Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
All this is necessary to arrive in the end at the project's objectives. The effort to
maintain PMS data should be in an economically reasonable relation with respect to
the overall project effort. There are small projects, where one can do without
expensive data capture and preparation, or where Excel
sheets cover all required
demands. On the other hand, however, there are highly complex projects requiring
appropriate system support. To handle these PMS applications qualified staff is
needed. Depending on the degree of project complexity PMS have to be selected
providing the necessary capabilities.
Besides supporting scheduling, a PMS should be capable to report about project
development and disruptions, dead line transgressions, capacity bottlenecks or cost
overruns. In this respects it acts as a controlling instrument.
To cover all these requirements ongoing status information about project pro-
gression itself has to be captured over and above the basic information identified to
establish a project plan. By this original planning can be compared to current
developments. The effort for this should not be underestimated. As for all business
systems the following rule applies for PMS as well: the quality of information a
system delivers depends on data quality and therefore on the input from its users.
Once the decision has been taken to deploy a PMS, data maintenance should be
carried out seriously. Half-heartedness leads to unnecessary effort and erroneous
project documentation.
PMS generally offer a large number of possibilities to create reports for project
management without having to reformat them.
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10.3 PMS Functions
It would be out of proportion in this section to portray the whole spectrum of
possibilities a PMS offers. Therefore the following will cover only the most
important PMS functions:
Administration of tasks
Gantt diagram
Mile stone plan
Capacity management and
Network diagram.
10.3.1 Administration of Tasks
Figure
10.1
shows a typical task list such as managed by most PMS. This list must
cover all relevant individual tasks in a project. It becomes obvious already at this
stage that a meaningful structuring of the overall project has to take place right from
the beginning. The sequence of task processing is determined by start and end dates
