TenForce – Pragmatic Project Management

One might suspect it has too many features. I just made a quick estimate on how many columns you can select for your Gantt chart: there are a staggering 441 columns to choose from!? That is not simplicity.

However, I don’t think that’s the real reason.

The thing can plan

If you cut down the tool to what it’s supposed to do, it does that remarkably well. It can plan, it knows about critical path, start-to-finish dependencies, resource leveling and so on.

To somebody with a hammer, everything looks like a nail

The only tool we often use is MS Project. No wonder that we add detail if this is the only formal way we have to manage the detailed tasks. Its remarkable resemblance to Excel does not help in resisting that temptation.

Management by Nike

Once you put all that detail in your plan, you need to maintain it. No way can you give all your team members access to your plan (often that’s even not an option because team members typically don’t have the license anyway). So the only person that can do the update is you.

You can recognize these project managers because they have sleepy eyes. This is because of the countless nights they spend on trying to keep this mountain of data up to date. Sometimes this type of project management is called ‘Nike management’, or ‘management by running around’. You typically need to make the tour of your team to know where they are with their detailed tasks.

Get the best of both worlds

The TenForce product solves this dilemma in an elegant way. We use the MS Project where it is good at: planning. If you manage to keep your plan on a high level, we import it in the tool. The detailed task distribution and follow-up is done through TenForce. Everyone updates his detailed actions in his/her to-do box during the day to day work. The consolidated result is fed back to the plan so that the % complete is updated automatically.

Once you get the hang of this, I’m sure that you too can become a happy MS Project user