Managing a large project |
Managing a large project is a complex and time-consuming task. In order to understand how best a project-management tool can help, it is useful to examine the life-cycle of a large project. We look at a scenario where a program manager is responsible for the top-level planning and tracking of a project. He has a number of division heads who will be responsible for handling various subparts of the project, and they in turn have teams of individuals who are responsible for executing specific tasks.
Typically, the program manager will lay out the broad parts of the project(planning), and allocate budgets for effort and cost to each part(budgeting). At this stage, budgets are, necessarily, educated guesses. This is because in this coarse-grained view of the entire project, one is bound to miss intricacies in the details which will, ultimately, affect the effort and cost.
Once the top-level structure and budgeting for the project has been decided, the plan is communicated to the division heads, so that they can plan their respective parts. The division heads will, in turn, split up their parts into smaller tasks, and budget effort and costs for each task. The original plan and budget are useful to guide planning and budgeting at this stage. It may be the case that the division head discovers, upon working out the details of the tasks, that the program manager's budget is too little, or too much. In this case, he communicates this information back to the program manager. In this way, there may be some amount of iteration between the program manager and the division heads.
When the overall plan is in place, the tasks have to be assigned to the individual resources, in such a way that the overall timeline and cost of the project is minimized and that each resource has a reasonable workload (scheduling). The scheduling of a set of tasks is also affected by dependencies between tasks. A dependency between tasks is when, for some reason, it is not possible to start a task until another is complete. The division heads have to determine which of the tasks depend on which, and also determine which resource performs which task. When the tasks have been scheduled and assigned to resources, the planning phase may be said to be over.
Once the project has started, it is necessary to follow the progress of the subprojects, in order to ensure that progress is satisfactory. This usually involves using a project management tool of some kind to track the progress of individual subprojects. Typically, at various levels, throughout the team, status meetings are held, whose purpose is twofold; to collate information on progress by the team members and to solve problems that the team is facing in executing the tasks. To keep the meetings manageable and productive, the teams usually meet in small groups, and status information is communicated to, for example, the group manager.
The program manager needs to have an idea of the overall progress on the project. The information he requires is essentially an aggregation of the status information for each individual subproject. However, actually doing this aggregation is not a simple task. As we saw in the previous paragraph, the status meetings leave various individuals in the team with aggregates of a small number of the subprojects. These have to be put together, and depending on the sizes of the teams, the process may need to be repeated.
Different organizations have come up with different methodologies for dealing with the complexity of aggregating status information to provide a top-level view. Some organizations have a person, or persons, dedicated to the task of keeping track of the progress of all the teams, and aggregating the information. By the time the data is collected, entered into the tool and the aggregate reports are generated, the information is no often longer current.
How Intellisys Project Management helps |
Traditionally, tracking has been the area where project management tools provide the most utility. Intellisys Project Management facilitates the process of communicating planning information and aggregating reporting information, in addition to the tracking process. The following simple methodology of using Intellisys Project Management yields considerable benefits to the entire project team.
The program manager creates the top level project and assigns a time and cost budget to it. Then he creates the next level of subprojects, splitting the time and cost budgets of the top-level project among the subprojects. For each subproject, he gives manage access to the responsible division head. Manage access enables a user to modify various attributes of a project, and create subprojects.
Now, when the concerned division had logs into the system, he will see the appropriate subproject listed under his managed projects. By opening the project for editing, he can see (but not alter) the budget values he has to work with. The division head goes through the same process of creating subprojects and splitting his allocated budget among his subprojects. If he is going to further delegate subprojects to next-level managers, he gives the concerned persons manage access to the subprojects he has created. If, on the other hand, the subprojects he has created will not be split any further, he enters the estimated hours for each of the subprojects. In preparation for scheduling he can also allocate candidate resources to each of the subprojects.
When the program manager next logs on to the system, he can see all the subprojects that the division heads have created. More usefully, his top level project has an estimated hours value, which is the aggregate of the estimates of all subprojects. The program manager can compare this to his original budget and take appropriate action. In this way the process of communicating budget and estimate information back and forth in the correct context is greatly simplified.
Once the bottom-level projects all have effort estimates and candidate resources, the top-level project can be scheduled. The system will automatically each task to one of its candidate resources, so that no resource is overallocated and so that the overall project span is as short as possible.
Whan a resource, i.e a user has a project assigned to him, he
automatically gets tracking access to that project. When he
logs in, the project will be visible in his list of assigned
projects, under the Typically, the program manager is interested in a high-level
overview on the health of his project. Using Intellisys, this is easy
to do. The software automatically aggregates all the tracking
information entered by the various resources and makes a unified view
available at each level of the project hierarchy. The program manager
can get the overview he needs by just logging in and looking at the
color-coded status columns on the main pane. The color codes alert him
to potential problems, and he can drill down into problem projects by
expanding the view of that project. Status advisories attached
to each project tell him exactly where the project is slipping, or at
risk, should he wish to go into more detail. The same information for
their sub-part of the project is available to the division heads.
Using Intellisys eliminates the task of status collection and
aggregation. It delegates the task of entering status to the person
closest to the activity, thereby ensuring accuracy. Finally, it
presents a visual overview of the project to those who need it.
Reporting