Optimizing a project plan is very often a tedious, time-consuming and stressful job, because the PMO or the PM has to take account, at the same time, of customers, employees and company requirements. But, in fact, these requirements are antagonists: customers require fast delivery, employees fair treatment and the company insists that budgets be respected. Needless say, such equilibrium is very difficult to obtain, but also to maintain once the projects have started. Indeed, the tasks are very often more difficult than foreseen, and unplanned events, like sickness, occur? Thus, re-planning is just too hard to be handled regularly. That's why so many plans are just made for marketing purposes and not for real and effective management.
Having comprehensively analyzed these planning processes over the last 8 years, ISC proposes, in PlanningForce, a new methodology which will allow PMOs and PMs to increase dramatically the efficiency of their project plan. This new methodology is based on several statements and planning techniques:

Projects and tasks should preferably be described through the notion of required roles instead of required resources;

Projects should not be scheduled ?a priori?, but have date constraints, goals and priorities

Risk factors and uncertainties should be identified and applied to both tasks and resources

Different solutions for a same plan should be easily produced to reflect different scenarios

The history of a plan should be kept and analyzed to learn from the past

And plans should be automatically produced thanks to advanced algorithms and search techniques.

Based on these, PlanningForce delivers planning and scheduling solutions that make efficient use of the resources, prevent any over-allocation, and propose realistic task durations. Furthermore, PlanningForce's scheduling engine produces those solutions so fast that PMOs and PMs can test and compare dozens of different scenarios and be sure to find the optimal one. And, when unforeseen events occur in the course of the project plan, they can easily re-plan and give new realistic and reliable instructions. By doing so, PMOs and PMs gain in credibility and authority, while releasing at the same time some of the pressure that weighs on their shoulders.