MrGantt fixes the road

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I’d better not mention where exactly, but a large Council near here was building a big new road… it was going to cost £20m over 5 years. After the first year they had spent £4m so they assumed everything was OK (that’s what they told me!!) – but no, it might not be OK, because maybe they have done almost nothing for the £4m spent so far! Or maybe the first year was only meant to cost 2m and the second year 6m, so although they’ve done exactly the right amount so far, it’s cost 4m instead of 2m.

So we need to know the spend profile for the whole project, and also we need to know how much progress has been made relative to the plan.

If only this could be done automatically……

And better than that, we need an optimistic and a pessimistic forecast, so we can get the likely range.

For example, in the above example, if year 1 was supposed to cost £2m and it cost 4 then either it was a one-off and we are heading for £22m instead of £20m overall, or we are heading for double the spend overall, ie £40m. We need to know which!

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This stuff is IMPORTANT because projects can bite you, easily and in a big way – projects are MUCH MORE DANGEROUS than processes, because processes are easy: you know how many people you’ve got, it’s visually obvious, and the accountants are always checking it every month, But projects are an unknown world of mystery, cutting across departments and making invisible progress across huge lumpy variable spend rates.

Imagine if you get to the end of the 5 years, you’ve spent exactly your £20m, and then the PM tells you the job isn’t quite finished (maybe something hard to see, like software or underground reinforcement or something in Africa) and they say you need another £3 million to finish the job. You’ll have to pay up! And everyone will say “Where did they £3 million suddenly go? And how could you not know??” But it didn’t suddenly go, it was slipping away all through the 5 years, without you knowing. 10% late and 10% overspending looks like everything is OK.

But Mr Gantt will know, and he’ll be able to tell you that you have problem nice and early so you have plenty of time to fix it.

This is what this unique and brilliant software will show you:

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The blue line is your plan – taken automatically from the Gantt chart. It ends at the horizontal date when you are due to finish, and at the vertical cost of what you plan to spend. …if everything goes to plan!

But of course already you have deviated from the blue line – the green line is what you have done so far.

But is the green line under the blue one (ie cheaper) or is it to the right of the blue one (ie late) ??

The answer can be seen by the green ranges. If you look at the horizontal axis first, the time, you can see that we are late – the best and worst forecasts are both well to the right of the planned finish date (though, unusually and fortunately well to the left of the required finish date, the intended deadline shown in red, so we are still OK!). The range is between “if we get back onto plan” and “if we continue to go as late on the rest of the project as we have so far”

Then the vertical range, the estimate of how much we will have spent by the end, also has a range – between 18 and 27, again depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. The project manager should have a view on this – are the problems going to continue or not? But this automatically-generated range is a great starting point for the discussions.

In some projects the time is more important, in others the money is more important – but Mr Gantt gives you both – you can see the Box of Possible Finishes right there at all times.

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Imagine as a boss being to click on any project and see this! It’s really all you want to know – you can then drill into the detail for the ones where you have a concern.

Want to know more? email me, or go to http://mrgantt.com and have a look…..

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