vPlanner allows the users to commit to work in the Make Ready Plan, thereby creating a workplan. To create a workplan in vPlanner, click on the "Create New Workplan" option under the Commit Menu.
Navigating to create a new workplan
Team Selection Pull Down
This option let's the user narrow down the selection to a particular team and not worry about all the teams involved with the entire project. One can just commit to work that his or her team is responsible for without having to worry about the other team's work. Therefore, selecting a particular team here will list the activities that the selected team is responsible for in the current view of the Make Ready Plan. If a team's name does not appear, it means that the team has an Active Workplan. You must close the previous work plan (from the Status menu) before starting a new workplan for the same team.
This option is set to 5 days from today by default i.e., 5 days from the day on which the user is creating the workplan. It is highly recommended that the workplan due dates are at most 5 days from the workplan creation date. For other durations, adjust the due date. vPlanner uses this date to evaluate the required number of activities on the workplan and sets this date as the target completion date. This helps micro planning by committing to work within the next due date.
This is the total number of activities on the workplan including Pending and Ongoing activities. For example, for the "Finish" team there is 1 committed (will do) activity within the workplan due date so far.
These are the activities that can be done or can be started before the due date from the required activities. These are Critical Activities that can be done within the due date. For example, for the "Finish" team there are 11 activities that can be done or started within the workplan due date.
These are the activities that can be done or can be started before the plan due date but are not required to be started before the due date. These are not Critical Activities. They could include ASAP activities from the required activities or activities not assigned to a downstream milestone. For example, for the "Finish" team there are 0 backlog activities within the workplan due date.
This will display the total number of required activities based on downstream milestones that must be started or completed before the plan due date to keep the project on track. These are the total number of Critical Activities off which a few are trimmed out of the workplan because they fall outside the due date. For example, for the "Finish" team there are 23 required activities within the workplan due date, but only 11 of them can be done. This shields the teams from work that cannot be done within the commitment due dates.
This will display all the activities of the selected team that start after the selected due date. For example, for the "Finish" team there are 0 activities that start after the workplan due date.
Commitment Level (CL) = Will Do from Required / Should Do. You goal is to make sure that CL = 100% when a workplan is created. This will require regular Make Ready Planning to ensure that the workstreams are adjusted to accommodate variances. Notice that that Commitment Level (CL) starts increasing and approaches 100% as we commit to more and more activities first from the "Required (Can Do)" list and then if time and resources permit, from the "Required (Should Do)" list of activities.
This button will activate when a team is selected for creating a new work plan. If the button is grayed out, select the team again from the Team pull down. If you do not see any teams listed in the pull-down, make sure that you have defined teams in the Teams attribute editor and that their status is enabled, and that those teams do not have active workplans as a team can only have one active work plan at any given time. Click on this button after you have committed to all the activities that you intended to commit to. This will create the new workplan.
In the above snippet, all the 9 Required (Can Do) tasks have been committed to and hence there are 9 Workplan (Will Do) tasks, thereby increasing the CL to 39.1%. All the critical activities that can be completed within the due date have been committed to. The remaining 14 tasks that compose the Required (Should Do) tasks are those which fall outside this due date. By some means of planning if a few or all of these 14 activities can be completed within the said workplan due date, the CL increases and approaches 100%.
