Support System of Project Management (work with documents, task, time management)

Transcription

1 Support System of Project Management (work with documents, task, time management) Yuliya MUSAEVA, Anton PETROCHENKOV Perm State Technical University, Komsomolsky Ave. 29, Perm, Russia Tel.: , 1. Introduction Abstract: In this article we solved the problem of accelerating the information exchange among working group members while realizing a project by means of creating a project management support system. Basing upon the problems which are faced by every working group while realizing a big project, a functional has been worked out and some of service systems have been modeled. The programme obtained is universal and can be applied successfully in realization of other projects. Keywords: Project Management System, Management Support, conjoint document editing, Time Management, Project Management. While a group of several people realize a project, problems concerning management of information flows can arise. Moreover, these problems always have an effect not only on an increase in labour costs and time of work, but they can also lead to more serious consequences the failure to meet the deadline, that will affect in the end the quality of the final product. Perm State Technical University, including the Microprocessor Automation Means Department are constantly involved in the realization of several projects conducted simultaneously. During realization of one of the projects of the department, in which both University tutors and employees of an industrial enterprise of the city were involved, the following problem occurred: information exchange was impeded, complicated and conservative. As a matter of fact, it was not more than sending each other messages, calling to work phone numbers and personal meetings. Every member of the group (a tutor, student, engineer of the enterprise, bookkeeper) had his or her own working hours and lifestyle. It was a real problem to find at least two hours a week to gather all the people for a meeting. Of course, everybody gets messages, everybody has a mobile phone, but not everybody has a secretary to write and keep messages and answer letters. And the group work was made even more difficult. Sometime later an idea appeared among the University employees. This idea was born by the necessity to create a project management system. System that can unite many functions, system which would be safe, mobile and reliable. 2. Objectives Thus the following aim was set forth: to provide fast and high-quality information exchange between the participants of the project and the working group. Coming out of the set aim and having analyzed existing problems, we can indicate several key goals: 1. To provide mobility of the project participants. There should be a reasonable combination of voic and text messages without fixing to the mobile i.e. personal phone of a participant; 2. To provide the possibility of conjoint work with documents distantly;

2 3. To provide an opportunity to discuss vital problems distantly with participation of many employees. To organize a meeting takes quite much time, taking into consideration territorial remoteness of the group members; 4. Automation of informing each of the employees about planned events; 5. To organize a storage of information where one can share authentic and actual internet content or media information as far as it concerns the topic of the project. 3. Methodology On the basis of the analysis of the problems this project management system should solve, an organization model was constructed (see pic. 1). In order to construct a system model we used the unified modeling language UML, with help of which we made up a diagram of variants of using with general system model and indicating all the projected functional [1]. Pic. 1. General model of the Project Management Support System Before starting the design planning of the system we have searched for analogues and made a comparison of them (see table 1) [2]. The service analogues of the given system can be represented by any CRM Systems as well as services which partially fulfill the required functions. In the Table below we review several examples of well-known and unheard-of systems. The majority of the examined variants are united by the threat for safety and information confidentiality, as far as they all use their own remote servers for keeping data. Purchase of the application in box involves much more expense. In the end after a comparative analysis the most optimal variant is constructing your own system which is oriented on the needs of a concrete team and specific features of its activity.

3 Name of system Table 1 Comparison of analogues of existing systems for project management support Functional Disadvantages Cost NetSuite CRM + [3] Order management; Bonus Management; Project Management; Clients-business portal; Web-site and analytics; Partner Relationship Management; Possibility of adding modules Access to the system is possible only via Web-browser; Data Storing on the external server (SaaS application) SaaS System. Cost of onehour-work of the consultant for implementation and training - $100 an hour Salesforce CRM [4] Web-page for free communication; Call-centre; Web-page for clients; Integration in social nets like Twitter and Facebook; Analytics; client; Chat; Communities; Access from mobile phone; Visualization of the product creation process management SaaS application, many game services not connected with work, it looks like a social net 30-days free version. Price for the license about 135 a month On-CRM [5] Common base of contacts and counteragents; Goals; Distribution of users rights; Personal organizer; Monitoring of employees extent of participation SaaS application, failure of the proposed functions Free plan for two users. Tariff Optimal about 25 a month Informicus CRM [6] Google Apps [7] Keeping a common base of clients, suppliers, partners and their contacts; Keeping full history of mutual relations with every client; Registering all employees and outsourcers; Registering clients inquiries through the site, telephone and e- mail; Formation of orders, planning of works and monitoring the milestones for work completion; Document management automation Keeping common base of contacts, synchronization with e- mail contacts, Service of notes and memos; Service of online editing of documents; Service of browsing and information addition; Video- and text chat; Translator; MicroBlogs etc. High cost; need to pay for updates of the programme Advertising, outsource server Price for 1 license from 86 annually. Training, implementation, adaptation, updates are extra paid Free of charge

4 Name of system Functional Disadvantages Cost Megaplan [8] Task-manager; Conjoint work; Finances; Business-manager High cost, Internal system without possibility of creating a site One license for using one service from 38.3 to for a box 4. Technology Description For a start we should try to abstract away from the project management system. Nowadays every new development and every new business should have its own web-page. It can be a usual online business card or an effective flash-application, but an interactive face in Internet is something that any project must have. It s not just an additional way of attracting potential buyers of the programme, but also one extra source of information for the people whom it may concern. The project team decided to combine the useful with the pleasant the system should function both as a communication platform for the team and as an information site for other users. Along with that every participant of the project has his own login and password for authorization and getting an access to basic services. Publicly-accessible part of the system should represent all the necessary and fullest information about the project. For example, the subject matter of the project, actual news, information about scientific and educational centre, which realizes the project, about an enterprise, various multimedia information and virtual tour around test table. This part of the system should have a pleasant design and a friendly interface. A user who enters the site for the first time, on the one hand, should not get afraid of technical terms and definitions being strange at first sight. And on the other hand, he must not get lost amidst a big lot of information and eye-catching design. Let s look closely at the functional of the system. For this purpose we should turn to the problems indicated in item 2 of the given article. Let s compare them with those difficulties which appeared in the process of the project realization. First, it is multi-version which can occur if the report is being prepared by a group of several people. Thus, every time document is changed by one of the participants, the corrected version should be sent to others. And what if several people at once make their own changes and send each other the corrected versions? Or, what is even much worse, the quasi ready report is submitted to the supervisor who has started to edit it and suddenly he receives a new version, and then another one. This situation is not pleasant, because efforts are useless and the time for report preparation prolongs, and moreover such a situation can lead to confusion and difference in opinion among team members. Undoubtedly, we were not the first who faced the problem like that and had tried to find a solution. For example, Google has offered not a bad variant that is service Google Docs. It is free of charge, but slightly slow. And now we get an option to adjust the programme for using an outsource service or to write a similar one on our own. In the first case, besides authorization at site the user will have to pass through authorization in the Google Docs system, to study the new interface which is different from the system interface, all that is not convenient. The process of passing from one s own site to the outsource service breaks the system integrity, and therefore increases the possibility of burglary. We want to remind that safety is one of the basic requirements to the designed system. After the assessment of risks and designers capabilities, we decided to create our own service which would allow to work with documents online, to follow up all the changes marking them with the name of a user and the date of editing, as well as to keep a register of changes which would allow a user to go

5 back to any saved document. The given function will help to escape the confusion of having many versions, and moreover it will give us an opportunity to observe the history of creating a report, the quality and promptitude of work for each employee. Using the unified modeling language UML we created activity diagrams which give models representing the operation of conjoint editing of documents (see pic. 2-4) [1]. Pic. 2 General scheme of working with the document

6 Pic. 3 Document editing

7 Pic. 4 Adding a new user for conjoint document editing The second problem which we faced on the way of the project realization was the socalled human factor. Of course, we cannot avoid it, but we can try to moderate its influence. Let s take the following situation: the manager gave a task to his employee. He did it either via telephone, or via , or personally. It will be great if an employee will set about his job immediately, but it is more credible that the task will be postponed for a while. And here we can see human factor in all its glory later an employee can get distracted, turn his attention to something else, and after he gets back to the task he can forget or ignore some important thing, which in the end will surely have an effect on the result. Or, for example, in case if an employee works remotely, his telephone can be inaccessible, and sometimes it takes much too long to get a reply to one's . Virtually, the problem is narrowed down to the following: to create a way of communication between the manager and an employee with the time minimizing and result maximizing strategy. That is it is required to decrease the employee s access time to task and to provide a good feedback from an employee to the manager. In this case, firstly, not only an executor is responsible for the job, but the manager is also responsible for it, which surely will have a good effect on the result. Secondly, the time for job processing decreases

8 as it is always available and it can be overviewed if needed. Defining the problem gave us a hint how to solve it it should be a service with the possibility to leave a task. If it is needed, the manager can leave a task to another project participant indicating the job content, its deadline and priority. After authorization in the system an employee can see both new tasks, which are sorted out according to deadline and priority, and the previous ones waiting to be executed. While viewing a new task, its status automatically changes from Awaiting execution to Being Executed, the date and time of accepting the task is fixed, and the read notification is sent to the manager. In the same field along with the text of enquiry, an executor can leave his comments which will be sent to the manager. After the task is accomplished an employee can change its status to Done, and the manager in this case receives a message about finishing the task. Moreover, if a new request comes to an executor, he gets an SMS. Thus even if the telephone is not available for a while, when it s available, an employee will at once get an SMS, and the manager will get a confirmation that the task has been read. In order to avoid spamming every employee gets his access level, depending on which people who he or she can leave a task are defined. The third, but not the least important problem that our team faced while realizing the project is the low speed of information exchange. In order to prepare an article, a report or simply to discuss a pressing question it was necessary to inform all the participants, to agree when and where the meeting would take place, and to hold the meeting. In order to collect the data, it turns to be insufficient to send request letters: we have to call them and make sure we understood each other right. All this affects badly the organizational process, increases the time of work, and as a consequence lessens the efficiency. In order to avoid this problem we had made up a series of neighbouring services. They were also created for acceleration of information exchange and making the system more mobile. The first service is sending text SMS messages to users; the second one is forum for discussing basic project topics and the third is an exchange of messages between two participants of the project. As far as the task service is designed firstly for information exchange between employees and their managers, it was decided to create an additional service for exchange of messages between team workers. Sometimes it is much simpler to send an SMS than to make calls to all the employees. To do that without turning away from the web-page is even more convenient and pleasant. For this purpose the following function of free SMS sending right from the site page was created. But we had some difficulty while realizing this service. For now there are several web applications which help to send SMS free of charge. Each of them interacts with the mobile communication operator by some agreement. To get protected from spamming in these applications check for being human is arranged the user is offered to input a text code from an image. In our system while realizing the given service it is necessary to achieve some agreement with mobile communication operators. Let s look in more detail the next service of the system that is forum. It is also designed for information exchange between all the participants of the project, but according to concrete topics. The site administrator creates the list of actual topics and every team worker can leave a message in the topic he or she is interested in. The forum s aim is to involve employees in active communication, it may substitute partially plan meetings and improve efficiency of project participants work. In addition to this service we offer as well exchanging of messages via web-site. You can use it in case if you don t want to send an SMS or start communication in the new forum thread which can be seen by all users. The history of messages is kept on site and the communication is arranged in one dialogue window with a tab for each conversation partner. This way it is supposed to be engaged in a dialogue and along with that to see the history of the previous talk. The given function can partially substitute clumsy and

9 uncomfortable exchange or usage of ICQ programme which is not designed for working purpose. When a new message is received on site or in case if another user answered the message left earlier in the forum thread, an employee gets a notification letter in his box. This service added contributes to more fast information exchange between the project participants and make a territorially remote team closer, by creating the unified information dimension. It is also supposed to create data storage to provide more close communication between employees, and opportunities for their self-development and knowledge enrichment. An authorized user can add there photos and video and any other internet content. Any other employee can view the information which was added before him and if he wants he can discuss it in the corresponding forum thread. For now we have done the following works: we described the functional of the projected programme, we made up the Technical Task, we created the project web-page and we realized the function of message exchange. In order to realize the project we have chosen the programme language C# on the.net platform. We have chosen this platform from the following analogues: PHP, Java, C#, but the last one is used more widely by the IT designers all over the world right for the construction of complicated systems [9]. 5. Results The expected result of the system creation and implementation is raising the efficiency of employees, decrease in time and labour costs for report preparation, decrease of mobile phone and transport expenses. With help of the implementation of the given system it is also supposed to set up fruitful working relations between team members, that will obviously have a positive effect on the result of their activity the final product, to improve its quality and competitiveness. The implementation of the system will allow to develop and enrich the corporate culture, that will allow employees at their own experience to get to know the new developments of CRM systems and project management systems on the whole. The possibility to create a web-page for every portal will allow to find more potential clients, to raise the authority of the university and the department s fame among the business circles of the city. 6. Conclusions At the moment the system is in the stage of the development. We look forward to finishing it and implementing the system among the working team members. Here we need to pay attention to the fact that the development turned to be universal, and this means it can be applied by the department and the university in future as a support of management of other projects realized by large working groups regardless of the branch features of their activity. The system is also extendable which allows to add new services if needed. Among the similar services we can find: implementation of video-call and videoconference service provided that each employee has a web camera and a microphone. It is possible as well to create the given system in the version for mobile phones to make it more comfortable for employees. We can provide the integrity of the programme with the following systems: 1С, MsProject, Project Expert and others, to create your own client. It is for long that we can continue enumerating the services which can allow accelerating information exchange and facilitating the fulfillment of employees jobs, the main thing about this is that you should wish and need their implementation.

10 References [1] Martin Fowler, Kendall Scott UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language. - Boock Jacobson Rumbaugh, [2] CRM Systems Review on LiveBusiness. [3] Cloud ERP, Business Accounting Software, CRM, Ecommerce Netsuite. [4] CRM The Enterprise Cloud Computing Company Salesforce.com Europe. [5] CRM system with web-interface On-CRM.ru. [6] CRM system Informicus Implementation Customer Relationship Management System Program. [7] Google Products, Google.com. [8] Megaplan: Management and Automation of Business System. [9] Andrew Troelsen C# and.net Platform. - Piter, 2007.