I manage a team of 8 people in a small (successful) software house. The team take on all tasks in projects that are not assigned to the Design and Development departments. This means we do project management, analysis, testing, documentation and training. An individual usually has to take on multiple roles in a project and could for example, be project manager, analyst and tester. We also have to support the Sales staff in producing proposals.
The work is varied and generally things go well. On average we have 20-30 active projects at any time. These range from small changes that take 2-5 days work, to projects that take over 2 man-years.
The main issue I face is how to maintain an accurate schedule of what everyone is doing. In the past I tried to get this included in the ‘master schedule’ that gets maintained by a central Schedule resource; this is stored in MS Project. This was rejected because it was ‘too complicated to maintain’ as the number of tasks that needed to be included doubled.
The time allowed for in the quoted work generally doesn’t allow for a MS Project plan to be produced for anything other than the largest projects. This means that 50% of projects just have a simple list of tasks. This isn’t a problem, and doing a full plan would be overkill.
Should I continue with a simplified high-level list of projects and key dates in Excel (I had one in MS Project but it took too long to update) or try another approach?
I would also be grateful for views on allocation of the time allowed for in the quote to ‘project management’. Based on what has happened in the past I take the total, assign 30% of it to the startup phase of a project, 30% for the design/development/testing phase and 40% for the implementation phase. This seems to work for us but are there other views? Saving Changes...
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Andy JordanPresident| Roffensian Consulting S.A.Cherry Grove, AB, Canada
Anon, I could make this a very long post as there are a number of points in your e-mail that I would like to debate, but I'll try and stick to the specific questions that you are asking. If MS Project is not the core tool for what you want to track then I would suggest that your best solution would be one of the many time tracking solutions available - as long as it has the ability to plan resource allocations into the future, not just track historic data. I am assuming that what you really need is a view of where your resource availability / shortfalls lie. I never liked trying to track time based data in Excel because it doesn't really lend itself to a moving timeline. As far as the % of time per phase, well every project is different and I wouldn't want to try and apply a rule of thumb to individual situations (products / market conditions, etc) - if it works for you (in terms of quality / functionality / cost AND time) then it probably isn't far off.
If you want to get into some of the other points around multiple roles / importance of a project plan / etc I would be happy to discuss - feel free to contact me. Andy Jordan, President, Roffensian Consulting Inc., www.roffensian.com Saving Changes...
I understand that this is a shameless plug, however I'd like you to review Easy Projects .NET
If you consider MS Project to be an overkill, this product might work for you better, since it can give you a quick overview of all projects and tasks with their statuses, task dependency will keep the schedule alive and you can see how the allocated time compares to the actual time by categories (design, implementation, startup, etc)
Best regards, Vadim Saving Changes...
Anonymous
Thanks for the feedback.
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Wayne MackRetired| RetiredSouth Riding, Va, United States
A simple approach might be a set of 3x5 task cards on a cork board with everyone's name listed. Each person can have three columns, Work Completed, Work In Progress, and Backlog. This can also be don with a whiteboard. Couple this with a 10 minute daily stand up status meeting (See Scrum, Extreme Programming, etc.) and the supervisor and the rest of the team will know exactly what everyone is working on. I have used this method and found it to be a powerful mechanism to track status with minimal overhead.
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