Hello,

Following the telcon with Katrin, I have a few remarks/suggestions:

1. The Planner tool is a very promising tool to work with people who are not real project managers. I'm quite enthousiastic about it.
In my case:

• I'm the project manager and need to do a full planning with MPP; projectspace will not be powerful enough (for now, in its stage of development).
• there will be approx 5 others involved in review/updating the overall plan.
• there will be approx another 5 others who will have to manage a derived subproject.
• there will be approx 150 people involved (experts, managers of various levels) from 6 states (civil and military authorities), to whom we will have to communicate the plan and who will give input/feedback/guidelines.
I see good opportunities to use projectspace, however there are 2 shortcomings.

2. To work with projectplace efficiently, I see the need for 2 features:

A. I would have to be able to import a mpp plan, and then continue working on it with the Planner Tool. So, as a minimum, the Planner should be able to create tasks from the workplan tasks in projectplace; initially, it could just replace the whole plan or create a new one in the Planner.
Without such feature, I would have to manually create a plan in the Planner that matches the workplan in projectspace. And then, keep the tasks in projectspace and Planner consistent manually.

B. if not with dependencies, the Planner should have a feature to ease the moving/changing of tasks.
A frequent issue is that tasks are delayed/prolonged and thus all subsequent tasks have to be moved.
So, as minimum, it would help to be able to select ('elastic band') a group of tasks and move all of them in one action.

Obviously, on the long term, the Planner and projectspace should become real integrated tools, that can keep the workplan and all tasks consistent.

For a decision, it is important for me to know whether my suggestions can be considered and if so, when the features could be available.
( ... Standard issue of a project manager ... Always in a rush to meet deadlines :-) ... )

Feel free to call me; best on my mobile (number below),


EUROCONTROL Theo HENDRIKS
Capacity Programmes Manager
MUAC/OPS / ANP
Tel: +31 43 366 1508
Fax: +31 43 366 1501
Mobile: +31 6 50203327
E-mail: theo.hendriks@eurocontrol.int

EUROCONTROL
Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre
Horsterweg 11
6199 AC Maastricht-Airport
THE NETHERLANDS
http://www.eurocontrol.int

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