Project and Resource Management: A Do-it-Yourself guide

Project and Resource Management: A Do-it-Yourself guide By Shyam Kapoor Prisio Technologies LLC Introduction As per Gartner about one third of the projects are never complete and more than half exceed the budget. In a computer world survey, Project Management has been cited as the biggest management challenge. And within project management, internal resource management has been cited as biggest issue. In today s world project and resource management is a complex challenge. Today s projects are global in nature, have multiple stakeholders/ vendors/customers/partners from the globe, span multiple time-zones, languages, software, tools etc. To be on time and on budget, organizations and their project managers need to be agile with time sensitive plans. They need to review and revise strategic plans more frequently. They need to manage capacity of resources more effectively to be successful. Moreover these tools need to be adaptive and flexible for ever changing IT environment. In today s global project environment, stakeholders (Executive, Program/Project Manager, Team member, staffing/resource manager) are constantly asking questions like: What is the overall health of my projects? Are we on-time and on budget? What is the earned value of my project? Why do I need additional budgets for my project? What is my current utilization rate and how does it compare to last quarter? What is my resource requirement forecast? Do we need to hire more? How many? In this session attendees will learn how to use Oracle Project Management and Resource Management suite of product, to answer above questions with tools to manage and control work plans, budgets, resources and assignments collaboratively. Key implementation options and considerations from a case study of a large distributor company where project and resource management was implemented in their IT department will be discussed throughout the paper. Projects Management Lifecycle Oracle offers applications, beyond just Project Costing and Billing, to support the full lifecycle of project and portfolio management from conceptualization initiative to execution. Within Oracle E-Business suite of applications it encompasses project portfolio analysis, project & resource management, collaboration, costing & billing and time & labor. Project Management begins right after project is selected, approved and appropriately funded. This paper will focus on the following stages of project management: Initiation & Planning o Work planning o Budgeting & Forecasting Execution o Progress updates Managing Project controls o Issue Management o Change Management Project Reporting o Performance & Status reporting Additionally Resource Management will be discussed which follow through the entire lifecycle of the project. COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 1

Figure 1: Project Management life cycle Oracle Project Management is a tool for stakeholders, primarily project managers, for maintaining control and visibility of all aspects of their projects. As a project stakeholder, project management application assists to track and manage a project through the project lifecycle, from creating and planning, through to completion. It can be fully integrated to Microsoft Project if desired. As a project manager, using Oracle Project Management, you can: Create, manage, version, and view workplan Track progress against the workplan. Link Microsoft Project with Oracle Projects enabling to work with a project using both applications. Create budgets and forecasts to plan and manage the financial performance of projects throughout the project lifecycle. Track and monitor the performance of a project, and analyze financial and effort information by task, resource, and time. View exceptions for key financial and schedule metrics, and send automated status report notifications to key project stakeholders. Provide a timely and consistent view of project status information to all audience members and project stakeholders. Manage issues such as concerns, problems, and outstanding questions for projects and tasks. Manage actions or changes that affect the scope, value, or duration of projects and tasks. Attach and manage documents for projects and tasks. Search and review the current financial status of projects and review detailed financial performance for projects and tasks. Project Initiation & Planning During the initiation and planning, once the project is approved, project manager can create a detailed project workplan with all the tasks, assign resources, create a budget for each task (or project) for approval. This is a critical task of every IT project but typically not standardized. Many organizations choose multitude of tools Excel, MS COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 2

Project, SharePoint, in-house portals etc without standardizing the project management process. Oracle Project Management tool can be used during the entire life cycle of project for: Improved management of Resources Better monitoring and performance reporting Effective analysis of project portfolio by executives Project(s) can be conceptualized and initiated in Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis (PPA) with basic information. However if PPA isn t used in your organization, project can be directly defined in project management using traditional java or newer self service forms by either copying from an existing project or a project template. Configurable project dashboard can be used by all stakeholders for a single consistent view of the project details, performance, worklist, issues and deliverables. At an IT organization implementation we created standardized work plan structure in project templates. We didn t chose to use project life cycle and phases, an attribute which can be used in project reporting specially on large phased projects. Figure 2: Project Management dashboard Detailed workplan can be loaded from MS Project also. However we standardized work plan by project type in a project template and updated work plan after project creation if required. Multiple budgets and forecasts can be entered for a project either in summary or detail either manually or using Excel (ADI) with or without workflow approvals. Budgeting is important for monitoring overall financial health of a project as well as many project performance reports. We chose to enter budget in efforts (hours) at each detailed task and used labor burden to calculate financial cost. Project Execution Since projects is fully integrated with Oracle applications like Time & Labor, Internet Expenses, Purchasing, Payables etc, project management application has little to offer in execution other than updating the progress of the project. All project costs can be continually collected for reporting the health of the project. Workplan progress can be updated, reviewed and monitored by project manager and team members. You can enable collaborative progress entry so that Individual task managers can enter the progress for the tasks that they manage. You can allow physical percent complete collection to constantly updating project progress and rolling up at project level for reporting purposes. COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 3

We weekly updated the percent complete and rolled up the complete and used the Gantt chart below for project reporting. Figure 3: Project Workplan Gantt chart Project Controls Oracle Project offers a fully featured Issue Management application where issues can be logged, routed to appropriate team members, exported to Excel and reported on. It has full document attachment capability for reference. Based on your implementation and project reporting needs, you can tailor issue classification and status. Managing change is crucial for all project performance reporting as it may impact resources, cost and revenue for the project. Change requests should be logged to enable managing scope changes and approval for the project. Change request can estimate impact on project cost and revenue. Once change requests are approved, change orders can be created for tracking cost and revenue changes by change order. Change management offers a full document management with approval and search capabilities. Figure 4: Project Controls Issues, Change Requests, Change Orders Project Reporting Older versions of Oracle Projects offered only Project Status Inquiry (PSI) which used to summarize budgets and actual at PTD, UTD and ITD level. Project Management application in conjunction with Project Intelligence now offers numerous options with powerful features for project reporting and publishing: COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 4

BI dashboards with project financial information like cumulative budget/actual, cost, effort, billing & collections, margin, earned value Tasks/Resource summaries for a workplan Analysis by Tasks, Resources, Time Visibility across all levels of a project and sub-projects and across organizations Drill down to underlying transactions Configurable with Graphs Multiple currencies and calendars Publishing and notifications with email attachments Configurable key indicators View Key Performance Area Statuses for a project like Financial, Schedule and Execution of project Reporting on individual exceptions in the above performance area with configurable visual indicators (e.g. On track, Critical, At Risk) Figure 5: Project performance dashboard For your project communication needs, different types of project status reports can be configured and templatized for future use e.g. monthly steering committee report which has financial summary, project performance, earned value, key issues and key risks or weekly project status report which has tasks status and open issues. You can maintain appropriate security, reminder rules, schedules and publishing options for your status reports. COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 5

Resource Management Oracle Project Resource Management provides you tools to manage and deploy resources to projects in a global environment. Figure 6: Resource Management life cycle Resource Management applications uses HRMS tables to store people data. If full HRMS isn t in place, resources can be defined in Projects using shared HR. Since all the resource requests and matching are done using competencies, it is utmost critical that competencies should be current for all resources. If the competencies aren t current, resource matching can be done manually. Resource Requirement Once the project is setup and approved, project manager can create project resource requirement. Project manager can enter request priority, required date range, total efforts and competencies. If managing multiple competencies and proficiency level is found to be too cumbersome initially, single role can be used for defining competency unless open to resource matching manually. COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 6

Figure 7: Resource Requirement Advertise Requirement Resource requirements can be advertised to be made visible inside or outside the organization and can be made visible to selective people in a date range. Oracle has several pre-defined advertising rules and many more can be configured. Rules can be defined such as Escalate and publish requirement to bigger audience every seven days if not fulfilled. Search Resource Resources can be searched from the pool to identify Candidate. Candidate exists until either rejected or approved & assigned to the project. Resources can be searched independently of the project requirement too. Search is performed by the dates of requirement, job level and competency. Complex scoring can be configured, say based on different weightage of dates of requirement, job level, competency and location, to find a perfect (close to 100%) match. Weighting Types Percentage Comments Competency Match 0% Global competencies finalization in progress Availability Match 60% Availability had a higher importance for the Organization Job Level Match 40% Currently using only Job Levels for all resources Matching formula implemented was: Matching score = 0*Competency Match + 0.6*Availability Match + 0.4* Job Level Match Figure 8: Resource Matching and Candidature COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 7

Match and Review Candidate Resources can be nominated as candidate to fill the requirement. Project manager, or member with access, can review and approve or reject a candidate. Automated nomination can also be implemented based on weightings. Approve and Assign Candidate Assignment can be approved by project manager or sent for further approval based on workflow/approval hierarchy setup. Note assignments can be added directly without any resource requirements also. Once assignment is approved, resource is confirmed and notification is sent to resource/staffing/project manager. Assignment is created with initial transfer price rate. Maintain Resource Repository Resource repository has to be constantly managed by different people in the organization for the effective use of the tool. E.g. resource manager can review and approve vacations, timecards, trainings, and competencies and overall find work for resources. Staffing manager can analyze open requirements, nominate candidates and can review forecasts. Team member can track schedule, update competencies and can monitor utilization. Figure 9: Resource Schedule with status All stake holders Executives, Resource Manager, Staff Manager, Project Manager and Team members can view utilization summary or individually. Note this requires project intelligence setup. Figure 10: Resource Utilization COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 8

Lessons Learnt As outlined earlier, we implemented key functionalities of Oracle Project and Resource management for a large distributor company in their IT department. Key lessons learnt from the implementation: Standardize project management processes before implementation Standardize workplan structure for similar types of project Evaluate usage of project planning tools (e.g. MS Project vs. Oracle) Well defined project communication strategy Standardized resource competencies Evaluate current approval hierarchy Oracle software licenses Key Setup Considerations While setting up Project Management key considerations are: Although Oracle offers Workplan structures, primarily tasks for project managers and team members, and financial structures, tasks for financial administration of projects; we found Sharing structures was easier to manage and satisfy all reporting need Progress status can be configured as per your management practice e.g. Red, Green and Yellow OR standard On Track, At Risk and Critical Measurable Work item for each task of Workplan and Task types to control how Oracle Projects processes tasks. These are used in filling timesheets if using Oracle Time & Labor Status for Projects, Tasks, Issues, Change requests Control Item Types which represents a specific type of issue or change and provides you with a template for the creation of issues and changes. Financial Plan Types are required for different types of project budgets and forecasts that you want to plan for (for example, an approved cost budget, an estimate, or a bid). While setting up Resource Management (and shared HRMS) key considerations are: Define Status for resource requirement, candidate statuses, assignment approval statuses, and assignment scheduling statuses based on your organization needs Define team templates for easier setup of projects based on project types Resource competencies list OR Job Levels OR both. Note these has to be constantly managed and updated for each resource in your organization Resource matching formula with appropriate weightage for your organization About the Author Mr. Kapoor is a partner at Prisio Technologies where he manages Oracle Practice and oversees deliveries of financial, projects and procurement implementation and upgrade projects. He has over 20 years of sales, implementation strategy and delivery experience in Oracle Applications for numerous fortune 500 customers in various industries. He can be reached at ShyamK@prisiotechnologies.com. COLLABORATE 12 Copyright 2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 9