I am new in this site. I never thought a site like this actually exist. and it feels good.. because most of the time projects here in the Philippines only have one planner in a project. And i have no one to talk on matters in planning and scheduling. Specially if your counter part in the contractor side don't know how to speak English(pure chinese who needs interpreter).   Anyway, I am a Planner by accident, because our planner suddenly took another job. And I filled the shoes. Nevertheless, I had always been in Project Management, Project Coordination and Control. Also taking up Master's degree in Management. Eventhough Primavera is just a tool, its was hard to start . Started from scratch a year ago (with no formal training), and as of now i feel im doing progress. But I have no one to compare with. That's why I hope i can learn much from here.  

What is the value of the project planner?

 

Project planners most of the time, are just seen to be technical staff in the office, producing reports, were data's normally came from the site, filled up by the site/resident engineers.

Project Planners can actually say why the project is delayed. Specially when all activities have their roles and resources. The sad thing is most of the time, they just ignore what you say, because they think they know better.

Well that what happens when they do not know the capability of the software the user.

It it important, they should know why a planner is needed, and they should listen when you say we are Going to be DELAYED...

 

 

Leslie:

I see your from Louisiana, well the Dollar amount in our area right now is inflated by katrina’s winds. I hired a guy about 3 mounths ago on a project in Baton Rouge. I had to pay him $59.00 hr and $90 a day in per dium. botom line he did’nt cut it, and there was more clean up on his schedule than you can imagine.

Mel,

If you don’t mind my saying so, you may have a slightly unrealistic view of schedulers and their value. This is because you learned your stuff in the industry application (nuke outages) that is BY FAR the most sophisticated in the U.S. in terms of scheduling. Additionally, the cost of time on nuke outages is very large, clearcut and quantified: $X million for each day offline, depending on size and grid location.

I so much wish that other industries (especially my customers!) had planners even 10% as competent and sophisticated as those in your industry. Unfortunately, most schedulers in other applications (espec. IS, Pharma, aerospace/defense) provide far less value than energy-industry schedulers, even on projects with budgets in the tens of millions.

I would love to inject just a little of your industry’s planning and scheduling sophistication into PMI!

Mel

I think we also want to look at the other side of the fences, not how much a planner earn, instead how much value can a planner bring into the organisation.

What is your view...

Alex

I have found in practice that a LOT of companies look for their scheduler/planner to be able to have lots of skill sets. Ranging from office management to project management. I realize that a lot of you that work on considerably larger jobs are unable to field multiple positions on your projects due to stringent time contraints or quite frankly the contractor ONLY wants you to be thinking about scheduling.

When I first started in this field I was an outage scheduler in the field and only making $25.00 hr. To me back then that was damn good money *simply because I didnt know any better*, now I wont even get out of bed for less than $65.00 hr. It really all depends on the company and what value THEY put on their schedulers. Sadly it isnt until they damn near fail miserably before they put the effort into finding skilled schedulers and paying them what the job is worth.

Leslie,

To address your query seriously, it’s unfortunately pretty impossible to tell the value of anything in project management -- because traditional project management makes no attempt to plan, measure, or track value! Even a concept such as earned value has nothing to do with value -- it’s all about cost, as the "C" in the terms BCWS, BCWP and ACWP demonstrates.

Please understand -- I’m not saying that projects aren’t about value; they clearly are! It’s just that traditional techniques and metrics ignore that fact.

In addition, any question about value, in any field, is always relative. I don’t know if you’re a baseball fan, but the St. Louis Cardinals used to have a great shortstop who was named Ozzie Smith. Baseball announcers loved to talk about how Ozzie’s fielding saved his team 50 - 100 runs a year. Which raised the question: 50 - 100 runs versus what? Versus not having any shortstop at all, merely a hole in the infield? Versus having me play shortstop? Versus the worst shortstop in the league? Versus the second best shortstop in the league? Unless we know to what Ozzie was being compared, we can have no idea of how many runs he was saving.

How to tell how much is a planner worth? Here’s what I tell my seminar attendees and graduate students to do:

1a. Put together a plan for the way that someone without planning and optimization skills would do the project.

1b. Take a snapshot of the estimated duration and EAC.

1c. Estimate/determine what the value-minus-cost of the project would be with that duration and EAC.

2a. Use your planning skills to optimize the project for schedule and cost.

2b. Estimate/determine what the value-minus-cost of the project would be with the optimized duration and EAC.

2c. Subtract the output of 1c from the output of 2b to get an approximate "starting value-added" for the planner.

Now, as the project proceeds, every time there is a variance during implementation:

3a. Estimate/determine what the value-minus-cost of the project would be without ameliorating that variance.

3b. Use your planning skills to optimize/ameliorate the impact of the variance.

3c. Estimate/determine the value-minus-cost following amelioration.

3d. Subtract the output of 3a from the output of 3c.

3e. Add the output of 3d to the output of 2b. This gives a cumulative value-added of the planner.

Repeat until the end of the project to get an estimated AVAP (Actual Value-Added of the Planner).

Actually, a good and experienced planner can add much more value than would be shown by this method. But at least this is a start. If someone argues that you weren’t worth "that" much, ask THEM how much they think the results of decisions were worth!

To find out more about the TPC approach (which focuses on managing projects as investments, for greatest value), read the series of articles on TPC at:

http://www.projectsatwork.com/departments/methods-means/

If you’re especially interested in the baseball and project management metaphor, scroll to the bottom of the PMI Metrics SIG web page below and click on the Webinar "Moneyproject: Baseball, Metrics, and Project Management" at:

http://www.metsig.org/Webinars/index.cfm?NavID=15&SubNavID=0

Registration is required for both the Projects@Work articles and the PMI Webinar. It’s free for the articles, but I believe the Webinar is $10. I also believe the Webinar offers PDUs to PMI members.

the prettier is better, but there must be another more prettier but the value added is the same

Alex,

Spot on! Although the ugly one can make the office pot plants wilt.

Chris Oggham