I have a question, not related to any planning technique.
I have made several attempts to introduce the position of a planner in our office. I even posted a job advertisement here. The situation is that we probably would not have work enough to occupy planner for 100%, therefore the idea was to combine planning with some other activities (e.g. tracking of documentation status or doing small projects), whilst at the same time maintaining overall schedule, consisting of several projects.
Main responsibilities were to do resource leveling, what if analysis, resource forecast, avoiding conflicts with vacations and holidays, collecting and analyzing actual performance information etc.
In reality I never found somebody, who was doing planning as his job in the past. We did use several times project managers to do this job. However somehow it never worked out the way I envisaged. And the skills were not a problem. They either could use MS Project or I could teach them how.
The problem was more psychological. It just seem to require certain personality type to maintain the schedule again and again, collect tasks statuses, reschedule if management asks to analyze what happens if we for instance lose one engineer, reschedule it again to analyze what happens if new project gets added to the program etc. I could never find anybody who could do it for a long period of time day after day. Let us agree, most of Project Managers would consider this job boring.
At the same time it requires somebody with quite a good analytical skills and good level of intelligence to work out the planning software, earned value analysis etc. These 2 requirements seem to be in contradiction with each other.
So, if next time I will be looking for a planner, I will 1st most probably be looking for his psychological characteristics, not his knowledge of MS Project or planning
Questions:
How to find a good planner and what to pay attention to?
Did I make any wrong assumptions in my post above about the work of a planner?