Touchplan

"Touchplan has allowed our Trade Partners access to view the schedule and print reports at any time."

Comments: This forced the trade partners to plan ahead. I used the software during my weekly sub meeting.
I created schedules for all phases and buildings.
If a sub was unable to provide info I entered it for him.
The reports were sent out every Friday to all.

Pros: Instant feedback on where you are with the schedule.
When you have to adjust something you are able to show the multiple impacts that it creates.
If you need to create a recovery schedule you can instantly see the impacts to your workload. Being able to zoom in and back out to capture the big picture. Reports for multiple buildings with multiple floors showing how many men are required.
The report will include location and duration and will be updated daily electronically.
Touchplan's flexibility to report on one trade, combination or all. Same goes for locations that can be broke down in the report.

Cons: 1. If there is a RAIN day I then have to move each ticket that has been place after that date. 2. After I have the pull plan established I wish there was a way to create a "group" with the tickets that would "link" them as they sit on the schedule. Finish/Start Lag/Start. Just so if I had a Rain Day or Something else impacted the Plan I wouldn't have to adjust all the tickets moving forward. The select all feature works nice BUT the weekends play havoc.

"Really like how we can quickly go through the critical items."

Comments: Ability to easily see our project tasks and where we are versus our commitments. The ease to add tasks and place them on the time line. The visibility we have reviewing the project is quite nice.

Pros: I like how we interact with the software. Having a live meeting and being able to place things onto the project schedule and see it real time. The ability to store things in your own desk top and then populate the project when the right information allows that particular item to become viable. The ease in which you can manipulate the system and move around is really convenient for jumping around. We have really taken advantage of the swim lanes and being able to separate items into their more natural events. Finally the people at Touchplan have all been excellent to work with. They have truly embraced being customer centric and their actions reinforce this each time we work with them. They are willing to listen and even develop their software to allow us to meet our needs.

Cons: Having to double click sometimes to update a task. Moving things around if dates change especially during definition. The one feature I would love if possible is to truly link items together. So that if something moves out you can easily see the overall impact (similar to a CPS in MS Project) would be a really nice feature to have.

"Great idea but bugs aren’t worked out yet"

Comments: I tried really hard to learn this and be the go to person on my team to help others with learning this tool. One thing I appreciate is how responsive the customer service is if you are struggling with something they help you instantly and take any feedback to their team to implement it. Despite this, this tool was too cumbersome for my team to work efficiently and use it.

Pros: This software is trying to help construction and design build plan their schedules more realistically but helping you identify what tasks rely on others or other tasks, so you can visually see what is the most important thing to work on. In theory this sounds genius. The tool is a black space where you can freeform populate things you need from others to reach your milestones, alongside your team members who can log in and see what you are doing live. When you need something from somebody it sends an alert to that person which is nice. You can print off reports to check in with your team and have a list format rather than visual view, although the list loses a lot of the relationships that were carefully laid out in the visual map. The last major positive thing this does is help you track late work or postponed work and how that affects your end date. I do want to add one thing that isn’t really a pro or con. Part of the value of this is getting your team members to actually input what they need from the rest of the team, so everyone can plan their work. If you have uncooperative team members you cannot use this tool because you can’t read their minds and can’t plan others work for them. It is intended to be logged in by multiple team members and used by each person.

Cons: Unfortunately this is not that user friendly and I feel like it needs to go back to the drawing board for improvement. For example, you can’t zoom out and get a big picture view of your schedule, you can only see things when you are zoomed in super close. There are reports you run to understand tracking and what is coming up next, but these are also hard to read. My team ended up abandoning this tool because it was so hard to use, even for young people but especially for team members who are older and struggle with learning new tools. Planning smart is hard enough, this tool ended up making it harder.

"Excellent resource!"

Comments: Pull planning, replaces schedule software that is hard to manage, and is accessible anywhere at anytime. Not every one is tech savvy but I like the opportunity for training and customer service is available for changes and feedback

Pros: Easy to use, accessible to everyone on every device, provides a great way to pull plan versus using sticky notes

"My experience with touch plan was very simple to use and straight forward."

Comments: This software helps you plan out a very large project with multiple people that are involved. Also helps you pull together a great time frame on when the project will be completed.

Pros: I liked the feature to enter in sticky notes with the crew size and time to let the team know your progress as you complete work. I also like the fact that if you needed to move a sticky note, you had to answer why you moved and what was the cause.

Cons: The program was slow at times. To navigate through the system was difficult at the beginning but after much use I slowly got the hang of it.