Why planners and schedulers should post questions on Planning Planet

Planning Planet, a portal founded by James Williams, is the world’s largest online community of planners and schedulers with over 75,000 members. The most popular feature of Planning Planet is its forum, with sub-forums such as Primavera P6, Microsoft Project, Asta Powerproject, Spider Project, Forensic Claims Analysis and Project Management Issues Discussion amongst others.

The Decline and Rise

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Up until 2015 / 2016, the Planning Planet forum was regularly active with an average of 70 daily posts. But in recent years, there has been a lull in forum activities with an average of less than 5 daily posts. The decline in forum activity can be attributed to two factors; the fact that Planning Planet is not mobile friendly and the rise in popularity of the networking website, LinkedIn.

With most internet users now accessing websites via mobile devices, the poor rendering of Planning Planet on mobile phones would no doubt discourage a lot of Planning Planet visitors from visiting the site on their phones and hence the decline in forum activities.

Most planners and schedulers are on LinkedIn and the ease of using the app on their phones sees a lot of people ask planning and scheduling questions on LinkedIn and no longer bother asking these questions on the Planning Planet forum.

Let us Share Knowledge!

While you might get quick answers to your planning and scheduling questions posted either on your LinkedIn feed or in a LinkedIn group, most times the reach of these questions are limited to your LinkedIn network or group members. But the biggest downside of posing these questions only on LinkedIn, is that that LinkedIn posts do not appear in internet searches as they are not indexed by either Google or Bing.

This non-appearance on Google or Bing, means the wider Planning and Scheduling community might not benefit from the solutions posted to the problems, unlike Planning Planet forum posts which appear on Google and Bing searches making provided solutions available to all visitors of the site.  While only registered members can view other peoples’ posts on LinkedIn, there are no such restrictions on Planning Planet.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

So next time you have a Planning or Scheduling problem, and you want to ask for help online, make sure you also post your question on Planning Planet as there is a good chance you will get the appropriate answer or solution. Also, the open nature of the Planning Planet forum would guarantee a much wider reach and other Planning and Scheduling practitioners who have similar problem will easily find the provided solution.

The knowledge sharing that takes place on Planning Planet is good for the Planning and Scheduling discipline and luckily we have got some very dedicated members of Planning Planet community, who give up their time to answer questions. Rafael Davila, Zoltan Palffy, Alexandre Faulx-Briole, Santosh Bhat and Tom Boyle are experts who are still regularly active on the forum.