At our engineering company we use MS Project and Excel for pretty much everything. I think our techniques are likely outdated.
One thing that really kills me is we spend a lot of time updating action registers. But I imagine there is a tool out there that. Is there a recommended tool that:
--Each designer would have a dashboard of some sort
--Gives control over the actions to the designers, so that when they are done, they can check it off
--Would notify relevant people
--Notification would include attachments etc
--Would update some Gantt chart
I used Asana before but it felt like it was good for simple projects (something very sequential like website content creation) but engineering has a lot more vagueness to it.
I know if a designer clicks "completed" they might not be...but I will still exist on the project.
For context: Projects are complex and "completing a task" is a little grey. Often they will be done enough that people can move on.
A given project will have 20 engineers on it, take 3 years start to finish, each engineer will be on 3 concurrent projects. Money isn't my limiting factor, it just has to fit into our project environment.
Bonus points if it has some good communication feature (like slack) but that's likely another tool.
Side question: If there are paid services around that deal with this stuff, I'm happy to be pointed at them. Saving Changes...
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Andrew SoswaTechnology leader| Leading global financial institutionElk Grove Village, Il, United States
Unfortunately, any tool on the market will have limitations in how you want to make it perform. Using pre-packed software is an art of give/take. You sacrifice some functionality for a standard product that cost must cheaper than crating own solution.
I recommend Jira - but then you would need a Jira Admin (with Jira dev skills) to set it up and run it according to your specs.
If money is not an object, stand up a website, and build a home-grown solution. But without solid architecture, you'll see that your 10 lines of requirements will bloat to 1000's processes and sub-routines. Saving Changes...
Vladimir LiberzonR&D Director| Spider Project TeamMoscow, Russian Federation
I understood your requirements to the tool as follows:
1. Portfolio management. The tool must be able to calculate (and optimize) portfolio resource constrained schedule.
2. Uncertainty is high and so the tool must be able to simulate risks for setting reliable targets and controlling probabilities of their achievement.
3. The number of available resources is limited (20?), resources are involved in execution of several parallel projects, each one has certain skills and productivities on different task types. One of the tasks - optimization of resource assignments (resources with the same skill can replace each other).
4. Projects are complex and long. You wrote about design phase but I expect that engineering will include construction management. Usually budgeting and cost management is included also.
5. Three years project model consists of at least several thousand activities. Portfolio model can consist of hundreds of thousands activities. So the tool must be able to calculate the schedule and the budget for the portfolio of this size taking into account project priorities, resource constraints and (maybe) financial limitations.
Other requirements have lower priorities.
If I am right you have very limited choice but I am not sure that understood you correctly. In any case tool selection depends on your detailed requirements. Some of them are "must have", other - "nice to have". What is must for you? Saving Changes...
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