What's Your Best Project Management Tip?

This forum is for members to share and gain knowledge of Project Management. Got a question about project management? Need help with a problem? Wish to offer tips and advice? Post here.
satisfactionuk
Expert Member
Expert Member
Posts: 132
Joined: Wed 08 Sep 2010 1:38 pm
Location: Westminster - London

Resource Scheduling - Calendars

When starting a new project determining when resources are available can be a long and laborious task. People have holidays booked, special days off booked have to go on courses and a myriad of other reasons why they are not available to work on the project and of course they may be working on several other project too.

If you are using MS Project or another package that is similar this need not be a problem.

All you need to do is set up a blank project and call it resource availability, you may have to give it a start date but this can be changed at will.

The first step is to fill in the master calendar with all the official holidays for the next couple of years (this should cover the period of your longest anticipated project) or you could have it just run on into the forseeable future.

Next, go to the resource-scheduling page and enter the names of everyone in the company who works on projects and assign them a personal calendar.

Then get each of these people to fill in their calendars with their times off for the period that the master calendar covers.

Next have the PO fill in all the dates that each person is known to be working on projects, as new projects are aproved and come on line this master project schedule should be updated too.

Having done this it is easy start a new project with an up to date list of resources and a good knowledge of their availability.

Just open the resources availability project file and rename it to whatever you want and carry on from there.

All you need to do then is look at the main calendar for company wide holidays and shut downs, then look at the various resource sheets for an over view, then if necessary you can look at individual resource calendars to determine when they are available to work.

You could denote all the names of the resources that you are going to use on your project and then bring them to the top of the list and once your confident that you have fully resourced your project all you need to do is delete the names of the people that you don’t need before levelling.

This may take a bit of time to set up in the begining but will save a lot of time and hassle when resourcing future projects.

The biggest problem would of course be - getting people to keep it up to date - but that is a management policy issue.

Kind regards

Stephan Toth
satisfactionuk
Expert Member
Expert Member
Posts: 132
Joined: Wed 08 Sep 2010 1:38 pm
Location: Westminster - London

This is more of a discussion of an idea rather than a tip.

Zero buffer projects:

Assume that we have a project of any size but lets say it has 100 phases and 1000 task and that you are going to use MS Project as your scheduling tool and Palisade @Risk for Projects as your risk profiling tool.

Lets also assume that you have fully resourced the project and applied all of the cost and when it comes to calculating the durations you have used a confident and reliable three-point estimating system and entered the most likely times into the duration field (this does not matter at the moment because they will be changed).

Now lets assume that you have not included any buffers what so ever to any part of the project.

Now lets assume that you have completely risk profiled the project that is all of the task, the phases and the project as a whole using Palisades @Risk for Projects programme.

Now at this stage after say 1 or more thousand iterations you should have a pretty confident histogram showing a three-point estimate of the total time and cost of the project.

My argument for why a project does not need arbitrary buffers added into the phases or task by the project manager is this. Using simulation every task has had 1000 iterations or more to prove that on the balance of probabilities that the subsequent three-point estimate is accurate enough for project management purposes. The final analysis on the project as a whole is based on the accumulative effect of all of the other individual analysis carried out right down to the task level.

Now for the fun stuff, for simplicity we are going to use 100 percent as our distribution. Meaning our three-point estimate that we are going to present to the project sponsor is 0, 50 and 100 percent.

We advise the project sponsor that the risk profile for this project has had absolutely no additional buffers added to it and we are almost absolutely sure that the project will be completed on time at the 100 percent marker.

Using the mouse we then move the right hand pointer to the mean on the histogram (in this case the 50 percent mark) and say at this point there is only a 50:50 chance of finishing the project on time. We then move the mouse back to the 100 percent mark and invite him or her to move the delimiter line left according to his or her risk appetite.

If s/he moves the mouse too far left one could look in surprise and smile saying Hmmm are you really sure that you are that confident and want to take that much risk of project failure.

Lets say that s/he settles for and insists on the 70 or 80 percent confidence level mark, it doesn’t really matter where s/he really thinks the risk should be. You could argue for a better deal or you could appease him or her and say ‘fine we agree that that is the projects target time and the remaining amount we will use as the project buffer just in case something goes wrong’. Naturally you would do the same for cost too.

At this time you also make it absolutely clear that any changes to the project plan will have ramifications on both the time and the cost elements of the project and also the risks too and that they will have to be fully accounted for before acceptance.

Using this system, throughout the whole project the difference in time and associated cost between the most likely and pessimistic ratings on each task is in fact your buffer.

If you use up any or even all of the buffer you can simply put it down to the fact that the boss was over optamistic in his risk assessment and even though you came in at 99 percent you are still within the profile limits expressed in the project histograme.

What do you think?

Kind regards

Stephan Toth
satisfactionuk
Expert Member
Expert Member
Posts: 132
Joined: Wed 08 Sep 2010 1:38 pm
Location: Westminster - London

There is nothing as unequal as the equal treatment of un-equals.

Apart from the pre-communist era where the treatment of the whole of society was rounded down to the lowest common denominator is there any really good reason in society or even more so in the business environment for dictating that every single person should be treat the same.

Should a highly motivated and dedicated employee be treated the same as a mediocre employee who is just soldiering on to get his basic pay packet at the end of the month.

Should the disruptive employees be treated the same as the compliant ones or the or the highly skilled employees who take the time and trouble to add to their corporate value by continued education be treat the same as the person who has decided that they just want to know enough to get by.

When it comes to the art of good man-management, knowing and treating your workforce as individuals is of paramount importance if you are going to get the best out of them.

Kind regards

Stephan Toth
satisfactionuk
Expert Member
Expert Member
Posts: 132
Joined: Wed 08 Sep 2010 1:38 pm
Location: Westminster - London

Create a challenge – Have a bet.

This tip is in the form of a short real life story that actually happened.

When I was a thermoset moulding supervisor I noticed that one of my moulders shut down his press early. On enquiring why he had shut down his press he told me that he had completed his work quota for the day and bragged that he could have done 2000 mouldings instead of the 1800 expected of him. I checked his work and to my surprise he had in fact completed his task and with only around 2 percent rejects which was well under the prescribed limit.

I could have done what most supervisors would have done in this situation and told him that he had to continue moulding right up to the finishing time, but I decided that this was not the way to go.

Oh I said to him, you think your that good do you, he smiled and said you bet I am. I said OK, I’ll bet you a bottle of whatever you drink against a bottle of brandy that you cannot achieve 2000 good mouldings on a single shift by the end of the week.

He accepted the bet.

To cut a long story short over that week his recorded moulding production went steadily up until on the final day he proudly called me over and said there you are 2000 mouldings and only 6 rejects. Well done I said, tomorrow I will bring you in what ever drink you like, he said whisky would do fine. The next day I brought him in a bottle of good quality whisky.

Later on when it came to shift changeover the oncoming extremely autocratic and belligerent supervisor called me a fool and went on to say that this particular worker had been storing mouldings in his locker all week to guarantee that he would win the bet on the Friday.

I laughed at his ignorance and said I know, but you have to consider what I have achieved through this little exercise.

1) All of the week the rest of the team was talking about the bet and cheering him on which was a great team gelling process.
2) There was a great deal of good humoured banter on the shop floor which actually raised the game of the other team members and was reflected in their reported numbers.
3) Each day (not counting the mouldings that he had put in his locker) I had not only achieved my target from him but also had considerably exceeded it.
4) Over the week I had actually got an extra days work in production out of this moulder for the price of a bottle of whisky that cost me £12.50 in a supermarket.
5) If I had got him to do this work on overtime it would have cost me up to 6 times as much money in wages.

Unfortunately this went right above his head because of his autocratic attitude towards his workers he just could not grasp the principles involved.

The moral of the story is – Not all incentives have to come from the companies official scheme and there is no law that says you cant have fun at work and increase production at the same time.
Kind regards

Stephan Toth
Post Reply