Since January, Project Partners consultants, both in the US and in India, have had the privilege of working on-site with Oracle to test the Fusion Applications. An absolute win-win situation for everyone involved. It is our chance to see the live product in action, to test, test and test again to insure quality and to get hands-on experience and training using the best-of-the-best in Projects Applications. In exchange, Oracle receives a tremendous amount of feature validation, field expertise, and knowledge from those of us who live and breathe the world of Projects every day. This early look at the product before all the code is frozen helps guarantee the quality release we have all been waiting for.
Project Partners Blog
Archive for March 2010
By Robert D. Anderson, CPA
During the last two years, Project Partners has been approached by several firms who run Oracle Order Management and now want to implement Oracle E-Business Suite Projects applications to provide a project-level profit and loss view, as well as contract and client profitability across the firm. Generally this request is happening at the same time the firm is undergoing massive growth and management wants it done quickly so they can get a handle on the growth that is happening and make sure it is profitable or identify problem areas quickly so action can be taken to prevent serious impact to the overall business.
The Oracle E-Business Suite Project Management module (PJT) does not create transactions but provides several tools to allow the tracking of financial transactions that are happening in the Project Costing and Project Billing applications. In addition, it offers both direct tracking in the tool and integration with project management tools, such as Microsoft Project Standard Edition and Primavera P6, as well as an open interface to interact with other similar management and scheduling tools in the market. Since the financial, resource and schedule information all resides in Oracle, the ability to leverage Key Performance Indicators and grouping them into Key Performance Areas, progress tracking and status reporting all combine to offer a strong tool to present the exceptions out of large volumes of data so the firm can take appropriate action at an early stage in the work. Read the rest of this entry »
By Tamim Kulaly, PMP
The first important question is “why do projects fail?” There could be several reasons:
- Project over run – The project takes longer than planned
- Cost over run – Executing the project cost more than budgeted
- Underperformance – The project team did not deliver the goals of the project
- Plan too optimistic – Evidencing a lack of understanding of true scope of the project
- Scope creep – The scope of the project increased but plans and budgets were not revised accordingly
- Other – Sometimes things go wrong due to lack of appropriate resources or equipment failure or bad weather or other unpleasant surprises.
To avoid the downfalls of project failures, project centric organizations should look into Risk Analysis products to minimize project risks. Oracle’s Primavera Risk Analysis is a full lifecycle risk analytics solution integrating cost and schedule risk management. Users will have an objective view of required contingency to account for cost and schedule uncertainty as well as analyzing the cost effectiveness of risk response plans. Read the rest of this entry »
