How to Determine the Value of Value?

valueThe question is project management, that has been asked frequently and quite readily is how the things both tangible and intangible can be determined, the cost and effectiveness. What is its value exactly? Value is a concept that varies from organization to organization and encompasses the total sum of all profits, gains and losses.

When the value which can be seen and determined is easy but what about the intangible ones. The clear ones can get you return, and you can easily get where the return is? The intangible elements the project can generate.

Businesses primarily consists of things are tangible, but things which are intangible can have great impact on businesses changing the way they operate, how employees are managed, how products are designed and sold. Intangibles can be classified as benefits or assets (resources). The benefits classified as intangible consists of subjective approaches and views about a company that can’t be expressed in terms of money.

The challenge is finding and tracing these valued intangibles. Keeping in mind, most of the value will be created in the minds of the investors or stakeholders.

Project management is considered as a central process in businesses used to oversee and control specific activities. The results of project management from that of the project as a whole cannot be differentiated and if they can, this might be a difficult thing to do. It definitely takes time and money to manage a project. The benefits include, both in terms of tangible and intangible.

One of the very basic tangible benefits that adds value to the business or project is budget management.

It is a major benefit that includes budgetary savings. Project managers are responsible for controlling budgets, making decisions how the resources need to be allocated, in order to get the best return.

Second major tangible benefit is meeting deadlines, which majorly includes managing your time. The completion of project requires two main things, completing it in budget and in time, meeting the deadline is very crucial to success of the project which ultimately adds value to the business and in return stakeholders get a sense of reliability over the project management team.

The intangible benefits can be managing risk and team work.

Discussing the prior, risk management is important as well as a difficult task to do. The reason being its difficult quantifying as compared to cost savings. The only thing project managers can do is evaluate the factors that can cause harm to the project and plan a strategy to avoid it to the best of their knowledge.

It might contains some tangible benefits too like placing a financial metrics for placing a tangible value on risk. The intangible benefit is taking the risk when it’s best to take it, the appropriate move to make. The sign of a skilled project manager is he can lead the team to its objectives but remain flexible to react to changing risk factors.

Another intangible benefit is team work, one of the key factors that affects project management is its allocation of human resources. The right person for the right job and their ability to work in coordination to achieve a common goal.

Enterprise Function Support

valueIf you are new to project management, you surely need to know and understand this phenomena,the first thing is understanding enterprise function model. The enterprise functional model is generic one that can be applied to numerous organizations, in any industry. It can be of two ways, product driven and service driven. It represents the highest level functions in an enterprise.

Now a days with the changing needs, everyone is in need of enterprise function support, it is more demanded as hybrid project delivery approaches. The quantitative analysis as show that the hybrid project delivery is becoming rather common these days.

In order to add more value to one’s business the things like aligning business activities is coming into considerations by project management leads. The activities which are made top of the list are project delivery activities.

The considerations may include activities like speed at which project iterations are produced using agile method, complexities of business and technology, and the increasing expectations of customers. Though these considerations are not limited to the ones discussed in the article, there can be many others as well.

All of these enhances the importance of enterprise functions and their support such as portfolio management, release management and resource management etc. these and other enterprise delivery disciplines have been identified by a framework known as scale agile framework. This has been identified as the key to success in agile project delivery methods.

Coming back to enterprise function model and its key features, the material used in enterprise function model gives details about

  • Overview of functions used.
  • Functional responsibilities
  • Terminology

This model is generic and can be implemented to a wide range of industries and enterprises.

The approach used can be product driven or service driven.

A function can be understood as a group of knowledge related (subject area activities).

These activities need to have a purpose.

The framework used for enterprise function model has an impression of creating a sense of getting a long lost thing back specially when considering the innovations, but that’s not the case.

Rather this framework has helped in identifying the critical need to have these functions in place and engaging all types of deliveries in an enterprise.

Whether there are project managers or agile leads, both can increase the percentage of their project’s success by getting closely related and integrated with enterprise functions. Lacking of this will create troubles for enterprise and organizations will have a hard time in processes like schedule, resource, dependency, testing and implementation. Without having any robust enterprise function model in place, the enterprise may lead to lesser number of successful projects ultimately reducing the business value and profit share of organizations, which is indeed closely related to how organizations design their work infrastructure.

Talking about function and their model, it varies with the scope of the industry, whereas the thing that has been seen is all enterprises do have research and development function.

Consistency while following the right model and delivery is very important for businesses.

Hi friends, have problem listing open end activities in primavera P6?

import-projectIf you want to list up open end activities in primavera v6 and you can’t find any option in p6. A simple way is exporting activity relation detail to excel and separate predecessor with only SS successor. But that is a too lengthy process because at times you don’t know what formulas to apply in excel for fast working.  In excel one predecessor can have more than one successor. So you have to select predecessors with fully SS relation successors only.  Download are free to use schedule viewer. We have a project health check section which provides various checks including ‘ACTIVITIES WITHOUT SUCCESSORS’

There is a checkbox under this section where you can include or exclude activities with SS successors only. You can then export the activities to excel.  Hope this would be of great help for you on your project. You can still contact our experts if you face any ambiguity on provided email addresses globally or contact the vendor who provided you with the software.

Here are some problems that you might face and we are giving a solution to it in advance so that our blogs could be of great help for you. If you use the above-mentioned schedule viewer, and if it proves to be good there might a problem arise that it shows activities without predecessors or successors. It might not show open end activities. Only showing milestone activities with no successors and predecessors, this might create a lot of confusion or ambiguity. The problem can be, your, not tagging the checkbox. Consider, start to logic as missing.

Done. The other problem can be how to export that list to excel. When you try to export the whole project is exporting. Well, that is a big issue but you need not worry. When all the project activities are exporting including those without successors but you just want to export the list , not the Gantt then what you need to do is after clicking export and the options box comes up , you ought to select ‘expand to level  1’ and uncheck or deselect the ‘ draw Gantt  option’.

Another problem that can arise is , what can be the formula or any other method for extracting  SS relation activities in excel. The solution is using the formula countif(). You could sum up the total number of successors for each activity ID and the subtract the number of SS successors.

Another problem can be with the registration code being invalid there can be multiple reasons for it but one that has been commonly witnessed is moving or copying the existing file if you have copied or moved the file, the new file would need it’s own registration key. For the key that has been generated to you , you must use it for the existing file and not for any of new, moved or copied a file.

Cost Controls Redefined

Balancing the AccountsManage all types of projects with detailed cost control using separate cost control processes to track every dimension of project financials. View graphical cash flows.The Cost Sheet Dashboard provides rolled-up information from all project financials with drill-down into details.View and manage multi-year forecasts at the CSI division level or any other multi-level cost structure.Manage all contracts and change orders in detail. Ensure payment integrity.Leverage Transaction Visual Analysis to see all related cost transactions at a glance.Manage Project Schedule and Resources effectively and efficiently.

Advanced project cost management in primavera P6

Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is the most powerful, robust and easy-to-use solution for globally prioritizing, planning, managing and executing projects, programs, and portfolios. Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is an integrated project portfolio management (PPM) solution comprising role-specific functionality to satisfy each team member’s needs, responsibilities, and skills. It provides a single solution for managing projects of any size and adapts to various levels of complexity within a project. In addition, it intelligently scales to meet the needs of various roles, functions or skill levels in an organization and on a project team. This course builds on the student’s current knowledge, skills and application of project cost management using Primavera P6.

Learning Outcomes

  •     Ability to implement global change – modify projects using advanced functionality.
  •     Manage project cost effectively
  •     Apply advanced scheduling techniques.
  •     Implement earned value analysis.
  •     Use top-down budgeting.
  •     Assign codes.

Benefits

Assist project managers, cost control managers and cot controllers to use Primavera for integrating the cost with the project schedule.

  •     Apply the cost control techniques using Primavera including EVM.
  •     Calculate percent complete. Importing and exporting project data.
  •     Understand effective top-down/bottoms-up budgeting calculations.

Topics

Import and export data.

  •     Update baselines.
  •     Use Claim Digger.
  •     Apply duration types.
  •     Calculate percent complete.
  •     Use earned value analysis.
  •     Use top-down budgeting.
  •     Apply tracking layouts.

Auto computes layouts.

  •     Use top-down estimating.
  •     View reflection projects.
  •     Manage issues and risks.
  •     Create a project with Project Architect.
  •     Assign codes.
  •     Use global change.

Advanced scheduling.

Prerequisites

Participants should be working in a project management environment and understand how projects are planned and controlled, including knowledge of the following subjects:

P102 Project Management in Primavera using P6 V8.3.

Project management processes.

Experience in the use of PCs and an understanding of the operating system.

Audience

This course is targeted at those who are seeking to develop their skills and knowledge in the project budget and cost management.

  •     Project manager (generic)
  •     Project manager (industry specific)
  •     Cost Control Managers
  •     Project planners and schedulers
  •     Project control managers
  •     Project control engineers
  •     Project team members
  •     Project team leaders
  •     Cost Control Engineers
  •     Project coordinators
  •     Planning and scheduling engineers
  •     Quantity surveyors

Format

  • Face-to-face delivery of theory.
  • Facilitated discussions.
  • Facilitator demonstrates the functions of the software using different mediums, such as PowerPoint slides, live software module-by-module view on a screen.
  • Individual activities.
  • Structured Workshops

Our program design and delivery is based on adult learning principles and experiential learning techniques:

  • Individual and group activities
  • Short lecture sessions
  • Using templates
  • Practical and experiential
  • Written activities
  • Presentations

Standardization and How it Effects a Project Manager’s Business?

project-managementThis article is written for the better understanding of how the standardizing of project management adds value to once business, in any industry, the growth is driven by standardizing project management across the organization.

Some key capabilities for standardization:

An enterprise must invest in standardizing, codifying and documentation of project management practices. It doesn’t mean one way of managing projects but a portfolio of consistent projects the enterprise.

Different business units and verticals may follow different methods or templates for following project management. Many variations are carried out in order to meet the needs of customers and specific markets.

For instance just think if standardizing is not done, it can reduce management’s ability to track and control price change requests and manage scope stuff, which may result in lower margins and increased project risks. Formalizing projects help scale your business. Fostering standardization of processed such as change management, scheduling, costing and project reporting is also very important.

Another major step in standardizing is consolidating and integrating project data. Project teams can also improve productivity and effectiveness.

Benefits of standardization are vast and far reaching, those organization that combined standardized project management processes with the right kind of technology get a significantly good result and successful projects. The outcomes include improved project team productivity, fewer project losses, the higher instance of projects that get completed on time, and are under their financial reachability.

Standardizing project management across an enterprise often encounters resistance. Because teams usually working as how they might be feeling but often you have to encounter adjustments one way or another. There is a positive side of creating consistent project management experience.

Standardization can have the following positive impact on a project manager’s life.

If you are a project manager, you can experience that your life may go from slow and steady to chaotic in a matter of seconds. , it is witnessed it would be helpful both for the leader and the teammates to work efficiently if you share a common way of working such as a framework or interface etc.

Considering an example, if the schedule of your project is built on the same tool as your teammate, it would be easier for you to grab what’s next on the to do list.

When hiring a new project manager, standardized project management, which is already implemented in the enterprise may help the new hiring in the understanding of how the work is done in that organization. Thus, drastically reducing the learning curve.

The cooperative continuous improvement is a very important thing and I have always been in the favor of improving. And the best way of doing this working along the other project managers, peers or pioneers both. This will help you in carrying out your tasks in more effective and standardized way. Thus making standardizing your tasks easier. Having someone to share your ideas and looking up to someone for some good experience is indeed a good strategy

How Project Management Training is Important?

Training is a very essential tool in any kind of resourceful work. If you do not train your employees in right way; there are more chances of work go wrong and can cause downfall to your organization. The presumed goal of training software project managers is to equip them with the knowledge and competencies that will help them to be successful in different domains regarding the domain of Software project management.

project_management

These will not guarantee success but make success more likely. Over the years, the notion of success has expanded greatly from simply meeting requirements, delivering on time and not exceeding the budget to include a plethora of other success criteria. In fact, what success is; often changes many times during the project. This and many other facets of software project management frustrate and perplex untrained software project managers since most enter into this role untrained.

This article presents what anecdotal and experimental evidence has shown software project managers need to know that can be conveyed via training programs. Today’s software project manager can also benefit from this information to overcome many of the misperceptions about nearly everything regarding software project management.

The need of the hour is managing adequate issues of software engineering projects that cannot be done without the use of software project management. The importance of adequate management is becoming more apparent with each passing day. Usually in organizations the project managers are not trained at all or are poorly trained. This article examines what we now know is needed to successfully manage software engineering projects and how education can help transfer this information.

Software project management represents a paradox within the software engineering community.

It has been described as being more vital to software project success than all other factors combined, yet there are still no conferences or journals devoted to this topic. In fact, international conferences on software engineering rarely list software project management as a topic in the call for papers topic list. Finally, we are slowly realizing what other knowledge work related professions have known for a long time – project managers are not born, they are made – through education. The problem is that there is no general agreement on what knowledge and skills a software project manager needs in order to be successful. In fact, we have yet to agree on just what success in software engineering is. This article examines what software engineering project managers need to know, what skills they must possess and how these may be acquired through education. The resources cited are not restricted to software engineering alone as there is a lack of research in this subject.

Before we move to the training part we need to know what software project managers actually do. The tasks they carry out are.

According to a very successful and renowned CEO Robert Townsend, the most skillful and capable person in a team should be made a manager. Because of his caliber of carrying out the underlying tasks and managing what needs to be done when.

Use Of Enterprise Track

oracle use INSTANTIS ENTERPRISE TRACK , The first question that arises is why you need to choose INSTANTIS ENTERPROSE TRACK. The use of this enterprise pack comes when you need to optimize project and resource investments. This helps you improve strategy execution and financial performance with more effective work and resource management. this end to end solution provides a top down approach to managing, tracking and reporting on the enterprise strategies, projects, portfolios, processes, resources and results. it uses what-if scenarios to optimize resource deployment. here we present an overview of the instantis enterprise track, so you have a clear view before choosing the best solutions for your resource deployment plus the above mentioned scenarios and solutions. here’s the overview: – plan and execute project portfolios strategies – manage demand and resource utilization strategies across IT and other project portfolio types. – monitor, report and analyze work and project portfolio activity, status and metrics – deploy quickly and easily the features include: strategy and process management: the benefits of this features includes, drive buisness and IT execution strategy from the top down by defining a portfolio of strategic goals and initiatives the second benefit is related to the feature idea management: capture new project ideas and filter requests by levergaging an online portfolio demand management: this feature is highly feasible when it comes to benefits like streamline and standarize intake capture , workflow, prioiritization resource scoping and approval processing for simple and complex project work demand proposal management: ensure alignment with strategic goals by enforcing a standarize workflow for promoting an idea for a proposal and selecting and approving projects. capacity management:  optimize scenarios with resources which include what-if scenario planning to simulate the impact of shifting , excluding or adjust proposed project plans resource management: enhance resource pool visibility and allocation control by balancing inbound work demand with available reource supply which includes time, staff and budget etc. the next feature is the most valuable of all project management: increase project status visibility and guide project team execution success. knowledge management: it is immportant as it improves project success by levergaging a centralised knowledge base of best practices, documents, tools and templates. financial management: this is very crucial for a projects success and minimising risk factors as it tracks planned versus actual costs with top down and bottom up project budgeting as well as capitalization, expense and charge back accounting. metrics management: track and roll up non-financial performance indicators such as defects , service levels, trouble tickets or any other operational metric of choice. survey management: gather feedback on demand from key internal customers and stakeholders with simple online surveys and polls. dashboards and reports: easily and instantly compose and share project and portfolio level projects which includes dashboards and reports at any phase of the project lifecycle , from ideas to metrics and from metrics to results collaboration: the collaboration involves improve productivity and project team which includes stakeholder communication and collaboration with seamless , fully integrated social networking. integration: it involves integrating with desktop applications , project management tools, enterprise applications and IT service management systems. oracle instantis enterprise track is the leading , cloud enterprise project portfolio management software used IT and project management offices to improve strategy execution and financial performance through better work and resource management. It provides an full service suite for managing , tracking and reporting on enterprise strategies , processes, projects , programs , portfolios , products, resources, costs and benefits. instantis enterprise track is easy to deploy quickly easy to use, easy to administer the tools of project and affordable. It empowers IT and PMO leaders

Primavera Real Estate Management World-Class Real Estate Management

Primavera Real Estate Management provides comprehensive tools for planning, tracking, and managing your real estate portfolio. Make strategic decisions effectively and accurately for leased and owned properties. Rules and compliance requirements are kept up to date for easy lease management. Primavera Real Estate Management is part of the integrated Primavera Unifier offering.

Overview of primavera real estate management-a world class approach:

  • Comprehensive management and tracking of leased and owned properties across an entire real estate portfolio
  • Support for landlord and tenant lease types to allow tracking of expenses and income separately
  • Automated tracking of costs and expenses by department, space, or payees
  • Create and track lease payments automatically and roll up information to each facility’s cost worksheet or across your real estate portfolio
  • Manage critical dates and allow Unifier to notify you of upcoming lease dates that require your attention
  • Utilize flexible workflows to route, review, and approve common real estate transactions such as site selection and acquisition, dispositions, new lease initiation, subleasing, lease termination, and more

Features and benefits include:

  • Lease management
    • Flexible, configurable lease management capabilities to support tenant and landlord lease types
    • Automate payment requests and tracking of costs and expenses, associate lease payments with designated cost codes, and roll up to the facility’s cost worksheet
    • Track lease payment terms, contacts, key dates, clauses, tenant improvement allowances, security deposits, and more
    • Straight line rent calculation
    • Automate notifications and alerts for critical dates
    • Ability to support rent roll reports for a single property or across the portfolio

·         Document management

    • Leverage a robust audit trail of document changes to reduce tension across team members
    • The system ensures that all members of your team are always working on the most current document versions

·         Portfolio management

    • Set up and manage portfolio by region, property, site, or any other structure that suites your business organizational hierarchy
    • Full visibility into all real estate information across the entire portfolio with drill-down capabilities
    • Real-time portfolio data through visual dashboards help track performance against business objectives
    • Single, integrated, real estate and facility lifecycle management solution lets you view, compare, and report information for a single property or across your entire real estate portfolio—all in real time

·         Transaction management

    • Initiate and track strategic transactions, such as site/property acquisitions, dispositions, lease initiations and renewals, subleasing, terminations, and more
    • Automate management of scope, tasks, and deadlines through Primavera Unifier’s business process workflows
    • Complex transactions can be configured to handle scope, schedules, costs, documents, and related due diligence processes
    • Ability to configure the solution for tracking other real estate transactions, such as commission tracking processes and reporting

Conclusive discussion:

Use portfolio property KPI’S and dash boards for quality management

Set up and manage complex lease agreements for both tenant and land lord

Track property taxes and other fixed costs

Consolidate all costs and payments for lease and property

View portfolio profile and metrics by portfolio heirarchy

Oracle’s Primavera Facility Management

World-Class Facility Management

Primavera Facility Management provides a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use solution to plan, manage, and maintain smooth operation of your facilities. From defining and tracking building spaces to performing facility inspections, the flexible toolset adapts easily to customer-specific needs.

  • Create service requests using an easy-to-use web portal interface and route requests directly to the appropriate personnel
  • Generate work orders to inspect, maintain, and correct issues for smooth operation of your facilities
  • Schedule automatic preventive maintenance work orders through timed- or metered-based scheduling
  • Roll up maintenance work related costs to a central cost sheet, and view detailed costs per transaction across a facility or portfolio of facilities
  • Visualize occupancy and room availability of a facility or building by floor or level
  • Inspect and assess your facility and gain visibility on the conditions of your building systems to compute the FCI index

Features and benefits:

   Document management

Leverage a robust audit trail of document changes to ensure team members have the most current set of facility documents, floor plans, and as-built drawings

Take advantage of Primavera Unifier’s Document Manager tight integration with market-leading business process and workflow engine to streamline changes

Use automatic storage of business-process attachments into specific folders and email alerts, and control file access by project phase, auto reference file management, and more

·         Facility condition assessment

    • Support for routine inspection and assessment of the condition of each building system. Collect, analyze, and report on the condition of the entire facility
    • Assess deferred maintenance work and estimated deficiencies, current replacement value, and capital renewal costs
    • Support for Uniformity II cost modeling using Primavera Unifier’s configurable FCA Manager sheet
    • Provide total estimated deficiencies and deferred maintenance work to support decision makers in annual budgeting and maintenance project planning

Space management:

  • Flexible and configurable solution to create, classify, and organize building floors and spaces by types, including usable spaces, common spaces, vertical penetrations, gross exterior measured areas, or any other customer-specific space classification
  • Leverage the configurable space definition capabilities to extend space attributes beyond the basic ones, including space name, size/area, location, types, vacancy status, usage, etc
  • Track space standard compliances, room availability, and occupancy rates in a single building, property, region, or across the entire portfolio
  • Provide a visual representation of an entire facility or building, broken down by floor or level, and show how space is being used and assigned
  • Simplify employee or asset moves by leveraging flexible workflow with task assignments, due dates, and space/room selection. Generate move tickets for detailed move tasks, labor, and material needed to manage the process

Maintenance management

    • Support for corrective, predictive, and preventive maintenance
    • Support for an easy-to-use service request submission via a portal interface
    • Configurable automated processes to generate preventive maintenance work orders at the appropriate time, based on a schedule or meter readings
    • Support for PM books, job plans, meter readings, job sequencing, invoices, and payments
    • Basic material and parts inventory, material orders and receipts, material moves, material adjustments, and more

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