Directions in Project Planning April 11, 2005

Measures of Plan Quality Timeliness – are the plan dates current and realistic, with activities starting and ending as planned ? Key Attributes – Do plans have required elements such as dependencies, resources and key tasks ? Resource Accuracy – Are resources planned and assigned, and usage leveled ?

BiWeekly Updates Project not within one month of GoLive reviewed every 2 weeks, else weekly. Late task analysis done for all 113 active programs. Late start reporting began last week. Reports ( as Excel ) available on the Monte drive.

Timeliness Metrics-March Start Dates Current: 98% of tasks started as planned. End Dates Current: 89% met or will meet planned completion dates. Percentage Complete Current: 70% have current tasks status updated within the last 2 weeks.

Resource Metrics 81% of Tasks have a resource assigned, up from 68% in December. Only 34% have leveled resources, unchanged since December. In most cases resources are underutilized except for Project Manager and Comm Spec hours.

Key Attribute Metrics Most projects have a four phase SDLC with the same phase names used. Addition of large projects Jan and Feb lacking dependency-driven tasks pushes dependency numbers down. Key tasks improved from 9% to 17 %, baselines up 26% to 31%.

Ongoing Improvements Key Tasks and Baselines will continue to be a focus area to 3/18 completion Reporting on unresourced tasks to start around 4/05 Commitment to finish dates will be made more visible at the staff meeting Metrics will convert to ratio scales instead of yes/no for more detail.

Metrics for Assessment Some measures are quantative and come off the monthly report. Convert to scales to rank PMs after agreeing on key areas. Group by AD, there are significant differences ?

April Trends

Our Projects -The Good PC Replacement follows all current standards from 12/04 forward. Tensor is all new based on Single Server deployment template. BL PACS is all new, follows all current standards using a BL specific template. CIS got there using templates also with some program-specific variances

Our Projects - The Bad Differences are in structure and detail, not in date accuracy. Many plans are so vague you can not determine the project status from them. Once the plan is committed, many are never updated again.

Our Projects – The Ugly VoIP appears significantly behind, over allocated, lacks dependencies. Design, Documentation, Lab installation all run simulteanously. No connection between project scope and tasks in the plan.