Once a project is underway, it is important to keep the schedule up to date. Actual durations will probably vary from your original estimates, and the sequence of activities may change once the work begins. In addition, you may need to add new activities and delete unnecessary ones. Regularly updating schedules and comparing them with baseline schedules ensures that you are using resources effectively, monitoring project costs against budget, and keeping abreast of actual durations and costs so you can initiate your contingency plan if necessary.
The project controls coordinator, along with the project managers, establishes company procedures and communicates them to all participants. Usually, several projects at various levels of progress occur simultaneously. Project portfolio management can be complicated further when project managers, key resources, or other employees involved in the process are geographically dispersed. You must consider these factors as you establish updating guidelines.
To help develop procedures, ask questions such as these:
The answers to these questions help determine how you will use the module to update projects.
The data to collect may depend on whether you are updating activities or individual resource assignments. You can update activities by simply recording actual dates and a remaining duration. For resource assignments, enter the actual hours to date and the hours remaining. The module can also estimate progress automatically.
When connected to a P6 EPPM database: Will you automatically collect timesheet entry data for each employee from the Progress Reporter module? Does your organization need to collect status from project team members who are not assigned resources or Progress Reporter users?
Will you import data from other systems supported by your company, such as an accounting system? Or will updates be handwritten on printouts of the schedule distributed to project participants, collected weekly by the project manager or team leader, and entered in the module?
If you answered Yes to one or more of these questions, your update process will probably involve more than one procedure—all handled equally well by the module.
Depending on how quickly your projects change, you may want to update monthly, weekly, or even daily. Although no rules exist for update frequency, consider these general guidelines: if your projects never seem to be accurate, you are not updating often enough, or the scope of your activities is too broad—you should divide activities into smaller ones. If you spend too much time updating, you’re updating too often, or the scope of your activities is too narrow.
Recording progress in the module is only the beginning of the update process; after you produce an updated schedule, you need to analyze the results.
Examine updated project schedules using the many display and print options available. You can first view onscreen layouts to see immediate results, then look at project data in more detail by generating reports. Pinpoint potential problems by comparing the current schedule to the target plan in the Bar Chart or by displaying a Resource Usage Profile for a graphical representation of resource use. If problems exist, you may want to perform “what-if” analyses before modifying the network. Use existing report templates, create new template specifications by modifying existing ones, or add your own template to produce the data you need to see.
Effective communication to all project participants is also essential to the success of every project. Use easily understood reports and layouts to show the project team and management what is happening. Focus on critical activities, resource and cost overloads, and slippages, and identify actual and required future progress.
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Last Published Wednesday, May 25, 2016