Insights

"Who was supposed to do this?" three weeks in — catching missed work at planning time with the WBS 100% Rule, 8/80 Rule, and mutual exclusivity.

WBS in one file, Gantt in another — two weeks later they disagree. Why plan artifacts and execution data belong in a single model.

The meeting where no one can answer "what was the original plan?" — the power of baseline snapshots and change control.

Progress stuck at 80% for eight weeks — EVM basics (PV/EV/AC, SPI/CPI) and honest progress rules.

Caught between "we're agile, we don't do WBS" and contractual reporting — decomposing the What (WBS) and executing the How (sprints).

The PM spending 10 hours a week on reports — deliverables should be extracted, not authored.

Connected over MCP, Claude drafted, refined, scheduled, and defined the WBS for a 6-month manufacturing ERP build — recall by machine, commitment by human.

One export button on the ERP project from our last case study produced four sheets — overview, WBS, weekly, monthly — and a clear boundary between what fills itself and what only a human should write.

On the same ERP project, we identified, assessed, responded to, and monitored eight risks on a 5x5 matrix — a risk pinned to a WBS node rides along every time you look at the plan.

With a baseline set and progress in, SPI 0.84 raised the alarm first — an execution report tracing the slip down to the responsible work packages.

Right after a schedule revision, we replayed it in the change history — field-level old→new with who and when, and what never gets recorded.

We fed in +3 days and CPM recomputed the chain — zero delay at first, until a missing line surfaced. Fill it in, and the critical path moved house.

Pinned BL-2 as a checkpoint right before a risky edit, then rolled a plan — a whole phase wiped out by one accident — back to the snapshot: auto backup, progress preserved, all-or-nothing.