Project Structures
Almost any sizeable work effort in the professional world can be treated as a project and is governed by few fundamental rules or best practices. Oracle Projects is one module of the Oracle E-Business suite which helps address the business need for different project structures for planning work and finances. It caters to different kinds of integration methodologies so that there is no repetition of data entry, there is extraction of the correct data from the right source and a clear representation of the business case exists.
A project structure can be setup in four different ways to cater how the projects are planned, executed and controlled:
Fully shared structure: A single structure of tasks is used for both workplan and financial plan functionality. These include the workplan, progress, budgeting and forecasting, costing, billing, etc. A fully shared structure is useful in scenarios where projects are planned with few work details, which could complicate managing the project’s finances. There is only one set of actuals that will be displayed across both the workplan and the financial plan which means greater consistency and ease of managing and controlling finances.
Partially shared structure: A single task structure is used. However the higher level task nodes are used for managing finances while the lower nodes are left for managing work and resource planning.
This is particularly useful in the Engineering and Construction industry where the workplan is extremely detailed and the financial plan has a simplified structure of the workplan using selected higher nodes. This allows the financial plan to use the same workplan’s top node structure without creating a separate financial structure.
Non-shared, mapped: Two different sets of tasks, one for workplan and progress functionality, the other for budgeting and forecasting, costing, billing, etc. This allows information captured on the workplan to be used on the financial structure by mapping workplan nodes to lowest financial tasks.
This is particularly useful in professional service companies where multiple tasks like business requirements gathering, development, etc. can be applicable to, or on-going for, multiple functional domains of a project.
These tasks will make up the detailed workplan structure while finances will be managed only according to the (higher-level) project domains. The progress collected for tasks map to each domain. Domains are rolled up from workplan tasks to the financial structure. This helps with financial management. Budget generation can use the mappings to generate a budget from the workplan.
Non-shared: Two different sets of unrelated tasks. Workplan and progress data is independent of financial data.
Workplan Structure Versioning
For a better control of the planning and execution of the project, the workplan structure can be versioned. Workplan versioning can utilize an approval mechanism to control publication and re-planning of work. This helps in maintaining historic data for the workplan and progress functionality to do what-if analysis at various stages of project execution.
Project Managers can leverage rich features of scheduling tools like Microsoft Office Projects and Oracle Primavera by implementing the integration with these project structures.
Choosing the right scheduling tool coupled with the right structure type, versioning, etc. will make Project Managers more efficient and give them a better control over the project during the entire life cycle of project.