Planners Recognition & appreciation

Depends on the region (contry) or company where you have been working, for example in my country & domain (constructions) planning is nothing more than a bunch of lines drawn in a spredsheet or if you are lucky you will get a print from a planning software which is no loaded with any resources or materials and cannot be justified by the contractor. I belive this trend will last another 40 or so years. 

Bogdan,

I hope that you are too pessimistic.

Those companies that implemented real planning just do not understand how they lived before. I think that competition will make project managers realize advantages of proper planning and it is happening.

Well at home it is different, planning is so important no Project Manager manage his job without planning. As a matter of fact it is considered so important it is his main responsibility to plan his own jobs with assistance of top management.

Usually scheduling is also done by the PM as a sub task of his planning responsibility. On big jobs the PM as always is still responsible for planning, and scheduling is delegated to a scheduler always under the strict PM supervision.

It is not uncommon for planning and scheduling on small jobs be done with Excel, drawing bars. No matter what tools the PM uses, planning is his main responsibility. If he delegates it wrong in no time he will lose his job, he is supposed to be a good planner not a musician.

This does not means there is not frustration with CPM schedules. The main problem is that very frequently the Contractor, the one supposed to have control of the means and methods under fixed price contracts is required to use software different than his own. In such case he finds he is to use software he does not know, software he does not like, software that is not integrated with his accounting and financial systems, it can be very frustrating. When this happens we usually end up hiring cheap scheduling to meet the contractual requirement and run parallel schedules we use to manage our jobs using our own systems.

I wonder what would happen if for a hundred million dollars job the client requires the contractor to switch to Peachtree Accounting DOS version and he is using SAP and other powerful tools. Kind of similar when you use Spider Project and are forced to use MSP, P6 or any other less powerful software jokes. Well some come with thousands of bugs for free, bugs that are never fixed. Believe me it is frustrating having to use such software jokes. In our case we manage resources and we are always concerned about idle resources, we use variable quantity resource leveling wheather the software can handle it or not, for Spider it is as easy as 1-2-3 while with no other software I know you can even dream of it even when you still got to do it or loose your shirt.  

Maybe I exaggerated when I said 40 years but I don't think it will be any time soon.