Scheduling

Don’t Gantt. Strip!

Posted on by antono598

The Gantt chart is one of the most popular tools that project management professionals use today, but would a strip board be better?   Gantt charts have been a robust method of graphically representing a project schedule and the relationships with other tasks in that schedule for a century.  The problem I have found though is they can be difficult to understand.  Unless the person observing it has prior experience with Gantt charts and knows what to look for, the first expression one gets is usually a blank stare, then a look at the beginning and end dates on the left that appears like a spreadsheet and then a question about what tasks are specific to them even if the resources have been entered and appear on the bar in the graph.  So what tool can a project manager use to better communicate a schedule?

One effective alternative to a Gantt chart for a graphical representation of a schedule is the strip board.  Also known as a production board and made popular by the film industry, it shows the sequential order of a film on strips of paper that can then be moved around by the director to make up the scenes in a movie.  For a project management application, instead of a director and scenes, you have a project manager and tasks.  The project strip board can be constructed with the name of each resource across the top and the time sequence along the left column.  Fergus O’Connell provides a brief description and example in his book ‘The Competitive Advantage of Common Sense‘ in chapter 4 on page 65.  By constructing a project strip board, the number of resources, the tasks and the duration of each task need to be identified for the board to be meaningful.  In addition, the board can be distributed to each team member where they can see what they need to do, when and how it relates to other people on the team.  Some other advantages are:

– Can add a column for cost and sum up to give you total.

– Drives the PM to put names to tasks from the beginning.

– Works well with portrait style paper.

As an experiment, I re-created the exercise that we did in class Saturday, ‘A Project Management Decision-Making Game’ using the project strip board method.  Though anything is better than pencil, paper, and losing about half of an eraser, I found the strip board method very easy to construct in Excel and easy to manipulate when changes were made.  The only disadvantage I found was the ease of tracking the relationships between tasks unless it was done by the same resource.  With some additional experimentation though, using different color backgrounds or some of the graphic arrows available in Excel may help.

Has anyone utilized a project strip board on a project?  Do you think it might be a tool that can be used for showing activities during the events that project teams are hosting?

http://ebookbrowse.com/gdoc.php?id=273285826&url=b8f88204bedb2e3f850c40361888ce64

Software to Simplify Project Management

Posted on by jamesonh301s12

Learning about the aspects of project management was interesting to me because a business can be successful unless it manages it projects successfully.  I worked at a painting company one summer and our project management was directly linked to how successfully we completed a job.  The owners of the company had to assess how much time would need to be dedicated to a project and how much it would cost to complete.  They would also choose which employees they wanted to do which job.  The employees who performed the best were put on the most important projects.  Project management was successful at our company because we had clearly defined goals, each job was unique, the jobs required our specialized skills, and all of the projects were temporary but each was essential to the success of the company. 

 It was also essential for our company to use the process of planning, scheduling, and controlling.  The planning stage included figuring out what products or tools would be needed to complete a job, figuring out who would be put on the job, figuring out transportation, and other things of that nature.  The scheduling stage would include decisions like the jobs start date and the estimated end date.  They would also need to schedule when they wanted the job to be completed during the day.  Some jobs could only be worked on at night because the business could not be disturbed during the day. The controlling aspect would be making sure that everything is going according to schedule and that the quality of the work met company standards. If a job was substandard then adjustments had to be made to scheduling to fix the problem. 

The owners of the company also had to decide which projects took precedence over others.  Sometimes we would be told to put a current project on hold because more important project required more attention.  Deciding which projects take precedence is essential to the company’s success because you need to be able to understand which accounts are most important to your business so you can keep them happy. 

Keeping track of all of this would be very stressful.  However technology is being designed to make managing projects a little bit easier.  The company semYOU has come out with new project management software called sem.ProjectPoint(http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cloud-project-management-semyou-releases-new-version-of-semprojectpoint-159862105.html).  This is cloud based software so it allows you to store and easily share information throughout a company.  It also allows you to view information about your company in useful ways such as in pie charts or other forms.  This allows you to quickly find overviews of what’s going on in your organization and will help to identify a company’s needs.  Would integrating this new technology into a company’s project management process be beneficial to an organization, or would it interfere with their existing methods?

Project Management in Construction: The Difference Between Profits and Losses

Posted on by johnd301s1

Project management tools like Gantt charts and precedence diagrams can mean the difference between high profits and painful losses for project-centric lines of business. During my time with a general contractor in the construction industry, these two tools played a central role in each project we undertook. From planning to ground breaking to final inspection, the documents were an anchor for organizing our activities. We referred to them daily to determine when to schedule sub-contractor (plumbers, electricians, HVAC installers, etc.) arrivals, as a reference tool for updating clients during site visits, and as guide for keeping track of the literally hundreds of activities that needed to happen in precise sequence to stay on schedule.

On Site

In construction, business is negotiated on a per-contract basis. Before groundbreaking, general contractors will examine a proposed project in concert with architects and engineers to develop a construction schedule, calculate expenses, and formulate a bid. The schedule is basically a detailed Gantt chart and precedence diagram. If the client likes the bid amount, they will award the contract and agree to make payment after certain milestones and upon completion. If everything goes to plan, the contractor can reap substantial profits. On the other hand, failure to meet deadlines on the contractor’s part will result in penalty fees and turn the project into a financial loss very quickly.

Once work begins, on-site superintendents use the finalized Gantt chart and precedence diagram to manage sub-contractors and schedule upcoming activities. As a superintendent it was my job to know when each task needed to be completed, to understand how each activity played into the overall project timing (were they on the critical path or was there slack time?), and to manage the site accordingly.

The Five Guys Project

I remember one day, while working on a Five Guys franchise project, when our company was in danger of missing a critical deadline. Even though the consequence of our delay wouldn’t become apparent for several weeks, we knew from our precedence diagram that some certain cement cutting was on the critical path and had to happen before going home that day. We stayed overnight to get it done because failure to do so threatened the whole job’s profitability. Our project management tools helped us see the problem, address it, and avoid a costly delay.

The point of saying this is to drive home the applicability and usefulness of the tools we’re learning about in class. Understanding how to develop and how to use them is absolutely critical in the construction industry.

In your experience, what are some projects, industries, or situations where project management tools have played a central role?