(Reported by: Sdr. Cheng Wei Loon)
Too many activities to monitor? Too many information to update? Too much paperwork? That’s part and puzzle of project management. The very fact that project management is so important in project implementation, the project management tool has become more and more important too.
On 6 and 7 November 2004, the Graduate and Student Section organized a two days course on “Primavera Project Management Module” at the IT Unit, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia. The speakers are Mr. Vickneswaran P.Subramaniam and Mr. Suman Menon from ITX Solution Sdn. Bhd. Both of them have wide experience in the use of Primavera as project management tool in the construction and manufacturing industries.
In the introduction, Mr. Vikneswaran explained that Primavera Enterprise, P3e is a tools used for enterprise-wide project management. It provides comprehensive information on all the projects in the enterprise, from executive level summaries to detailed work assignment for each team member.
Before creating a project, Mr. Vikneswaran said that all users must understand the structures in P3e. The Enterprise Project Structure (EPS) is a structure made of roots and nodes to help organize project, an example of the node is a department in the project. An Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS) is a hierarchical arrangement of an organization’s project management roles or individuals. Basically, the OBS is assigned to EPS nodes. Next, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is hierarchical arrangement of the products by a project e.g. Shock Absorber model SA123. Then, there are elements within the WBS, an example is initial design of shock absorber.
After the explanation, Mr. Vickneswaran guided the participants how to create a project and define the initial scope of the project. After the project was created, activities are added. Activities are the lowest level of WBS and the most detailed work unit.
After having defined the WBS and activities in the project, Mr. Suman show the participants on how to create relationships with Precedence Diagramming Method. The P3e employs the Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling technique to calculate project schedules.
At the end of the first day, the participants have created a project.
On the next day, the participants learned to view project data from many different perspectives e.g. group activities, sort activities, apply filter, and modify bars as available in the P3e’s formatting capabilities.
Then, the participants assigned roles, resources and cost to the activities. The speaker also introduced various method for analyzing resources and costs. Mr. Vickneswaran explained that after created a project, P3e can be used to shorten the schedule, removing over-allocation, and analyzing the budget to optimize the project plan.
Last, Mr. Suman also showed the participant the various methods to report the project performance using P3e.
The participants were having two busy days with tutorial packed lesson. Each participant was provided with a workstation to have hands on learning of P3e. Now, the participants can apply the knowledge in their respective project.
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