Here is a bit of insight into the eating habits of project managers and business experts who suffer from planning overdoses. Don’t be surprised if they get irritated by how spaghetti looks on their plates.

Maybe this type of pasta reminds C-level executives of their daily intake of stress. What is so infuriating about spaghetti, anyway, and how is it connected with enterprise performance?

Why do your project activities turn into a spaghetti network? 

Spaghetti, a staple food that’s popular in Italian cuisine, is a common meal for many people, but… Spaghetti is a chaotic dish that you might associate with project planning, especially if you work in a multi-project environment. Google AdWords research shows that there are usually 100,000 to 1,000,000 searches for ‘Gantt charts’ every month. It’s stressful to imagine that the scope of a project’s potential is limited to these charts. Project management experts are familiar with Gantt project planning, though it’s cumbersome to use when managing large numbers of projects at the same time. Read The Final Word in the Gantt Chart Polemic to get more insights on the topic.

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Jan Willem Tromp, a Dutch scientist who’s been exploring the challenges of multi-project environments for 20 years, says that re-planning is off his to-do list. Luckily, he does not use Gantt chart apps, and here’s why:

“Every time I watch videos about resource management for projects I get the same picture. The message is that with Gantt planning you can easily re-plan if resources are overloaded just by rescheduling a task. It is always beautifully demonstrated in the video. If this does not help, you can also reduce the percentage of work for your team members – 50% on task #1 and simultaneously 50% on task #2. I always get allergic reactions to this because it is bullshit. In reality, you’ll get spaghetti. It introduces multi-tasking, and because of that efficiency will drop.”

A spaghetti network is mostly the result of scope creep.

Rescheduling is a nightmare. It creates a lot of planning and management overhead. Changing project plans leads to messy outcomes and often entails chaos – you’ve got a scenario full of lines that stretch to all sides, and it becomes impossible to understand the correct priorities. In this case, your project management methodology is close to the brink of disaster.

How can you prevent the tasks across your project environment from getting tangled like spaghetti?

The solution is simple: the more sauce you add to your spaghetti plan, the less sticky it becomes. The secret sauce from Jan Willem helps create the perfect flow for your project schedule: in order to get a robust plan that does not need to be adjusted all the time, just dedicate more time to your project network and approach project management from the perspective of resource availability. Effort-based workloads and clear priorities will prevent your data from clumping and reduce your planning overhead.

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The other essential ingredient of the secret sauce is leveraging robust resource management software like Epicflow. It eliminates chaos not only in planning and scheduling but also in resource allocation and management. Epicflow provides insight into resources’ capacity and availability and facilitates assigning the right resources to the right tasks. In addition, Epicflow automatically prioritizes the tasks across the whole project environment so that every team member knows what he or she should work on at the moment. Prioritization combined with the right resource allocation contributes to the seamless flow of projects, reduces chaos, and promotes maximum efficient project work.

So, who knows, maybe you’ll fall in love with Italian pasta once you’re relieved from your project management nightmare. Contact our experts to explore the full spectrum of Epicflow’s functionality for perfect planning and scheduling, and keeping your business environment organized.