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Project Management in a Multi-Project Environment

The Military Engineer
Volume 82, Number 536 - July 1990
By Steven Pinnell and Capt. Kevin Stubblebine

Project management is a demanding task that requires considerable skill and experience. When performed in a multi-project environment as part of a complete design and construction program, it can be nearly impossible. And, managing the program itself to achieve the program goals is equally difficult.

Problems with project management in a multi-project environment usually include:

Inadequate planning, with a loose definition of objectives, and no list of the tasks that are needed to meet them, let alone an identification of the critical path to achieve the objectives in the shortest possible time.

Unreliable, incomplete, and untimely project status reporting.

Limited feedback on the actual progress so that corrective actions can be taken. Also, there is no recording of historical data for planning future projects of defending against contractor claims.

No reliable estimates of the in-house labor (resources) that are required for a project, with no forecast over time of the staff needed to maintain schedules.

Poor use of manpower. This is made obvious by insufficient staffing, the attendant project delays, rescheduling, confusion, and inefficiencies.

Inaccurate or untimely reporting of the actual labor used. Also there is no comparison of actual labor planned to date, nor a forecast of the resources required to complete the project. There is no analysis of earned value, cost performance index, or other performance factors.

Inefficient and ineffective management of the overall program, with cost overruns, delays, failure to achieve major objectives, and the waste of limited resources.

The Engineering and Planning Division of the Charleston District, Corps of Engineers, has been able to resolve most of these difficulties and to reduce the impact of the rest of them to manageable levels. This required a concerted effort, including:

Selecting the right project management software that is not only powerful and flexible, but can also be configured or modified to meet Corps' requirements. PMS80 (a project management software package from Pinnell Engineering in Portland, OR) provided unique features such as a time-scaled arrow diagram, extensive import/export capabilities, and an online help and glossary.

Establishing an interface between the Corps' mainframe accounting database and the project management software. This entailed:

  • Creating extraction programs to capture historic and real-time data from the Corps Division and District mainframes to perform limited processing (accumulation) and to dump the result as an ASCII file to a PC.
  • Making several minor changes to the PMS80 program. These resulted in our being able to make better use of the data available from the mainframe. For example, we were then able to generate lists of all work-codes in the design and construction program based on the individual project files. We were also able to modify the existing resource estimates and other accounting reports.
  • Using the PMS80's user definable menus and macros to create a high-level, customized interface that automatically executes a number of existing low-level functions. These generate the list of work-codes used by the mainframe extraction programs; import the accounting data from the ASCII files made by the extraction programs; and print reports on progress, planned versus actual resource use, earned value, and other performance indicators.

Producing the actual project database, using PMS80's split/merge feature to copy a standard network "template" from a library of typical projects and batch edit it for the unique tasks of individual projects. This was done for all 75 projects in the Engineering and Planning Division's program.

Training the Engineering and Planning Division's project engineers so they will know what information is required to maintain the database and which reports and other features are available to help them manage their projects.

Ensuring that the database is updated monthly with progress and changes, so that deficiencies can be corrected.

The process that the Charleston District went through to create their program management "system," the lessons learned in creating it, and the availability of the system to other Districts are of immediate interest to many others.