Project and Resource Management: A Do-it-Yourself · PDF fileIn this session attendees will learn how to use Oracle Project Management and ... company where project and resource management

COLLABORATE 12 Copyright ©2012 by Shyam Kapoor Page 1

Project and Resource Management: A Do-it-Yourself guide

By Shyam Kapoor

Prisio Technologies LLC

Introduction

As per Gartner about one third of the projects are never complete and more than half exceed the budget. In a

computer world survey, ‘Project Management’ has been cited as the biggest management challenge. And within

project management, internal resource management has been cited as biggest issue. In today’s world project and

resource management is a complex challenge. Today’s projects are global in nature, have multiple stakeholders/

vendors/customers/partners from the globe, span multiple time-zones, languages, software, tools etc. To be on time

and on budget, organizations and their project managers need to be agile with time sensitive plans. They need to

review and revise strategic plans more frequently. They need to manage capacity of resources more effectively to be

successful. Moreover these tools need to be adaptive and flexible for ever changing IT environment.

In today’s global project environment, stakeholders (Executive, Program/Project Manager, Team member,

staffing/resource manager) are constantly asking questions like:

What is the overall health of my projects? Are we on-time and on budget?

What is the earned value of my project?

Why do I need additional budgets for my project?

What is my current utilization rate and how does it compare to last quarter?

What is my resource requirement forecast? Do we need to hire more? How many?

In this session attendees will learn how to use Oracle Project Management and Resource Management suite of

product, to answer above questions with tools to manage and control work plans, budgets, resources and

assignments collaboratively. Key implementation options and considerations from a case study of a large distributor

company where project and resource management was implemented in their IT department will be discussed

throughout the paper.

Projects Management Lifecycle

Oracle offers applications, beyond just Project Costing and Billing, to support the full lifecycle of project and

portfolio management from conceptualization initiative to execution. Within Oracle E-Business suite of applications

it encompasses project portfolio analysis, project & resource management, collaboration, costing & billing and time

& labor. Project Management begins right after project is selected, approved and appropriately funded. This paper

will focus on the following stages of project management:

Initiation & Planning

o Work planning

o Budgeting & Forecasting

Execution

o Progress updates

Managing Project controls

o Issue Management

o Change Management

Project Reporting

o Performance & Status reporting

Additionally Resource Management will be discussed which follow through the entire lifecycle of the project.


Figure 1: Project Management life cycle

Oracle Project Management is a tool for stakeholders, primarily project managers, for maintaining control and

visibility of all aspects of their projects. As a project stakeholder, project management application assists to track

and manage a project through the project lifecycle, from creating and planning, through to completion. It can be

fully integrated to Microsoft Project if desired.

As a project manager, using Oracle Project Management, you can:

Create, manage, version, and view workplan

Track progress against the workplan.

Link Microsoft Project with Oracle Projects enabling to work with a project using both applications.

Create budgets and forecasts to plan and manage the financial performance of projects throughout the

project lifecycle.

Track and monitor the performance of a project, and analyze financial and effort information by task,

resource, and time.

View exceptions for key financial and schedule metrics, and send automated status report notifications to

key project stakeholders.

Provide a timely and consistent view of project status information to all audience members and project

stakeholders.

Manage issues such as concerns, problems, and outstanding questions for projects and tasks.

Manage actions or changes that affect the scope, value, or duration of projects and tasks.

Attach and manage documents for projects and tasks.

Search and review the current financial status of projects and review detailed financial performance for

projects and tasks.

Project Initiation & Planning

During the initiation and planning, once the project is approved, project manager can create a detailed project

workplan with all the tasks, assign resources, create a budget for each task (or project) for approval. This is a critical

task of every IT project but typically not standardized. Many organizations choose multitude of tools – Excel, MS


Project, SharePoint, in-house portals etc without standardizing the project management process. Oracle Project

Management tool can be used during the entire life cycle of project for:

Improved management of Resources

Better monitoring and performance reporting

Effective analysis of project portfolio by executives

Project(s) can be conceptualized and initiated in Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis (PPA) with basic information.

However if PPA isn’t used in your organization, project can be directly defined in project management using

traditional java or newer self service forms by either copying from an existing project or a project template.

Configurable project dashboard can be used by all stakeholders for a single consistent view of the project details,

performance, worklist, issues and deliverables. At an IT organization implementation we created standardized work

plan structure in project templates. We didn’t chose to use project life cycle and phases, an attribute which can be

used in project reporting specially on large phased projects.

Figure 2: Project Management dashboard

Detailed workplan can be loaded from MS Project also. However we standardized work plan by project type in a

project template and updated work plan after project creation if required.

Multiple budgets and forecasts can be entered for a project either in summary or detail either manually or using

Excel (ADI) with or without workflow approvals. Budgeting is important for monitoring overall financial health of a

project as well as many project performance reports. We chose to enter budget in efforts (hours) at each detailed task

and used labor burden to calculate financial cost.

Project Execution

Since projects is fully integrated with Oracle applications like Time & Labor, Internet Expenses, Purchasing,

Payables etc, project management application has little to offer in execution other than updating the progress of the

project. All project costs can be continually collected for reporting the health of the project. Workplan progress can

be updated, reviewed and monitored by project manager and team members. You can enable collaborative progress

entry so that Individual task managers can enter the progress for the tasks that they manage. You can allow physical

percent complete collection to constantly updating project progress and rolling up at project level for reporting

purposes.


We weekly updated the percent complete and rolled up the complete and used the Gantt chart below for project

reporting.

Figure 3: Project Workplan – Gantt chart

Project Controls

Oracle Project offers a fully featured Issue Management application where issues can be logged, routed to

appropriate team members, exported to Excel and reported on. It has full document attachment capability for

reference. Based on your implementation and project reporting needs, you can tailor issue classification and status.

Managing change is crucial for all project performance reporting as it may impact resources, cost and revenue for

the project. Change requests should be logged to enable managing scope changes and approval for the project.

Change request can estimate impact on project cost and revenue. Once change requests are approved, change orders

can be created for tracking cost and revenue changes by change order. Change management offers a full document

management with approval and search capabilities.

Figure 4: Project Controls – Issues, Change Requests, Change Orders

Project Reporting

Older versions of Oracle Projects offered only Project Status Inquiry (PSI) which used to summarize budgets and

actual at PTD, UTD and ITD level. Project Management application in conjunction with Project Intelligence now

offers numerous options with powerful features for project reporting and publishing:


BI dashboards with project financial information like cumulative budget/actual, cost, effort, billing &

collections, margin, earned value

Tasks/Resource summaries for a workplan

Analysis by Tasks, Resources, Time

Visibility across all levels of a project and sub-projects and across organizations

Drill down to underlying transactions

Configurable with Graphs

Multiple currencies and calendars

Publishing and notifications with email attachments

Configurable key indicators

View Key Performance Area Statuses for a project like Financial, Schedule and Execution of project

Reporting on individual exceptions in the above performance area with configurable visual indicators (e.g.

On track, Critical, At Risk)

Figure 5: Project performance dashboard

For your project communication needs, different types of project status reports can be configured and templatized

for future use e.g. monthly steering committee report which has financial summary, project performance, earned

value, key issues and key risks or weekly project status report which has tasks status and open issues. You can

maintain appropriate security, reminder rules, schedules and publishing options for your status reports.


Resource Management

Oracle Project Resource Management provides you tools to manage and deploy resources to projects in a global

environment.

Figure 6: Resource Management life cycle

Resource Management applications uses HRMS tables to store people data. If full HRMS isn’t in place, resources

can be defined in Projects using shared HR.

Since all the resource requests and matching are done using competencies, it is utmost critical that competencies

should be current for all resources. If the competencies aren’t current, resource matching can be done manually.

Resource Requirement

Once the project is setup and approved, project manager can create project resource requirement. Project manager

can enter request priority, required date range, total efforts and competencies. If managing multiple competencies

and proficiency level is found to be too cumbersome initially, single role can be used for defining competency

unless open to resource matching manually.


Figure 7: Resource Requirement

Advertise Requirement

Resource requirements can be advertised to be made visible inside or outside the organization and can be made

visible to selective people in a date range. Oracle has several pre-defined advertising rules and many more can be

configured. Rules can be defined such as ‘Escalate and publish requirement to bigger audience every seven days if

not fulfilled’.

Search Resource

Resources can be searched from the pool to identify ‘Candidate’. Candidate exists until either rejected or approved

& assigned to the project. Resources can be searched independently of the project requirement too. Search is

performed by the dates of requirement, job level and competency. Complex scoring can be configured, say based on

different weightage of dates of requirement, job level, competency and location, to find a perfect (close to 100%)

match.

Weighting Types Percentage Comments

Competency Match 0% Global competencies finalization in progress

Availability Match 60% Availability had a higher importance for the Organization

Job Level Match 40% Currently using only Job Levels for all resources

Matching formula implemented was:

Matching score = 0*Competency Match + 0.6*Availability Match + 0.4* Job Level Match

Figure 8: Resource Matching and Candidature


Match and Review Candidate

Resources can be nominated as candidate to fill the requirement. Project manager, or member with access, can

review and approve or reject a candidate. Automated nomination can also be implemented based on weightings.

Approve and Assign Candidate

Assignment can be approved by project manager or sent for further approval based on workflow/approval hierarchy

setup. Note assignments can be added directly without any resource requirements also. Once assignment is

approved, resource is confirmed and notification is sent to resource/staffing/project manager. Assignment is created

with initial transfer price rate.

Maintain Resource Repository

Resource repository has to be constantly managed by different people in the organization for the effective use of the

tool. E.g. resource manager can review and approve vacations, timecards, trainings, and competencies and overall

find work for resources. Staffing manager can analyze open requirements, nominate candidates and can review

forecasts. Team member can track schedule, update competencies and can monitor utilization.

Figure 9: Resource Schedule with status

All stake holders – Executives, Resource Manager, Staff Manager, Project Manager and Team members can view

utilization summary or individually. Note this requires project intelligence setup.

Figure 10: Resource Utilization


Lessons Learnt

As outlined earlier, we implemented key functionalities of Oracle Project and Resource management for a large

distributor company in their IT department. Key lessons learnt from the implementation:

Standardize project management processes before implementation

Standardize workplan structure for similar types of project

Evaluate usage of project planning tools (e.g. MS Project vs. Oracle)

Well defined project communication strategy

Standardized resource competencies

Evaluate current approval hierarchy

Oracle software licenses

Key Setup Considerations

While setting up Project Management key considerations are:

Although Oracle offers Workplan structures, primarily tasks for project managers and team members, and

financial structures, tasks for financial administration of projects; we found ‘Sharing structures’ was easier

to manage and satisfy all reporting need

Progress status can be configured as per your management practice e.g. ‘Red’, ‘Green’ and ‘Yellow’ OR

standard ‘On Track’, ‘At Risk’ and ‘Critical’

Measurable ‘Work item’ for each task of Workplan and ‘Task types’ to control how Oracle Projects

processes tasks. These are used in filling timesheets if using Oracle Time & Labor

Status for Projects, Tasks, Issues, Change requests

Control Item Types which represents a specific type of issue or change and provides you with a template

for the creation of issues and changes.

Financial Plan Types are required for different types of project budgets and forecasts that you want to plan

for (for example, an approved cost budget, an estimate, or a bid).

While setting up Resource Management (and shared HRMS) key considerations are:

Define Status for resource requirement, candidate statuses, assignment approval statuses, and assignment

scheduling statuses based on your organization needs

Define team templates for easier setup of projects based on project types

Resource competencies list OR Job Levels OR both. Note these has to be constantly managed and updated

for each resource in your organization

Resource matching formula with appropriate weightage for your organization

About the Author

Mr. Kapoor is a partner at Prisio Technologies where he manages Oracle Practice and oversees deliveries of

financial, projects and procurement implementation and upgrade projects. He has over 20 years of sales,

implementation strategy and delivery experience in Oracle Applications for numerous fortune 500 customers in

various industries. He can be reached at [email protected].

mailto:[email protected]

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