Simplicity & Empowerment: Activity Projects

You are an analyst working in a research firm. You are responsible for producing high quality research reports for your clients for their investments in financial markets.

You are a test engineer in a software development organization. Your job is to develop test cases quickly to test the products.

You are an experienced software developer specializing in writing code for certain niche areas.

Each of the above activities is a project needing specialized skill sets and a high degree of initiative and responsibility. Given your expertise and contributions, you expect autonomy. You neither need someone else to plan your work, nor you would like to be micromanaged. Your pay is outcome-based.

Yet, your organization requires you to follow its administrative policies so that metrics like efficiency, output, and customer satisfaction scores can be tracked and the operational processes of resource management and billing can work unimpeded.

Activity projects

Project management frameworks like waterfall or agile are too complex for the above kind of activity projects that can be completed in hours. Activity projects are the ones which can be finished in hours and have clear and tangible output. Experienced professionals like researchers, developers, or testers work within a well defined technical framework to deliver their outputs. Every activity has well established norms of quality and productivity.

Horses for courses

You don’t wish to stifle the initiative of your experts.? You need a 'horses for courses' approach with minimal and non-invasive management that is good enough for your business processes and provide you with all the metrics and analytics that you need.

Trust a versatile PSA software

So far in this PSA Insights newsletter, I have described how PSA software can you let chose the best possible workflows for a variety operational needs e.g.

Waterfall projects

Agile Projects

Ticket-based or work package type contracts

Shared support services

ODC (Offshore Development Center) operations

I have shown how a capable PSA doesn’t force you to take tedious workarounds unlike the legacy enterprise software that needs you to reengineer what is working well.?

PSA software shines in case of activity projects too.

PSA lets you define and set up the above type of activity projects. You can set up efficiency standards in the PSA. Your knowledge workers assign themselves various activity projects, enter their start & end dates in PSA. They also obtain their clients satisfaction ratings and upload them in the PSA. PSA can then calculate per person efficiency, output and other quality metrics.

For example, a research analyst prepares 3 research reports in 8 hours. The benchmark is 2 hours per report. The efficiency is 75% because instead of 4 reports only 3 reports have been produced.

PSA helps you with insights into resource utilization, profitability analysis, and capacity needs going forward. You can also plan interventions to improve across the board efficiency. eg.. you can build various knowledge bases, which your analysts can tap into quickly. You can also provide more research and analytics tools to your analysts.

A versatile PSA is based on the philosophy that your enterprise system must not straightjacket your operations in any way, instead it must facilitate different operating and delivery models.

Benefits of activity projects using PSA software

1. Simplicity - doesn't force extraneous workflow

2. Empowerment - your people manage their work

3. Flexibility - people adapt to shifts in priorities or workload

4. Focus on outcomes

5. Data driven insights - PSA provides clear metrics on productivity and quality.

Kytes is your 'go to' PSA for adaptively managing your activity projects.?

It lets you retain all the advantages of an overarching enterprise system without being overbearing.

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