Effortlessly Create Project Management Invoice Templates for Product Quality

Project management invoice template for Product quality

Well, hello there. Let’s talk about a way that you can improve your ability to deliver projects with better schedule quality. If you’re watching on YouTube, please Subscribe to our channel, and hit the bell to get notifications about new content. If you’re watching on LinkedIn, please like, comment, or share. Let’s talk about what you are trying to do. You are in the business of delivering projects – perhaps you are part of a PMO, maybe you are a Vice President, or maybe you are a Project Manager. And, … maybe you are doing engineering & construction projects, product delivery, or IT projects. You know that you need to have better schedules to help you drive project delivery success. Better delivery can be achieved by improving the quality of your schedules. There are two quality elements to consider: The science of putting together a schedule which is all about the rules and logic of how a schedule should be built to be good. The art of putting together a schedule which is all about making sure the schedule has the right tasks, the right work estimates, and the right people assigned to each task. The science and art are both delivered through good planning practices, and trained project managers. The science element can be assessed by a variety through a variety of quality auditing tools, and that’s today’s focus. The DCMA – an agency of the United States federal government that is responsible for administering contracts for the Department of Defense and other authorized federal agencies. In 2005, the DCMA implemented a 14-point schedule assessment to help evaluate the enormous volume of contracts and schedules they had to manage. Since then, it has become the gold-standard for evaluating a schedule’s quality. The 14-points provide a set of guidelines for measuring the logic in a schedule. But there are more quality checks that you might want to run for your own schedules. These may include ensuring that your schedule has project- or task-level custom fields completed. Here’s a list of requirements that you might want to consider for your schedule checker. There are many benefits to using a schedule quality checker. For owners it will improve our confidence in schedules for all stakeholders from Executives, to the PMO, to individual contractors. You can apply it to both your in-house project schedules, and also to schedules you receive from subcontractors and partners on joint ventures. More than that, the extra attention to the schedule you get by running a schedule check on all schedules on a regular basis, you can reduce the costs and delivery time on projects. There are clear benefits for an owner organization in using a schedule checker wrapped up with a business process. For contractors, it also improves your confidence in the schedule, and your customer’s too. It might even be table stakes to compete in a bid, and alternatively it might be a unique selling proposition if you have a business process and related scheduling checking tool. Again – you can see that there are quantifiable benefits from using a schedule checker. You have several options for schedule quality checkers. Within Microsoft Project Online, you can create a variety of capabilities, using the organic capabilities of Microsoft Project Online and Power BI. For example, you can use Views and Filters, Task Inspector, Power BI reports, and macros. These are obviously something you’d custom-build, or that we can build for you. The cost is simply the time and dollars to build, test and maintain a variety of quality checker capabilities to suit your needs. There are also many commercially available products at relatively low-costs. We’ll have a look at one of these in a moment. The thing to watch out for when you are looking at one of these out-of-the-box products is that some of them are short-lived solutions. Many Google searches result in dead links, and many existing products are built off the side of someone’s desk and are virtually unsupported. Let’s look at forProject’s Schedule Analyzer, available through forProject.com. Here we are looking at a schedule in Microsoft Project Professional. forProject provides this sample project so that you can see how Schedule Checker finds errors, based on the DCMA 14-points, and other criteria. After installing the Schedule Checker, run it by simply selecting forProject from the Microsoft Project Professional menu. forProject will analyze your schedule and return with an interactive report that will show you the potential errors in your schedule. Here we have the interactive forProject DCMA Schedule Analysis. This includes all of the DCMA metrics and others, as you can see on the tabs. To get help on any of the metrics, a project manager can simply click on the metric, opening a help screen where you can get a good understanding of what the metric means, and what the targets are. By clicking on the hyperlinked metric, you can highlight the rows that contain the errors – allowing a project manager to quickly find and fix problems in real-time. You can also toggle a filter to show just the rows that have the errors. This gives a project manager another way to quickly zero-in on the schedule problems. The forProject Schedule Analyzer has other metrics, including checks for Earned Value whiere you find things like Dangling Start and Dangling Finish. There are additional health checks that are helpful for a Project Manager. These include checks for bad linking practices like start-to-start relationships and Must-finish-on constraints. You can also export the findings from the forProject Schedule Analyzer to an Excel report. There are many options available for the report. With the Excel report, you can examine the output in various ways. For example, a Project Management Office could establish a weighted quality scoring for each schedule that would be calculated from this report and factored into overall project schedule quality tracking for the enterprise. Let’s summarize. forProject’s Schedule Analyzer is a powerful schedule quality checker for Microsoft Project. It is easy to learn, easy to understand, and has great help available for your project manager. As a unique feature to this product, you can produce Excel reports that you can use to create a metric for your schedule quality. You might, for example, use this for evaluating your organization’s schedule quality and improvement over several months of using the forProject Schedule Analyzer. Is implementing a schedule checker of interest to you and your organization? Western Principles can help you implement a Schedule Checker through a simple process, either for an off-the-shelf product like forProject’s Schedule Analyzer, another similar product, or a custom-built solution. Western Principles is a Microsoft Gold Project & Portfolio Management partner, and a UMT360 Gold partner. We know Microsoft Project and can help you with all aspects of your project & portfolio management. We can also help you extend your PPM system with the Microsoft Power Platform or partner solutions, like the Strategy Hub and Portfolio Manager from UMT360, to help you drive more ROI from your project and portfolio management system, and of course with products like forProject’s Schedule Analyzer. Let’s get started together. Visit us on the web at .WesternPrinciples.com, call us at 1-800-578-4155, or email us at info@westernprinciples.com. We look forward to helping you.