908 Town & Country, Suite 550 Houston, TX 77024 Phone: (713) 278-7622 info@pmccinc.com
There are several key project documents that stockholders to a corporation would assume are under the control of the project manager. One of those documents is the schedule. Yet, over the years, PMCC has audited many projects where the project manager (and sometimes the entire team) profess to understand nothing about the schedule that bears their signature! They don’t understand scheduling logic and can’t explain the constraints related to key activities.
PMCC staff member have been helping companies create, status, and report on project deliverables using schedules since the inception of the PC. The founder of PMCC, Ben Voivedich, was an early user of PC products like Harvard Project Manager, Timeline, and Finest Hour by Primavera. PMCC Vice President Burt Campbell was an early adopter of the Artemis software used extensively on Department of Defense and NASA related projects. Over the years, the names of the scheduling tools have changed and the functionality has increased logarithmically. However the best practices of schedule management have largely remained the same and PMCC can help you institute and perform quality audits to make sure that they are used.
Some areas where PMCC can provide best practice expertise include:
Schedule creation: When building schedules it is essential that certain fundamental best practices be observed. Every activity must have a predecessor and successor. Activity Durations should not normally be longer than two reporting periods. Activities must be “bought into” by the performing organization. Schedule constraints must be limited. The use of leads and lags must be closely monitored. Key milestones that tie to major project objectives and/or contractual dates must be established. These and a number of other best practices are the types of techniques that PMCC can help instill in your staff through consulting, mentoring, and training.
Schedule updating: One of the fundamental errors made in updating schedules is for the project team to report the progress to the scheduler via “per cent complete”. Once a project is over 30% complete, the question should be “what do you have left to do and how long will it take”? Experience has shown that asking this question provides much better “remaining durations”. PMCC has extensive experience in training and consulting with companies on how to properly update and report schedule progress. We can help your projects keep from falling into the “per cent complete” trap.
Schedule analysis and reporting: Making sense of a large integrated schedule can be difficult. The improper use of logic relationships, calendars, and constraints in a CPM schedule can give you an incorrect critical path. PMCC can help you analyze and report on the “real” critical path for the project. We can also help you make sense of the vast number of available reports and focus on the ones that provide the most useful information to the project team and stakeholders.
