show the dates as given to him/her by the project team, usually to iclude the results for the up and coming weekly/monthlyt report(s). There is very little or no long term lookahead analysis done to argument with the given dates.
A ’Keyboard Jockey’ needs no further explanation, does it?
The point I’m trying to make here, is that we ’senior’ or ’old lags’ need to take the young and inexperienced planning engineers under our wings to bring them on in the ’real world’ of planning. Yes,I know that we say ’we don’t time for this’ but remember, when we shuffle off into the sunset, these younger people have to take over where we left off.
Another point I want to make is, that we all must remember that Primavera, MSProject and all these other softwares are only a tool, they do not and cannot teach people to become planning engineers, only years of experience and cunning can do this.
I would welcome your views and opinions.
Cheers and don’t forget "Plan the Work, Now Work the Plan"