06 Apr 2018 News

Dear Members,

Please find below this weeks' newsletter.  We hope that you find it adds value to your day.  Please visit our sponsors as they fund our web-servers. 

LISTEN, LEARN, MAKE A CONTRIBUTION - DISCUSS

Planning Planet and the Guild of Project Controls organise community events around the world on behalf of Members and Partners. With the largest online community of Project Control practitioners in the world we see communication with our members of paramount importance to our longevity.

On the 18th of April 2018 at 18.30 pm we are starting our UK gatherings for the year at the home of Wolverhampton Wanderers football club.

Your hosts are: Ragu Gondi, Planning Planet member and the PP/Guild management team.

To make this event unmissable, we have two senior industry speakers - benefit from their experience - and a presentation about the Guild, hear how to transform the productivity of yourself and your team. All this AND an open discussion forum. Click on the link below....and register to attend.... ....refreshment included - sign up to reserve a place [1]

“High-Rise building elevations can represent the linear locations for schedule tasks”

Vertical high-rise building construction is typically a series of trades or disciplines of work progressing vertically through the floors of the building, the elevation (or Relative levels, RLs) of the floors can be treated as discrete linear locations, similar to the continuous linear locations of horizontal linear projects such as railways, tunnels or highways.

Traditional representations of high-rise building project schedules use Gantt or Bar charts with time for the horizontal axis, and the vertical axis represents a form of Work Breakdown Structure, such as floors, trades etc. 

New York City is renowned for its lush and lively open-air parks. Indeed, few green spaces in the US are as iconic as Manhattan’s Central Park. With Oracle Industry Connect set for April in New York, we are excited to have Diane Jackier, chief of capital strategic initiatives at the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, join us to share her experience helping make New York City an inviting, beautiful, and livable metropolis.

With a five-year capital budget of more than $4 billion and a portfolio of more than 500 active projects, the department uses Oracle’s Primavera Unifier to manage capital projects and ensure visibility for stakeholders.

Read more about Diane’s professional interests, career journey, and approach to her work in her candid Q&A in the Construction and Engineering blog [4] here.

Learn more about Oracle Industry Connect and link to registration here [5].

OneTouch Program Management by Burns & McDonnell

Live webcast with Q&A May 10

On large projects, the difference between high tech versus low tech, high quality versus rework, and seamless versus multiple seams can easily translate to millions of dollars in savings or additional costs.

Join Burns & McDonnell in a discussion of how technology and efficiency can benefit large linear projects when project processes are designed with that in mind. Learn how Oracle's Primavera Unifier Mobile Application, Document Manager, and Burns & McDonnell’s proprietary geospatial tool OneTouchPM can yield large savings compared to processes that involve a lot of manual work and manpower that still does not promise a high quality outcome.

Join us for the live webcast on May 10. Register today [6]!

Still using sticky notes, phone calls or Social Media to get the status and % completed on Tasks and Activities in your projects?

PrimaveraReader [7] presents an effective solution:

• One place to collect and manage feedback on project status and completion
• Up to-date project schedules and insights, easily accessible during meetings
• Faster creation of Weekly Reports by project baselines comparison and analyses of project data

See video [8]

Additional Benefits:

• Share Primavera P6 plans as .XER / .XML / .XML files to Project Team and Stakeholders
• Open schedules from contractors and external consultants in less than 3 seconds, without interfering with P6 databases
• Compare multiple project screens side by side

Learn more [9]

Meet the team:

• [ 16 th - 18t th April ] Houston, Texas - Advancing Project Controls 2018 Conference [10]
• [ 29th May ] Rome, Italy – PrimaveraReader for Project Management [11]

In Primavera P6, when we assign a resource to an activity there is a equation:

Original Duration x Units/Time = Total Units (i.e. 10 days  x 8 hours/day = 80 hours )

Now when you change the duration, which element will be changed by P6: Units/Time or Total Units?  That's when P6's Activity Duration Type comes in to play and this determines which field has the most importance.  Read the Blog on Planning Planet [12].

One of the most common complaints we hear from project practitioners is how inefficient their current resource management processes are, “sometimes there aren’t enough staff and we’re hitting delays, and other times there are too many and there’s not enough work to be done, leaving them simply sitting on the bench.”  

At Clarizen [13] we feel we have developed an effective solution to one of the biggest issues associated with “traditional” project management software.

With our product you’ll be well on your way to practicing better resource management, which includes:

• Avoiding multi-tasking wherever possible, small delays in one project strand can end up having huge snowball effects
• Planning thoroughly but don’t be afraid to change these plans as new needs or information arises
• Updating project plans and progress as often as possible through online project management software
• Aligning your processes across different teams but don’t enforce homogeneity, certain fields are better suited to different methodologies
• Maximizing your highest performing resources and blend teams to take full advantage of their abilities

Read the full article here [14]