Planning sessions with site teams are crucial for setting the foundation of any project. Hosting your first digital planning session with Nialli™ Visual Planner may seem like a daunting task, but with the right preparation and approach, you can ensure it will be productive and successful for everyone. Here’s some guidance to help you get started:
Before you host your first planning session, it’s important to get alignment with key project decision-makers, such as the site superintendent and project managers, to ensure they are familiar with the core functionality of the software. These leaders will play a critical role in getting buy-in with the trades and wider team, and your planning session will be far more effective if they have already been introduced to the application.
Host a smaller meeting with these project decision-makers ahead of the planning session to show them the basic functions of the software, including how to set up trades, add users, import milestones and tasks from a master schedule and run reports. This way they can play an active role in getting the rest of the team on board quickly.
Before you host your first planning session, it’s essential to ensure your space and technology are ready for the team. Nothing kills adoption faster than having to put your meeting on hold while IT fixes the room.
The person responsible for leading the session should be comfortable with the room setup. This includes the videoconferencing setup if you intend to invite remote participants. Before your first planning session, do a dry run and make sure both the software and hardware are working as intended!
As you prepare for this first planning session, you should get your basic plan settings configured. Load in your trades, set your working days, set up reasons for variance and import any master milestones or activities so the team can immediately begin planning when they come to the session.
In addition to this preparation, be sure to provide team members with a link to join the plan prior to the planning session so they are already set up and you avoid having to add them manually to the plan. Let them know they should expect an email invite so they can set up their login in advance of the session.
In your first planning session, you’ll want to get the team immersed in the software without overwhelming them with too much information to remember. For this reason, we recommend starting with weekly planning. Host this planning session as an extension of an established team meeting, adding 15–20 minutes to cover the basics of the software.
Visual Planner is designed to closely replicate processes the trades are likely using already to keep track of work with sticky notes or spreadsheets. The best way to get them to engage with the software is to invite them to come up and interact with it on a touchscreen display (while using large interactive displays isn’t mandatory for Visual Planner, we highly recommend it for the best Big Room planning experience). There are three key things trades should know how to do — add new activities, edit and move activities and status their activities. Show them how easy it is to do this with interactive gestures (here’s a cheat sheet you can print if anyone forgets). The trades can also log in and interact with the application from their own device if preferred. The plan updates in real time for all users.
In this first planning session, your goal should be to capture the following information while keeping the meeting on schedule:
Constraints are outstanding items that are blocking work from being completed. Confirm which constraints from the week prior got resolved. Which issues are still outstanding? Add any new constraints for the upcoming week.
Which activities got done last week? Have the team status their work. If work didn’t get completed, ensure reasons for variance are captured and discuss if there are any workarounds to get work back on schedule.
What activities are scheduled for next week? Add new tasks as necessary and confirm tasks that have already been added to the plan. Determine and input any dependencies between tasks.
How is the team performing? Review Percent Plan Complete (PPC) data. Ask the team for feedback on what’s working well and what could be improved.
It is easy to get off track whenever you have dozens of people from different disciplines in a room together! For collaborative planning to work, you need someone to take the role of facilitator. This person will often be the site superintendent or someone they delegate to. But they should have in-depth knowledge of the project and decision-making authority.
The role of this individual is NOT to command and control the discussion! The goal of involving the trades is to get honest input on how the project is progressing from those closest to the work being completed. If team members are fearful they will get blamed for problems or bossed around, they will tell you the answer you want to hear and not what you need to hear, defeating the entire purpose of their involvement.
The facilitator should protect the discussion and keep the meeting on track. They will need to ensure everyone has a chance to provide input, prevent people from talking over one another, keep the discussion on topic (pausing discussions that don’t need the wider team’s attention for follow-up after the meeting) and hold people accountable to their agreed-upon deliverables.
Now that the team is comfortable with weekly planning and statusing of activities, you can begin to introduce planning for a longer time horizon with the phase pull module. This allows the team to evaluate work scheduled 6–8 weeks in advance and map out the most efficient ways to get tasks completed. In the phase plan, tasks can be dragged directly into the weekly plan for continuity and tracking.
Additionally, you should now have some data captured on your project progression. This is a great time to sync up with key project decision-makers on the reports and insights generated. You can start to track trends and build comparisons to other projects across your organization to see how effective your approach is. This data can also be shared with the scheduling team to improve future bids or link it to other applications.
Want more helpful tips for getting the most out of your Nialli Visual Planner experience? Visit our new Nialli Knowledge Hub.