executive summary
➔ The venerable Gantt project schedule increasingly is moving outside the project management office to the desktops of departmental managers, executives and rank-and-file staff.
➔ Electronic scheduling tools can be accessed easily to provide a status report across portfolios.
➔ Advanced features facilitate delegation management, a hot topic as companies strive to get a more precise handle on the levels of responsibility in a project.
➔ Web links and collaborative groupware make it easier to distribute schedules across the enterprise and receive timely reports from team members.
Scheduling software comes in two varieties. Most commonly, it is a module, or at least a major feature, in a much broader and more powerful project- or portfolio-management offering from the likes of Microsoft Corp., Niku Corp., Primavera Systems Inc. and Welcom. A small group of vendors sells standalone scheduling tools that typically include basic project-management features, including earned value and resource management and are geared to people without special project management skills. Products in this category include Milestones from Kidasa Software Inc., FastTrack Schedule 8 from AEC Software Inc., Delegator from Madrigal Soft Tools, and Niku Corp.’s free program, OpenWorkbench.
Scheduling, long the responsibility of specialists—especially in such long-term planning-intensive industries as construction and aerospace—has taken on new life as a core project discipline. “What is fairly common is to generate a first cut in Microsoft Project, and then not really keeping it up to date,” says Matt Light, research director at Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn., USA, an IT market-research firm. Mr. Light is among a growing chorus of experts who say desktop project management tools like Microsoft Project are often used for basic Gantt scheduling and little else, a situation that is turning scheduling software into a cheap commodity.
Niku made the same argument last year when it released its Workbench scheduling and project management tool for free, as OpenWorkbench. Still, while Mr. Light believes that scheduling is growing in popularity, “it's not growing by leaps and bounds,” he says. “It's probably adding 10 percent a year, and a lot of that is Microsoft Project.”
Popular Movement
➔Robust project scheduling is moving out of the project management office to corporate desktops. Scheduling tools are a good fit for executives because they provide views that closely map to the organizational structure of the people under supervision. Like departmental managers, project scheduling tends to view resources (including people and equipment) as being assigned to several projects. “They have a lot of small projects, and those projects involve a lot of the same people,” says Casey Rippon, marketing manager of Madrigal Soft Tools, Victoria, B.C., Canada, maker of Delegator scheduling software.
Scheduling software is a run-the-business workhorse in some companies. At DENSO Manufacturing Tennessee Inc., Maryville, Tenn., USA, a maker of automotive instrument clusters, managers and engineers use FastTrack Schedule 8 to schedule repeated pre-production tests on manufacturing equipment. For this arrangement, the company needed FastTrack's ability to display multiple Gantt bars for a single, repeated task, something that a prominent competitor could not provide. DENSO also liked the software's support for different display options. “It's pretty easy to take a snapshot out of FastTrack and put it in a PowerPoint presentation,” says Don Tracy, the company's senior manager of production services. The instrument cluster plant consists of approximately 500 people, of which approximately 200 use a variety of other communication mechanisms, including e-mail, to get schedules out to workers. “If managers have been given the right to update [the schedule], they do the updating on the same file that's loaded on the network,” he says. Mr. Tracy likes FastTrack's ease-of-use, which he considers critical in any scheduling tool. “I can sit someone down to learn the software in less than an hour,” he says. “They can create a simple Gantt chart, then they can learn resources as they get more familiar with it.”
Ahead of the Curve
Most recent and upcoming advances in project scheduling software have focused mostly on the communications technology needed to distribute schedules more broadly across and outside the enterprise, while ensuring that new information on project status flows up and down the management chain.
Mobile Clients. Software vendors have begun adding support for PocketPC and Palm handheld computers and even cell phones, making it easier for team members to view the latest schedule changes and upload time sheets and other status reports to management.
Web Integration. The software increasingly is exploiting open Internet standards to link to other programs, such as project portfolio management (PPM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications that hold critical project-related data.
➔Teamware, Collaboration and Document Management. Project schedules are posted on a Web server and viewed by everyone through a dedicated centralized “portal,” or e-mailed to team members who sometimes can update their status directly. Project documents are accessible from highlighted links embedded right in the schedule's timelines.
Smarter Scheduling Software. Emerging “semantic Web” technology could make it easier to share schedules and access the information within them, regardless of the brand of software. New algorithms in Metier's Worklenz, for example, allow managers to build rule-based critical paths to explore alternate scenarios.
At Georgia Power Co., Atlanta, Ga., USA, scheduling is arguably a more serious endeavor, as managers use the scheduling tools in Artemis Views from Artemis International Solutions Corp., backed by Oracle databases, to schedule electrical transmissions. “We have a dedicated project management and scheduling team,” says Principal Engineer Bob Nowell. “We manage close to 1,500 projects at the same time.” Team members log their task status every two weeks into Oracle forms that are collected by the scheduling specialists, and the company is considering eventually letting teams modify schedules themselves. The company also uses the Artemis Views scheduler to drive its budgeting system.
Scheduling the Enterprise
It is perhaps ironic that although scheduling has a reputation as the solitary task of a single manager, the concurrent growth of project portfolio management (PPM) software such as Metier's Worklenz, Niku's Clarity and ProSight's Portfolios— all inherently networked, enterprisewide systems—is fueling increased use of scheduling. According to Thomas Walenta, senior project manager at IBM Global Services Germany in Frankfurt, the scheduling tools in the Augeo Software portfolio management suite give his company a better overview of the 150 projects in the portfolio, as well as better visibility of milestones, dependencies and progress.
➔Software is becoming increasingly popular at the executive level because electronic scheduling tools can be accessed easily to provide a status report across portfolios. As a result, software provides increased functionality for a range of higher ups. “The advent of project portfolio management really has caused project management to become a required core competency for companies,” says Douglas Clark, Washington, D.C., USA-based Metier's chief executive officer. “In our own tool, we're examining critical paths across the portfolio. The art of scheduling is out of the hands of the priests of scheduling.”
Because resource management modules, which often are included in enterprise project management and PPM suites, work across departments and roles, the newer, more mainstream scheduling tools must have an accurate view of resources both inside the manager's department and in other departments across the enterprise. This allows the manager to track the multiple projects that typically are shared among the resources in the department, while making the same information available to superiors and other managers who assign projects.
➔These features also help with delegation management, a hot topic as companies seek to meet strict governance laws by getting a more precise handle on the levels of responsibility in a project. “The project manager typically can identify a role that is required,” says Michael Shomberg, vice president of marketing at Primavera, Bala Cynwyd, Pa., USA. “In a lot of cases, it has to go to a resource manager to assign a resource to that role. There is a definite transition from managing discrete projects to managing work. If you're just managing projects, you're only getting a partial view of what's going on in the organization.”
While scheduling technology continues to progress (see sidebar), PMI’s upcoming Practice Standard for Scheduling holds much promise. The standard, scheduled for release in March 2006, is investigating the use of the Internet's data-exchange standard, Extensible Markup Language (XML), to allow exchange of schedules across different computer platforms and software. “We're going to codify some basic rules—for example, every item in a schedule has to have a predecessor,” says Mr. Clark, the standard's project manager. The standard also will encourage best practices in how schedule software is designed and how it is used. “We really discourage the use of constraints, because constraints override the logic of the critical-path algorithms,” he says.
“By offering these newer, enterprise-level schedules which identify cross-project relationships and tying them so closely to an organization's other business applications, vendors can improve an organization's project success rate by 10 to 20 percent or more,” Mr. Shomberg says. PM