Project Partners Blog

By Ravi Shankar, PgMP, PMP, PMI-RMP and PMI-SP

The Oracle® E-Business Suite Project Management application (PJT) integrates with Microsoft® Project out-of-the-box to provide for bi-directional integration between Oracle E-Business Suite Projects and Microsoft Project (MSP). This provides for downloading the project structure and current working version of the project from Oracle and updating them in MSP to create the detailed workplan structure, together with resource assignments and resource scheduling. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ravi Shankar, PgMP

This is Part 2 of a 2 part blog series on Program Reporting in Oracle E-Business Suite Project Management (PJT).  These  blog articles and our May 4th Webinar will help you understand how to use Program Reporting in your organization.

Program Roll-up Metrics

The following metrics roll up at the Program level:

• Financial Performance (Budgets, Forecast, Actuals for Cost, Revenue, Margin, etc)
• Effort
• Cost
• Revenue
• Earned Value
• Billability
• Billing and Collection
• Backlog

Read the rest of this entry »

By Ravi Shankar, PgMP

The Oracle E-Business Suite Project Management (PJT) application offers a key feature that is not yet widely used, but delivers valuable functionality: Program Reporting.  This 2 part blog article and our May 4th Webinar will help you understand how to use Program Reporting in your organization.

Program Level reporting, as distinct from managing the Program itself, is the process wherein related Projects are linked to the Program Project. While the Program itself is a Project, and hence could have its own activities for costs, budgets revenue, etc, it could also be the recipient of rolled up data of related Child Projects, whose financial, Workplan and Progress information are visible in the Performance Management Tab of the Program.

For the Program level roll up reporting, we link the individual child projects to the lowest WBS of the program project. A linked child Project could by itself be also a Program i.e. could have roll up of Projects to itself. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Ames, PMP and Kimberly McDonald Baker

Continuing our discussion from the prior blog article, we are now ready to address success factor number 2 in the Key Drivers to EPPM Success.

All Business Systems Talk to Each Other

An Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system is one of many business systems that an organization may use to improve its operations, but it must not live in a vacuum. An organization’s projects touch accounting through project costs and expenditures. Projects touch engineering through cost and material estimating, drawing releases and change orders. Service projects are affected when scheduling client engagements. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.