WhatIF? - Evaluating Alternatives

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Project Observatory maintains a compilation of commitments and reservation. This provides an excellent view of the future. But when the future needs to be different, you need to be able to quickly explore alternatives. That's the purpose of the "WhatIf?" facility that is now an integral part of Project Observatory.

WhatIF?... Exploring alternatives without complications
The WhatIF? tool starts by decomposing your workload into its constituent parts. Then it allows you to quickly adjust the those parts to create an alternative future.

You can manipulate your commitments as if they were putty.

Shift the start (or resumption) of a project or reservation to an earlier or later date

Stretch or Squeeze the planned enddate.

Inflate or Deflate the planned work.

Flatten or reshape the work profile.

Reconcile overdue work by shifting or reallocating it.

Remove existing commitments or reservations.

Add new commitments to the mix.

Override limited authorizations.

Select projects based upon the scenarios.

Add and remove staffing at specific times.

WhatIf? lets you do all of the above, in any combination, in seconds!


Three quick steps to an alternate future

Open any member, organization, project, program, or capability report and click "WhatIf?"

Select the commitments you want to change, and the changes you want to make to each. Click "Evaluate".

The Outcome page will show you graphs of the new work plan and provide details of the specific changes. You can also get an instant Gantt chart. If you like this outcome, you can save it.

What sets WhatIF? apart from traditional project planning?



While project planning tools are usually very good at letting you change the low level details of a project, they are often hopelessly clumsy when you want to change the "big picture". For example: To "stretch" a plan in Microsoft project you need to change the duration of every task and the workrate of every assignment. This will require a multitude of separate manual changes and considerable expertise. Now imagine needing to change a half dozen such projects, each in a unique way, just to compute a one new workplan for consideration. It is simply too much work to actually get done. By contrast, using WhatIF to do the same thing takes a only a few mouseclicks to specify and a few seconds to compute. Hence, you can evaluate more alternatives in much less time.

WhatIF provides the relative simplicity of a spreadsheet within the structure of a project environment.

It works with real, up to date project information.

You can save any number of your proposed outcomes for others to review.

Since the underlying information in never modified, any number of people can participate.

Since WhatIf? works at such a high level, you can use it during a meeting or online conference to explore ideas.

When you do reach a consensus for change, the saved outcomes provide specific guidance for project leaders to revise their plans.

Meanwhile, resource managers can reshape reservations and contour authorizations to put the framework of the solution into effect immediately.

A Typical WhatIF? Session

	The dashboard indicates that Tom Applegate is overcommitted, and has overdue work
	We open the Report document. Notice the "WhatIf?" action button at the top.
	Clicking that button opens WhatIF? Options page. There are lots of possible adjustments here, but first, lets just press Evaluate and see the starting situation.
	The Outcome shows what we already know. There is unfinished work in the past, and overcommitments in the present.
	We click back to the options page. We change the "Overdue Work" option from "Leave in past" to "Shift work start to next week" and Evaluate. Now we can see how bad the problem really is!
	We change the display selector to show a pie chart for the current period. Here its obvious that one of our projects "Field Trials" is a major source of the problem.
	We click back to the options page and select "Field Trials for QP21" for adjustment. We select a SHIFT of 4 weeks and a STRETCH of 8 weeks.
	Much better! In fact, this is probably all the change that is really needed. But, we decide reduce the load a bit more.
	On the Options page we decide to SHIFT "System 14 Redesign" by 2 weeks. Note that the selectors at the left of the table will contain a list of all of the commitments and reservations for the selected subject. They will also contain items labeled "All Other Commitments" and "All Other Reservations". Using these, it is possible to make extensive changes very simply.
	Now Tom's workload looks pretty reasonable. Keep in mind that there were many ways to create a more acceptable work load. Your understanding of the people and the politics is key to making choices that are not only mathematically reasonable, but which can be accepted by the stakeholders. In this example, we choose to propose a delay on the Field Trials project. But we could have achieved a similar final result by adjusting other combination of projects.
	To see where we have changed the workplan, we can show the "Work vs. Reference" graph. The green areas show where we have reduced the workload. The red areas show where we have increased it.
	We decide to save the proposed changes. The saved outcome library document contains all of our changes and lets anyone display the Graphs, Gantt Chart or proposed commitment tables.

Advanced Features

You can restrict the evaluation to a specific commitment or collection of commitments, ignoring all others.

You can reallocate overdue work over a selection of time periods.

You can add up additional projects to the workload ranging from a person-day to 100 person-years in effort.

You can add or remove staffing to simulate hiring or reductions.

If your projects have been classified into scenarios, you can evaluate the workload for each scenario.

If you are using the Resource Authorization Workflow, you can evaluate the the impact of enabling or disabling the limitations.