First post here. I manage large scale SAP projects in IT. Generally, SAP still uses Waterfall (although we're slowly moing to agile techniques). I'll use MS Project to manage my projects and I'm struggling with the development phase of the projects.
On my projects, there may be 50-200 custom developments (in addition to the configuration of the tool). Each of these custom developments is generally independent of each other and consist of the same tasks: Write Design Spec, Write Code, Technical Test, and Functional Test These task are each steps and have predecessors logged, 1,2,3,4. Depending on the project there may be one or two other in there.
Two Problems:
1)I'd like to resource level - but I always seem to get unknown results. I put higher priorities on all of the Design specs to get them out to the developers asap... I try to keep one resource per task for simplification...How do I control this in the best way??
2)Something that I don't think IT does well at all is execute against a project. That means updating the progress against the status date on a regular basis. I think this is part of the reason that 1 is a problem as I get into execution and change requests are added. Do you use automatic resource leveling? How often should I update progress (using the update project button)? What are the pitfalls to lookout for?
Thanks for any help and thoughts on the matter Saving Changes...
Given the significant number of custom development items in the project, you might be better off working from a prioritized backlog and organize tasks within your schedule in terms of small iterations. Yes, this sounds agile, but you could still do it in a waterfall like manner - that will at least save you the effort of micro-scheduling down to the individual activity per custom development. Have your team size the relative effort of each custom development and then decide how many can fit within each timebox. That should make it a bit easier to manage resource allocation as the allocation is to a fixed duration rather than to a set of activities.
In general, I'd avoid having team members till me a % complete for their tasks and would prefer to have them tell me how much effort is remaining or when they expect to have a task completed.
Avoid automatic resource leveling as it will rarely give you the control over the schedule that you desire.
Given that these are SAP implementation projects, doesn't the ASAP methodology include some standard schedule templates which might already address some of these concerns?
Yes Kiron's idea of the backlog is a good one. I would add in a task or kanban board to visualize the movement of tasks through to completion. Saving Changes...
Thank you so much for the feedback. Quite honestly, your advice sounds much like what is going on in the SAP world moving to Agile concepts. Pushing the development phase into sprints and releases.
There is still quite a bit of Waterfall going on simply due to the difficulties in breaking up SAP into smaller digestible chunks. How can you see HR working without Finance or logistics without Sales. Not saying that it's not doable - smarter people than I are trying to get there.
In the meantime - a significant portion of the work is still pure Waterfall. To give you a sense of scale, we might have 50-200 custom developments across 40-50 developers and 20-30 BAs. A quick project is 6 months, long projects go from 2-3 years (and yes I hear the collective moan from anyone who is reading this :-) )
Most of the projects that I've been working on (23 years of SAP, 16 years of SAP PM) haven't done a good job in this area. Sometimes I was in charge of that part, some I wasn't. Few do schedule down to these tasks.
So many of these individual tasks may be weeks...and I need to determine how much development is going to be complete by test time.
I like the statement of not telling % complete for status. I prefer task completion date for status on my projects.
BTW - SAP as well as my consulting company has plenty of templates for plans. Two things - they don't have the development phase laid out in the template as those details don't come until BluePrint has started. Also, I haven't seen IT PMs drive the status date for execution though. Saving Changes...
Even in a waterfall, sequential phase-based approach, you could use a work management philosophy such as Kanban to encourage flow rather than batching. The key to address your resource allocation challenge will be to get some predictability around resource availability. If those 40 developers & 20 BAs are dedicated to your project, then the question shifts to what will they work on when as opposed to how much of them do I need...
With regards to the long duration of certain tasks - is there simply no way to decompose them in some logical fashion to enable more accurate estimation and/or tracking?
