ERP Project Management

1. ERP Project Management By Elizabeth Grieggs

2. What is Project Management? • The ensemble of activities (such as tasks) concerned with successfully achieving a set of goals. • This includes planning, scheduling and maintaining progress of the activities that comprise the project. • Reduced to its simplest project management is the discipline of maintaining the risk of failure at as low a value as necessary over the lifetime of the project.

3. What is Project Management? Cont. • Risk of failure arises primarily from the presence of uncertainty at all stages of a project. • An alternate point of view is that project management is the discipline of defining and achieving targets while optimizing the use of resources (time, money, people, space, etc).

4. What is Project Management? Cont. • Project management is quite often the province and responsibility of an individual project manager. This individual seldom participates directly in the activities that produce the end result, but rather strives to maintain the progress and productive mutual interaction of various parties in such a way that overall risk of failure is reduced.

5. “Perhaps the single most decisive element of ERP success or failure is the knowledge, skills, abilities, and experience of the project manager. An ERP project manager must understand both the business and the technology. To avoid customization, businesses frequently change their business processes to fit the new software. An ERP project manager must understand the impact of the ERP implementation on the business, and work with business managers to ensure a smooth transition from the "as is" to the "to be" business operating environment.” ~Charles Trepper

6. 1. Define Work 2. Build Work plan 3. Work plan 4. Issues 5. Scope 6. Communication 7. Risk 8. Documents 9. Quality 10. Metrics Steps of Effective Project Management

7. Methods to Project Management • Critical Path • Critical Chain Project Management

8. Critical Path Method • Provides a way to easily identify how fast a project can be completed • Input to critical path is an activity • Can be displayed • Network • Gantt chart

9. Timing of Critical Path Model • Early Start Schedule • Designed to accomplish each task as early as possible • Late Start Schedule • Designed to accomplish each task as late as possible while maintaining expected project completion time • Slack • The difference between the late start schedule and the early start schedule

10. Other Terms • Milestone • Event marking end of project phase • Setting milestones and sticking to them are key to staying on time • Buffers • Time built into a schedule to allow for anticipated problems – is normally at each milestone • Resource leveling • Adjusting a critical path schedule to avoid overuse of limited resources

11. Basic steps • Activities defined • Network and Gantt charts created • Critical Path defined • Schedule start type decided • Milestones defined • Buffers defined • Project begins • If needed, resource leveling takes place • Extension of schedules so particular resources are not over-scheduled

12. Critical chain Project Management (CCPM) • Was developed and publicized by Dr. Elyahu M. Goldratt • Has emerged in the last few years as a novel approach for managing projects • An extension of TOC

13. What is TOC? • The Theory of Constraints • A tool for managing repetitive production systems based on the principle that every system has a constrain, and system performance can only be improved by enhancing the performance of the constraining resource.

14. Overview of CCPM • Very similar to Critical Path Method but instead of having buffers at the end of each phase, has a buffer section at the end that is scheduled.

16. Basic Steps of CCPM • Develop an initial schedule for project tasks • Critical Path is identified • Recalculating project schedule based on shortened task duration estimate

17. Reasons for Recalculating Project Schedule • All tasks in project are subject to some degree of uncertainty • When asked to provide an estimate of duration, the task owner will normally add a safety margin in order to almost certain that the task will be completed on time – meaning the task duration is overestimated

18. In most cases, the task will not require the entire amount of safety margin and should be completed sooner than scheduled • Due to this safety margin being internal, if it is not needed, it is wasted. The resources that are then needed for the next task are not available until the scheduled time. So, by taking out the buffer, the next phase of the project can begin right away and then the buffer section is moved to the end in case if something would interrupt the schedule.

19. Steps cont. After the project schedule is recalculated… • Project plan is executed • Resources working on the critical path are expected to work on the task flowing from one to the next • If task is completed ahead of schedule, the next task begins

20. Sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/614681 http://www.tenstep.com/0.0.1HomeValue.htm Olson, David. Managerial Issues of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2004. Raz, Tzvi, Robert Barnes, Dov Dvir. “A Critical Look at Critical Chain Project Management.” Project Management Journal. Vol. 34, Number 4, Dec. 2003.