These FAQs will be added to over time as questions are raised for which the answers may be useful to a wider audience.
Why should I use Proper Plan instead of MS Project or some other established solution?
Proper Plan has been specifically designed from decades of project management experience, to help project managers be more effective in controlling and managing their plan and project, and delight their stakeholders with automated, insightful, meaningful project snapshot dashboard and historical tracking charts and data, that demonstrates the project is in safe hands. MS Project and other products out there do some things that Proper Plan doesn’t, but in my experience they do an awful lot PMs don’t need, and don’t do the things we really need well enough. I built Proper Plan to do the things I, team members and stakeholders always badly need, really well and with great efficiency. And to stop wrestling with my plan and start enjoying it.
Why is Proper Plan MS Excel based and not its own application?
Being MS Excel based means that you can easily share your plan with other team members and stakeholders in your project without having to, for example, copy paste or export somewhere else. It also means you can easily extend it should you wish to augment the substantial delivered reporting. So, more flexible and adaptable than a fully-fledged application and probably considerably cheaper. This is not like some excel spreadsheets, that have a restrictive one-or-two-machine license. It has been licensed in such a way that it CAN be shared within your project.
How do I invoke it and is there anything else I should know?
When you decide on which license package you want i.e. 1, 3 or 5 years, and place your order, you will be supplied a license key, a 20 character string unique to your instance of Proper Plan. You simply key it into a field in the workbook. This will enable the capabilities for the duration of your license. Your version will then work for the duration of the license period on any machine with MS Excel installed, subject to the usual compatibility disclaimers. This is so that it can be shared with others in your project team and with stakeholders, without them needing a license and without you having to paste information into a separate workbook.
What happens if and when my free trial or license expires?
There are formulas that temporarily return erroneous values throughout the tool once there is no valid license in place. But as soon as the license is renewed with a new password, the original values are restored.
Why is the license on a time limit?
Because Proper Plan is not restricted by machine, it is restricted by time. Nevertheless, you can buy a 5-year license at a substantial discount from the annual or 3-year options.
Can you run Agile and Waterfall projects with it?
Yes. There are up to four levels in the project plan hierarchy that are completely configurable. So you can use Sprint/Feature/Story/Task or Phase/Deliverable/Task/Subtask or Phase/Value Stream/Deliverable/Task or whatever you want.
Why is there nothing in Proper Plan to support budgeting?
Project resource costs, in my experience, are rarely linked directly to the ever-shifting workload specified in a plan. You can of course build your own worksheet inside or outside Proper Plan and create the logic you need to whilst sharing the actual list of resources, for example.
Why are formulas hidden and protected? What if I want to tweak them?
Many of the hidden formulas are long and complex and contribute to multiple related components or functions of Proper Plan. They are protected to preserve the integrity of your plan and the various other functions and reporting. They are hidden for the same reason other commercial applications don’t share their code with you, because they are intellectual property.
Instructions:
Ever struggled to justify the duration you’re proposing for complex landscape end-to-end testing cycles, including user acceptance testing? Being asked for objective justification? I’ve encountered it more than once and so I built a modelling tool with an algorithm that combines all the factors. Download and have a play if you think it might be useful.
