Planning an Enterprise-Wide Project

 Server   Pro  With Microsoft Project 2002—and especially with Project Professional and Project Server—Microsoft entered the market for enterprise-wide project management software. Until the release of Project 2002, Microsoft Project played primarily in the standalone project management software market, leaving the high-end enterprise market to Primavera, Welcom, and similar software programs. Users well-versed in how to use Project had to abandon all those skills and knowledge to migrate to a completely different software platform. But with Project 2002, Microsoft is betting that a large number of project management professionals will opt to stay within the Project family when managing larger, enterprise-wide projects.

What, exactly, is an enterprise project? Put simply, it’s a very large project with a lot of team members, and pieces and parts spread across the far regions of a large company or organization. Resources might come from several remote branches, and twice as many departments; these same resources might be working on (or be available for) other projects managed from elsewhere in the organization. Tasks might be dependent on resources located halfway around the country, or on tasks or other projects managed by staff you’ve never even met.

To compare, a project to develop a short advertising brochure, executed by a half-dozen people, is not an enterprise project. A project to develop a new jet aircraft, with hundreds of different tasks spread among a dozen locations, is an enterprise project. It’s simply a matter of scale.

Managing this type of complexity is well beyond the capabilities of older versions of Microsoft Projectas well as Project 2002 Standard. Project 2002 Professional, however, was designed just for these types of enterprise-wide projects.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of Project Professional’s enterprise management features, it’s imperative that we discuss exactly how to plan for the management of a complex enterprise-wide project. As with more-familiar, smaller-scale projects, if you get the planning right, the management of the project becomes much easier.

Planning Consistent Processes

Just as you set up the key processes and deliverables in your smaller-scale projects, you need to set up enterprise-wide processes and deliverables for larger, complex projects. You must determine exactly how to define each task and subtask, how to measure progress, when to update the project, when to generate reports and what kind of reports to generate, when to reassess resource assignments, and so on.

And, if you’re working in a multi-project environment, defining all the pieces and parts for a single project isn’t enough. You need to define a consistent set of pieces and parts for all the projects in your portfolio, so that “Contacting the Client” in project 1 is the same as “Contacting the Client” in project 101. You especially want your reporting to be consistent; senior management will demand a consistent reporting format to help them grasp the details of all current projects more quickly. It won’t do to have naming and tracking conventions that differ from report to report. You’ll only confuse the powers that be, and make it more difficult for them to compare one project to another.

So job one for an enterprise project manager is to define the processes, measurement standards, reports, and other deliverables for all projects across the organization. This will be a living document, of course, as each new project is likely to contain its own unique elements. Create this as a Word document and then place it on your corporate server for easy access, or distribute hard copies to appropriate management and staff.

Planning Consistent Data Tracking

When you’re working with multiple managers, departments, and locations, it’s vitally important that you standardize on a consistent set of naming and tracking conventions. Without these conventions, what one branch calls “Sales” might be called “Revenues” by another, and “Bookings” by yet another; one department’s “John Smith” might be another’s “Smith, John.” Without some sort of standardization, you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time getting all your data fields to line up properly—if you can match them up at all.

Project Professional has several features that help you provide consistent data entry, tracking, and reporting. Here are some of the features that you should incorporate when planning your enterprise project:

Enterprise Resources When working on an enterprise-wide project, you can call upon resources located anywhere within the organization. A potential problem exists, however, when those resources are kept in separate databases, or in separate versions of Project. The solution is to create an enterprise-wide pool of available resources—what Project Professional calls the enterprise resource pool. By organizing all of your resources into a single database, you can control the definition and naming of the resources, thus preventing any potential inconsistencies. The enterprise resource pool also lets you assign resources to multiple projects across the organization; you’ll know immediately whether John Smith is available for your new project, or whether he’s tied up doing work for the new office in Des Moines. For this reason, it’s important to set up your enterprise resource pool before you create a new enterprise project.

Enterprise Skill and Attribute Definitions After your resources are centralized in the enterprise resource pool, you can determine all the information you need to record for those resources. You can define specific attributes you want to track, such as location, age, pay level, and so on, and make sure those attributes are tracked consistently across the organization. You can also assign specific job descriptions or skill levels to your resources so that a Programmer Level One is the same across the entire enterprise. Make sure to define skill levels and other attributes at the outset of every new enterprise project.

Enterprise Custom Fields Project Professional includes all the fundamental fields you need for basic project management; however, you may want to create fields to track data specific to your organization or project. Project Professional enables you to create what it calls enterprise custom fields, which you define once and then apply across your entire organization. If resource shoe size is important to your company, you can create a custom field to track shoe size across the enterprise in a consistent format (fractions instead of decimal points, for example). When you’re planning a new enterprise project, make sure to create whatever enterprise custom fields you need to track all your important data.

Enterprise Outline Codes You may want to track the progress of your project in a way that Project isn’t normally set up to track, such as sorting your resources by skill level, or looking at a project’s task by office location. When you want to create your own tracking criteria, you use Project’s outline codes feature. Project Professional enables you to create enterprise outline codes that are consistent across the entire organization; you should create a set of enterprise outline codes at the outset of every new project.

It’s a good idea to establish a set of tasks and project attributes that will be applied across your organization. You want every manager and team member defining and reporting their tasks in a consistent format, which means you have to tell them how it should be done. Unfortunately, Project can’t help you much with this; instead, you’ll want to create a set of project guidelines to be distributed to appropriate staff. Insist on strict compliance to your guidelines, and you’ll end up with much more consistent projects across your entire organization.

Planning Appropriate Responsibilities

Your final pre-project task is to define the responsibilities of the members of your team— or, in other words, to determine who does what. If someone is assigned to be project manager, that person should have the same duties and responsibilities as other staff with that title. And those duties and responsibilities should be different from those of senior management, and of lower-level team members.

Project Professional facilitates this process by defining seven different “groups” of Project users. You learned about these groups in Chapter 20. To refresh your memory, here are the seven groups, along with a general overview of their roles within the project management environment:

Administrators Administrators are responsible for installing, configuring, and administering Project Server, as well as managing the Project Server database, and making sure that Project Server interfaces with SQL Server, IIS, and other network services and databases. Administrators are also responsible for making changes to the enterprise global database, supporting the community of Microsoft Project users across the network, importing resources and schedules, creating portfolio analysis models, creating and managing views, and checking in enterprise projects and resources.

Executives Executives have many major responsibilities across the breadth of the company, but only a handful of responsibilities when it comes to project management. Their main responsibility is to view and analyze project information from a business perspective.

Portfolio Managers A portfolio manager’s portfolio consists of multiple enterprise projects and the processes behind those projects. In particular, portfolio managers are responsible for defining and deploying project mxanagement processes, standards, and conventions; creating generic resources in the enterprise resource pool; defining and assigning enterprise resource outline codes; creating enterprise templates; and viewing and analyzing enterprise resource information from an organization perspective.

Project Managers Project managers manage individual projects. They’re responsible for generating initial schedules, and saving schedule versions on Project Server. They’re also responsible for tracking project progress, assigning generic resource tasks to actual resources, and viewing and analyzing enterprise resource information from a project perspective.

Resource Managers Resource managers are responsible for keeping the information in the resource repository up to date, reviewing resource assignments, managing enterprise to-do lists, and performing resource analysis, modeling, and forecasting.

Team Leads Team leads (leaders) manage teams of users for individual parts of a project. They’re also responsible for assisting project managers and resource managers with resource management.

Team Members Team members do the work. They’re responsible for entering data about their tasks and status.

Note 

Team members don’t need to have access to Microsoft Project software; they can enter their data using a web browser via Project Web Access. (See Chapter 22 for more information.)

It might be easier to envision the roles of these groups via the diagram in Figure 21.1. Each large project has a manager, called the Project Manager. Underneath the Project Manager are several teams, each led by a Team Lead and composed of multiple Team Members.

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Figure 21.1: Project management across the enterprise

Each Project Manager reports to the Portfolio Manager who manages all the different projects in a portfolio—and a large organization might have several Portfolio Managers. Adjacent to the Portfolio Manager is the Resource Manager, who is responsible for managing all the resources in all the Portfolio Manager’s projects.

Above the Portfolio Manager are the Executives. These are senior management personnel who run the entire organization; the portfolio of projects is just one of their many high-level responsibilities.

Finally, in a support role, are the Administrators. These individuals are needed to keep the trains running on time, so to speak; they install and administer Project Server and all the individual copies of Microsoft Project, add and delete users as necessary, and troubleshoot any technical problems across the enterprise.



Mastering Microsoft Project 2002
Mastering Microsoft Project 2002
ISBN: 0782141471
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 241

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