Advice for New PP & RM Implementers?

[aduthie]

Hi

I have taken on the task of getting the Planning and Resource Management module implemented in our company.

I would be grateful for any advice or useful learning experiences (pitfalls to avoid) that more experienced members may offer, especially related to promoting uptake of the software within the company.

I will be taking two courses - User Fundamentals and Project Planning & Resource Management Webinars with Hand - on Lab. Is there other learning that I should invest in?

I come from an MS Project background and found that Vision PP & RM does not have the dependancy links of MS Project that allows one to organised work quickly and make changes easily. Am I missing something?

Thank you in advance

Andrew Duthie

Duthie, Andrew.jpg (74.37 KiB) Viewed 270 times

[Gerald Cox]

No, that was actually removed from the application around the release of 5.1. Apparently Deltek was having some issues with it and they removed it. I was told that it would be revisited soon but I haven't heard anything. I'd very much like to see prerequisites added back. It's the first thing any of my PM's has asked when I've showed them the program.

[Paul Tulloch]

Hi Andrew,

You may want to take a look at one of Deltek's new modules - Project Connect - which is advertised to allow for bi-directional integration between MS Project and Vision.

Our experience is that you need to be flexible in your approach, and very clear about what you hope to achieve from the implementation. For instance, you can use the Planning/Resourcing module to:
*Control projects
*Forecast individual occupancy
*Forecast revenue

For the second two, you need very high compliance, and to standardise your use of the Planning module. If you are only focussed on the first, you can allow more flexibility, with complex projects managed via MS Project, and very simple plans created from the Opportunity Service Estimate for simple projects

[mdobler]

Hi Andrew,

we are currently helping a customer in Alberta to get their Project Planning on track. What we found out is that you need the full buy in of your PMs. The best way to do it is to get them involved early on and try to implement their suggestions and answer their concerns. We did something we call "Lunch&Learn", so we brought some food, made everybody comfortable and showed them how it could work and what their involvment would be and then started discussions on how to go on with it.

Every company works a bit different but in this case they wanted more of a definitive guideline on how to to it so they can follow certain procedures. I hope something like this will work for you too.

About the easy reorganizing: you will have to move to 6.1 to get that feature in VISION. Then you can move single lines or complete tasks from one data range to another. But no dependency links yet there either.

Best Regards
Mike

[DJMayCO]

Hi,
All good advice. The "Shift" feature in 6.1 helps in making up for MS Project functionality that all of us appreciated. Another important piece for us was creating consistent 'templates' for our different types of projects. This allows us to create a plan more quickly to establish its resource impact.
It's helps to be consistent with your WBS structure, phase numbering and names across plans of all types. We also let the project manager plan to the lowest level that makes sense for the project. Some phases may not require lower level tasks, but if you have an area that may be hight risk, you'll want to track that in a little more detail. We always weigh this effort against the benefit of collecting the actual time from the users. Assigning your resources accurately to the time period on the plan helps them record time more accurately, when the task shows up on their timesheet.
Also, we found creating plans for all types of work (including overhead and vacation) allows us to have a truer picture of a resources availablity if you are using resource utilization.
Buy in comes when you get enough good information to start making better decisions. Project managers that maintain more timely and accurate plans, are able to react more quickly to changes on the project.

Good luck....