Project Partners Blog

The obvious benefit of project portfolio management is that it gives executives a bird’s-eye view of projects so they can spot redundancies, spread resources appropriately and closely monitor progress. PPM is a continuous loop of communication that allows an organization to collaboratively plan and evaluate its success or failure on projects.

Over the years as the importance of PPM has been noticed, several PPM tools have emerged in the market and they have attempted to enable organizations to manage the continuous flow of projects from concept to completion. Some commercial vendors of PPM software emphasize their products’ ability to treat projects as part of an overall investment portfolio. A 2006 Forrester Research paper documented and interviewed over 41 vendors and ranked the following vendors as “Best-of-breed” Primavera, Artemis, Plan View, Business Engine, ITM Software & Pacific Edge. They also ranked ERP vendors which, along with integration options to 3rd party products, provided a full PPM solution–the leaders were Oracle & SAP which allowed integration from 3rd party into their PPM Modules.

Not many people know that Primavera now provides a Microsoft Project Applet called “ProjectLink” that allows users to use Microsoft Project as a front-end while being connected to Primavera Enterprise DB. Users can now create a project in Microsoft Project and save it in the Primavera DB within a specified Enterprise Breakdown Structure. In addition Microsoft Project users have the ability to invoke Primavera enterprise resource management functionality from within the Microsoft Project Client. This feature is very powerful as it allows all users to use a single resource pool which enables excellent resource planning capabilities.

This type of integration allows organization to use Primavera Enterprise to manage complex projects while allowing others in the organization who are comfortable with Microsoft Project to continue the use of Microsoft Project. An enterprise view of all projects is obtained from the Primavera DB.

If your organization is project centric then you may be using one of the most common applications like Primavera, MS Project or Excel (the most-used PM tools) to manage your projects. In most instances the Project Schedules and Estimates are manually re-entered in a Financial ERP systems for cost collection and this is where Project Managers lose track of their projects as cost and schedule gets disjointed and out of sync. Project deliverables are missed; and resource utilization is not optimized.

This is where three products that I am going to mention will eliminate double entry of data and streamline data entry to save time and reduce errors.

1. OP3:  An out-of-the-box integration product that delivers tight, bi-directional integration between Primavera Enterprise P5 or P6 and Oracle E-Business Suite Projects applications. Consultants who are familiar with both Primavera and Oracle have spent years building this product. The overall solution allows organizations to build their Project Structure in Primavera, schedule and cost load the project and then transfer the structure into Oracle EBS Projects applications, eliminating dual entry of data. Data transfer of financial “actuals” takes the reverse direction. SPI, CPI and EV can then provide the Project Managers true insight into their project status.

2. Excel Integration:  The most-used Project Management tool around the world is still Microsoft Excel. Allowing users to use Excel as a front end UI to create simple project schedules and allow resource loading is very powerful. The best feature is that you can check out projects from Oracle and work offline and then check the project back in once you are in your office. This eliminates the loading of data into cumbersome forms.

3. Microsoft Project Integration:  This is a very slick addition to the MS Project tools Menu. Project Managers can use MS Project in creating their project structure, resource loading the project and then loading it to Oracle ERP. The beauty of this is that the resource dictionary is imported from Oracle and thereby centrally controlled. Financial “actuals” and other attributes can be downloaded from Oracle into MS Project to allow Project Managers to make sound decisions.

Any of these solutions will streamline data entry and an organization’s business processes.

In looking at various clients who are using or trying to use workplan functionality in Oracle Project Management (PJT), I find that the biggest issue people face (after they get all the right patches needed to get workplans to work correctly) is getting actuals to map into planned resources correctly. If this is not done correctly, based on the client needs, then what you get is a bunch of unplanned actual assignments that increase the cost of the project on the workplan as the planned amounts on the planned assignments do not get reduced correctly by the actuals.There are some basic points to remember when defining which planning resources you use in order to get actuals to map correctly to them.

1. All resources assigned to the workplan tasks have the following attributes on them:
   1. Resource Class
   2. Organization_ID (Expenditure Org)
   3. Default Expenditure Type
2. Now if the resource formats you use do not include the Organization or expenditure type on them, these values will be defaulted to each task assignment you make as follows:
   1. The Project/Task Organization defaults as the expenditure Organization unless it can derived from some other attribute of the resource such as the named persons assigned organization or the assigned organization from the Non-Labor Resource.
   2. The default expenditure type assigned to the resource class in the resource class setup is defaulted to the expenditure type on the assignment.
3. None of the other resource attributes are defaulted to the assignment unless they are a part of the resource definition (based on the resource format). Now this is done to allow Oracle to automatically compute the burden cost (from the raw cost calculated) and this needs expenditure type and org as these are the 2 main dimensions used in the setup of burden schedules.
4. The following issues can arise due to this defaulting:
   1. If the project/task organization is not setup as an expenditure organization, no actuals will ever map to the planning resources as actuals always have a different expenditure organization.
   2. If you have actuals coming in with different expenditure types for the same basic planned resource, only those actuals with the same expenditure type as the one defaulted to the task assignment will map to the planned resource. All others will show up as unplanned actuals.
5. Finally here are some rules to follow in order to get your actuals to always map to the planned resources as intended:
   1. If there is any possibility that the expenditure organization of actuals will be different from the that of the project/task, include organization into the your resource formats making people plan by the correct org and hence the actuals will map correctly
   2. Include Financial Category (Oracle speak for Expenditure type, Expenditure Category) into your resource formats. Now if you don’t care for burden cost on the workplan, then the suggestion will be to not setup a default Expenditure type on the resource class setup and then it will be not default to the task assignment and hence should not screw up your mapping.

That’s it for now and remember:
There is no better way to manage a business than to Manage by Project.

PS: I welcome all comments / trackbacks / pingbacks / queries to my nascent venture here. I will try and respond to your comments, etc in future entries.