Predicting The Project Timelines In Real Time

A lot rides on the success of your waterfall projects. Whether you are launching a drug based on a new molecule, or a new automobile, or completing the construction of an important tunnel failure is not an option.?

Through the recent editions of PSA Insights, I have explained the challenges involved and the tools that you need to meet them. I explained that the legacy, standalone project management, resource management, and financial management system aren’t adequate. The patchwork of such standalone solutions create several problems.

Read about the ‘secrets of success’ and ‘keys to unlock the secrets’ .

You can know everything that is to be known about waterfall project techniques by reading up or listening to the experts in the field. But your time of reckoning is every moment during the delivery of waterfall projects. Whether you need to quickly find the impact of delays (or pullbacks) of some tasks, reassess risks, find projected time and cost variances, or find best fitting resources? you must have all information at your fingertips.?

At the enterprise level, you should be able to visualize changing projected schedules across a group of projects. You must have quick access to analytics like ‘patterns of delays’ and tools to drill down to their root causes.

Wouldn’t it be great to have an ability to predict timelines in real time?

Your organization needs a real time ability to predict timelines of the waterfall projects. You can then act in time to prevent time and cost overruns.???

Advanced AI-enabled PSA software, with its project, resource, and finance management capabilities, supports the ‘ science of project management’ and provides you with environment rich insights for its ‘artful practice'.?

We have discussed the importance of the ‘humble templates’ while setting up projects and configuring live dashboards in the recent editions. I now come to the planning and execution of such projects.

The convergence of the art and the science

Everything must come together in your plan, execute, monitor, and replan cycles. Waterfall projects need successful iterations of several such cycles. Everything starts with the project’s blueprint. As you iterate, you need tools to do it all scientifically. You also need real-time insights for your judgements and decisions.?

Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and baseline

The WBS shows various tasks, sub tasks, their dependencies, resources needed, and their timelines. You plan your project by allocating resources needed for various tasks. The first approved plan of your project is its baseline. The baseline is used to determine variances in completion of various tasks and milestones.

Push & pull effects on planning and PSA’s dynamic planning?

As your project work gets underway, you come across delays in starting and completing some tasks and their domino effects on tasks dependent on them.? This necessitates rescheduling the dependent activities and the remaining project. Delays cause push effects.

For example, consider that task A is scheduled to be done from Jan 1 to Jan 5, but it actually finishes on Jan 9. Task B is dependent on task A. Task B originally scheduled to be done from Jan 6 to Jan 10, can start only on Jan 9 and will finish on Jan 13 - a push effect.

On the other hand, some tasks get done earlier than planned and they cause pull effects in your projects. For example, if task A finishes 2 days earlier, task B gets 'pulled' and will finish 2 days sooner. The pull effect cascades through all the subsequent dependent activities and affects the project’s plan.

This is where PSA's dynamic project planning capabilities come into play. Legacy standalone project management systems can adjust project plans reflecting 'pushes' and 'pulls' but they overwrite the original plan. PSA, however, retains various versions of project plans as multiple baselines or snapshots. The snapshots help you trace back your project's execution history and zero down on important factors affecting the project's progress.

To summarize, dynamic project planning enabled by PSA presents an at-a-glance status of the project and its revised plan or schedule for the balance period.

Manual changes in the project plan

Astute project managers can arrest further delays by tweaking a project plan. Such manual changes are easily possible in PSA. What's more, the PSA recalculates the remaining project schedule. AI-enabled PSA presents predicted scenarios of how the project might unfold under different conditions.?

Now, your experienced project managers are best placed to practice their art.

Encapsulate learnings into the templates

AI-enabled PSA generates insights to patterns of project delays by analyzing learnings from multiple projects. The details of delays at tasks, subtasks, sub-project and project levels and across customers PSA can help you pinpoint the root causes of delays. You can update your project template e.g. if a particular task takes more time to finish. For example, if you learn that a particular task never gets done in its planned 3 days and takes 5 to 7 days, you update the project template. If you find out that the delays occur because the task needs resources with a higher level of skills, you make such corrections also.?

Your improved templates prevent recurrence of systemic causes of delays.

Predictive insights

AI embedded in PSA can analyze previous project experience and provide plausible project plan scenarios. This is immensely useful in casting the first project plan more realistically. Although, PSA can dynamically adjust your project plan, and reflect changed resource needs across multiple projects, every change is a disturbance. Therefore care is needed in every iteration of your planning cycle.?

AI-enabled PSA is very essential here.

Elimination of manual work

Since PSA automatically recalculates project plans and preserves previous snapshots, manual work of changing plans is cut out. You free up your precious managerial time.

Conclusion

AI-enabled PSA’s dynamic project planning and predictive insights helps you master the art and the science of waterfall projects. It makes learning of multiple project teams available during execution of subsequent projects.

Kytes, the AI-enabled PSA, provides all the tools and an environment for mastering the art and the science of waterfall projects.

Contact us at [email protected] for a demo or more information.