Advice for Experts

In our daily life, whether GPS, automatic teller machine (ATM) or securities trading, we can see their dynamic and fast data processing to help us deal with the next step.

But in project management, most project managers and teams don't have dynamic and fast data processing (always know where they are and where their gaps are) and can’t control the following and others well enough:

• Sufficient upfront work done such as requirements study or geologic complication remediation
• Inability to understand the complexity of the work planned
• Queuing - Improper allocation of resources to critical path activities
• Multitasking causes project activities to wait on resources and suffer efficiency degrades
• Student Syndrome – Some team members wait to progress until it is close to the deadline
• Rework - Work not completed in accordance with standards and, thus, must be redone

If you don’t want “head in the sand”, having a dynamic plan will allow you to control project execution far more effectively. Today, with rapid data processing, using data to evaluate what is working and what isn’t is crucial in managing project execution.

PM can provide you with project dynamic plans through the following.

Similar to the transactions and data in an automated teller machine (ATM), PPM is real-time transaction-oriented and always has up-to-date single-copy-of-the-truth data.

You don’t want to leave room for doubt how complete or incomplete your project deliverables are. Therefore, it is important to set up the following concrete measures:

• For deliverables that can be measured by the system based on metrics, set up their metrics for measurement.
• For deliverables that can’t be measured by the system based on metrics, set up their % of complete policies.

You also want to have a methodological way of measuring the percentage of completion of the entire project based on the completeness of its milestones/activities/deliverables. In the light of the weights configured for top-level milestones/activities/deliverables, the system can automatically deduce the percentage of completion of the entire project.

You want your project stakeholders to access information and/or automatically receive information according to their roles. Therefore, it is important to set up the stakeholder access privileges and alert rules.

In order to control all project items that need to be approved and re-approved, you will need to set up the policies for approvals and control parameters for automatic triggering of the needs for re-approvals of your project items.

You want your relevant stakeholders to be alerted/notified at the earliest possible time on the things that they should know. Through setting up alert and notification rules, your relevant stakeholders can be alerted/notified at the earliest possible time.

You can also set up automatic generation of status reports periodically to send to the relevant stakeholders by the system.

You can set up the automatic baseline mechanism so that you can always compare the current project plan with any of its previous versions.

You can also set up the automatic forecast mechanism to allow you to see the impacts of every change to your project.

A deliverable or milestone is late only one day at a time. When a project suddenly slips its schedule by several weeks because the problem or lateness wasn’t detected at the earliest possible time. When the project plan and the project execution are inseparable, deviation can be detected at the earliest possible time. When the deliverable and its associated responsibilities are tracked together by the system, people’s performance problems can also be detected at the same time.