When you are buying a house, you can get a quick reality check on how well that’s likely to go by looking at your credit score. No matter how rose colored your glasses or unrealistic your assumptions, this number will tell you the hard, cold truth.
Well over half of all projects fail
Everyone who builds a project plan needs a number like this. When it comes to project management, unrealistic assumptions can derail much more than a home loan. All plans are somewhat fluid, but no one wants to discover that, say, the fiber network was never installed in the newly built help center until after the support team shows up to take calls. Yet, expensive mistakes like this real-life scenario happen often. In fact, well over half of all projects fail. Project planners should be able to see alarms going off months before failures like this happen. But most tools make it hard to find this kind of mistake.
Moovila, though, has a built in “credit score” that tells you how likely your plan is to succeed at any given moment. It is called the RPAX (Robotic Project Assessment Index) Score and is – like your credit score – the first thing you see in the project overview. RPAX was created by data-scientists and project management experts. It analyzes your data – directly from your portfolio of project plans – to calculate your project’s probable outcome. But it goes further even than a credit score. It also walks you through what’s missing in your plan and what you need to do to fix it.
All projects are buggy
“I might sound like Chicken Little when I say this,” says Moovila’s President and CEO, Mike Psenka, “But most plans are a mess. They are all buggy.”
If we are being honest, this isn’t surprising. Project plans are wildly complex, and humans are adaptable. Rather than make perfect plans, which would require hours of analysis and constant, vigilant attention to minutia spread across the organization’s tech stack, we accept guesswork as a substitute.
Many of our behaviors – daily stand-ups, constant check-ins, and the expectation that everyone will work long hours around deadlines – are adaptive responses to a buggy plan. Instead of debugging the plan as we create it, we debug it in real time, as the project unfolds.
Consider this, though. If you were programming a computer instead of writing a project plan, would your code work?
“As we move forward,” says Psenka. “Humans will have to work alongside machines more and more. There will be a requirement that things unfold in a knowable way. And once that happens, we're going to realize how poorly we have been planning and structuring work and how much we depend on humans to be the levers that pull things.”
A machine intelligence that helps build the plan
There is a machine intelligence built into Moovila that is like a robotic planning assistant. You work with it to create a bug-free plan.
It works like this. As you enter tasks and easily build your project plan, a numeric and color-coded RPAX score evolves with your plan, which could be a simple list of tasks or a complex map that pulls data from spreadsheets, other project plans, people’s calendars, and other sources. (You can also import your existing project plans to instantly score plans built outside of Moovila.) The RPAX score keeps up, turning yellow and sliding toward red when it spots delays, invalid dates, and hidden structural flaws. These mistakes might take you days to find if you were able to spot them at all. But with the RPAX score, you know they are there immediately.
Once it identifies what’s wrong, it calls in Moovila’s built-in AI-powered project management coach, Carmen, to guide you through fixing it.
“It will take your current project plan and tell you what you need to do to make it viable,” explains Psenka. “It might say, ‘you don't have any durations here. There are no dependencies.’ Carmen, helps you rebuild the plan to improve the score.”
How would this have prevented the expensive disaster in the help center where the support team showed up to a building with no fiber?
“If they had been using Moovila,” explains Psenka, “Everyone would have known the fiber was late and responded accordingly. Even if, say, Human Resources, wasn’t working off the project plan, they would have been connected to it. They would have known not to hire and onboard an entire support team until the building was finished.”
Can your budget handle a mistake on that level? Maybe it’s time to consider debugging your plan before it goes off the rails.
