QSPlan is a project planner focusing on optimizing the plan so the right task is done at the right time considering task dependencies, resource availability and one or more deadlines.
You can of course plan different projects separately from each other, but the most benefit will arise if you plan all projects for your team together and put each of your projets as one task with subtasks in the same continously ongoing plan.
The idea of making decisions as late as possible and be able to adjust the project when things change is an integral part of this project planner. This works at the same time as you keep real track of all the remaining work in a way that ensures it is possible to finnish the entire project as it is right now considering different resources and their competences, all tasks remaining and their dependencies. Multiple deadlines within the same project or with different projects with the same team, and changes to those deadlines are continously tracked and taken into account.
Resources takes many shapes, a human doing things is one of them. A task in QSPlan can have one or more resources connected and they typically represent someone doing some work. It is possible to assign more than one person to the same taks meaning they will need to work together (at the same time) on the task. It is also possible to assign a group of persons to a task and then one of them need to work on the task, typically the group will represent a skill and all persons in your team with that skill is part of that group. A single person is usually only working with one task at a time and this system makes determining who to assign to what task dynamically and the actual decision can and should normally be made as late as possible to retain planning flexibility.
With QSPlan are you not locked at a specific hierarchy or number of levels, everything there is to do is a task, and tasks can be divided into subtasks for as many levels as you desire. Dependencies between tasks can be entered at any level of the hierarchy. Setting a dependency on a task will automatically include all it's subtasks, but can be overriden at a lower level if some subtasks should not be included.
So you estimate a task to take 4 hours to complete. So we plan for it to take 4 hours right? and plan for the next task to start immediately after that all the way to the end of the project. Well actually no, we don't. Tasks might take the estimated time to complete, it surely does happen occasionally. But it also happens that they take more time. It actually also (contrary to popular belief) happens that they take less time than estimated.
QSPlan is aware of that, and any time entered is an estimate with an uncertanity (both up and down). You can even tell the planner how unsure you are of a certain estimated time and the optimizer takes that into consideration. (Yes it is possible to say that a time is exact too).
We have found that the variations in completed time indeed makes the tasks on average take longer time than estimated, that is because on how the completed time are distributed around the estimated where there is roughly an equal chance of the task taking a certan factor longer time as the task taking the same factor shorter. I.e. the chance of a task taking twice the estimated time is roughly equivalent to the chance of it taking half the time, and when you add that up for several tasks are the chance that they have together taken more time quite high.
Plans change. The circumstances that was there when the project was created will most certanly not be valid half way thru the project. QSPlan is repeatedly investigating the current status of your project and re-optimizes your plan accordingly.
Multiple deadlines for different parts of the project makes it possible to prioritize between different parts of the overall plan, for instance different projects or different deliveries. Changing deadlines will make the optimizer prioritize other tasks trying to meet as much of the deadlines as possible as good as possible.
Each task might have any number of deadlines. Usually a deadline is put on some final task for each project, but you can have more than one deadline on the same task if you want. Having more might seem redundant, but since different deadlines can be set to be of different priority (or hardness) one might be when you would like to be able to deliver a specific part, another deadline might be when it definitely need to be delivered.
You will of course also get warnings when one or more deadlines are getting hard to meet so you can take countermeasures as soon as possible.
QSPlan uses a few purely functional cookies. We don't have any cookie for any other purpose than to make the site work as intended.
We will never sell your information to anyone. We will however follow the rules and reveal information if ordered to do so by court. You are free to download all personal information we store about yourself and all project related information we store about projects you are a part of at any time. If you delete your accout are all personal information about you deleted. Any resource connected to the login will however remain in the project and it's history but the connection to the login is deleted.
We will look at projects and their progress in order to improve the site. Our aim is to provide a site that makes managing a project an as nice as possible experience from start to finnish and constantly improving the functionality of the site and the optimizer is an important task to us, and for that we need historical data. For this to work will we look at all our projects in an aggregated manner to look for common pitfalls in order to make the best recommendations and planning optimization as possible. We might also look at specific points of specific projects to look for optimizations. We will avoid looking at your texts such as task or resource names and their descriptions in those cases and focus on project progress.
This site is currently in ALFA. This means we are not up to a complete set of basic functionality yet.
Current development focus more on function than form, the graphical features will be updated at a later stage.
The site is completely free to use. During the alfa stage are there no real guarantees about contigency even if we will try to not disrupt anything. You do best in only using it for test purposes for the time beeing, you may of course use it for real plans if you wish, but don't put anything here you don't have stored somewhere else, or at least download project data regulary.
When we reach beta are the site stable enough and feature rich enough to actually start to use for real purposes.
After beta is finnished is the idea to keep it free for basic use. The next step is to develop premium features and they will of course need some payment/subscription functionality. The basic planning and managing of projects are to remain free to use, possibly with advertisement but we will try to avoid that.
Since optimizing the plans are a CPU intesive task will one advatage of premium plans be higher priority in the scheduling for CPU power to do plan optimizations. Some features such as analyzes might also only be available in premium, that is yet to be decided however.
To reduce the CPU power needed will there also be some limitations in the combined values of planning resolution and project size for free projects, we will keep this limit at a reasonably high value such as that a plan with a one hour planning resolution still can have some thousands of unfinnished tasks with a time frame of at least a year, but probably not tens of thousands or several years timeframe. It will probably also depend on the number of active resources. Premium projects will have a higher alternately no limit, there will probably be different levels of premium.
This site uses english as interface language. It might be localized in some distant future but the chances for that is quite frankly very slim. All text fields have full unicode support so naming things in your project can of course be done in your own language.
The current version is alfa 0.20 2025-03-03
Most things here will probably be premium only features: