Promise Based Planning. Why project managers get no respect. There is not a child alive who dreams of being a project manager. Maybe a firefighter, a rock star or an astronaut, but not a PM. There is something inherently dull about the words “project” and “manager” – even the flames of a bright imagination would consider smothering itself to death in their presence. And it follows that in professional ranks, saying you are a project manager won’t get you much respect either. To many being a PM means you fit this unfortunate stereotype: you were not good enough in your field to be an engineer or a programmer, and through politics and self-inflation, you find ways to take credit for the hard work done by others. It stings, but that’s the stereotype (ask at your next happy hour).
The core problem is perspective. Our culture does not think of movie directors, executive chefs, astronauts, brain surgeons, or rock stars as project managers, despite the fact that much of what these cool, high profile occupations do is manage projects. The Long, Dismal History of Software Project Fail. Social Project Management at Enterprise 2.0. Planix Keeps Your 2.0 Project on Budget. We've got plenty of applications to help small teams collaborate on building software and other projects - Basecamp is the most popular example. But Planix, which is currently in private beta, wants to help with a slightly different problem: enabling small teams to estimate the resources, scheduling and cost of their software development projects. Anyone who's developed software knows that it regularly goes over-budget and behind schedule - feature creep, as more and more new features are added - also causes delays.
Planix works by providing a high level representation of your project’s requirements, actors, technical factors and environment (skill level of team, difficulty of project), then uses algorithms to determine the most likely case, the best case and the worst case outcomes. In my case, for example, my hypothetical Ruby on Rails project is estimated to take 673 hours with 4 staff members. The best case is 505 hours and the worst is 1010.