Describe project planning
After the initiation of a project, the first step is to have the project planning in place. Good project planning ensures the success of the project. Project planning drives for timely deliveries and defines the milestone-based critical functions for the different phases of the project. A project plan can address the important steps to reduce risk and have a mitigation plan in place.
A project plan tracks three major derivatives of a project: scope, cost, and resources. Project Operations provides various tools and features to manage these three factors.
Project scope
Project scope is initiated during the sales process and finalized with the contract. Project Operations caters to all the functionalities required in the sales process.
A Lead record is used to track the sales process.
Qualifying leads are tracked as opportunities.
All related artifacts for an opportunity are accessible. These artifacts include the sales team, stakeholders, probability, rating, sales stages, and business processes.
Multiple quotes are created for an opportunity.
A quote is given the status Closed as Won to create a sales order. In Project Operations, the sales order is customized and called a project contract.
Project cost
Project Operations provides a catalog of rates in the price list. The rates express cost, sales, and bill rates. Each price list consists of labor rates (role price), which is based on dates and resides in the price list header. Bill rates are based on time units and can be set up in only one currency, which is the currency of the Price list header.
Projects can use employees from different legal entities or different divisions. In Project Operations, the company that owns the project is referred to as the Owning Company. All legal entities who provide resources are called Resourcing companies. Because of the differences in labor costs across various geographies and labor markets, bill rates for labor can also be set up differently for different geographies.
Like billing rates, you can define the cost rate of the labor based on the role. Billing rates support resources from multiple legal entities with various cost rates. Cost rates can be defined in multiple currencies.
In Project Operations, you can define expense as a transaction category. You can set up the cost and sales price for expense category. This setup ensures accuracy in downstream functionality. It's also possible to set up cost and sales prices for products in Project Operations. Cost and sales prices for transaction categories and products can be listed in only one currency, which must be the currency on the price list header.
Project resource
Resources play a key role for the success of a project and are considered the most important asset. The ability to find the right resources at the right time, book those resources, and keep them utilized helps the organization meet revenue targets and customer satisfaction goals.
The project resourcing functionality in Project Operations can accomplish the following tasks:
Form project teams by booking available and qualified resources.
Create generic team member records and define their roles and resource organization unit.
Generate resource requirements for generic team members from their task assignments.
Match skills by identifying the skills defined on the resource demand against available resource skills.
Substitute resources.
Align project schedule assignments and resource bookings.
Reconcile differences in bookings and assignments.
Change resource bookings in response to out-of-office status.
Collaborate between project managers and resource managers.
View the history of resource use against a target, including a breakdown of how the resources' time was used.
Maintain a skills and proficiency repository.
Project Operations provides options for hard or soft allocation of resources to a project. This helps to understand how resources will be engaged across various projects within an organization. Generic resources can be added to project tasks as placeholders for resources that haven't been identified or allocated to a project. Resource assignment helps to build the resource requirement details, which derive the resource booking.
The Schedule assistant is used to book resources based on requirements defined by the project manager. The Schedule assistant relies on the parameters provided in the resource requirement to find the resource.
Booking and assignment of resources is loosely coupled with functionalities, where resources can be assigned without booking them or booked without assignment.
Bookings are the hard or soft allocation of resources to a project. Hard bookings are an absolute commitment and consume a resource's capacity whereas soft bookings are unconfirmed commitments and don't consume resource capacity.
Assignments are the commitment of resources to project tasks in the project schedule.
Ideally, these two should be aligned to optimize the resource capacity. The reconciliation process in Project Operations displays bookings and assignments down to the level of the individual task assignment for each team member. It can highlight both conditions: Booking shortage and Excess bookings. This feature helps to optimize resource use on a project.
Project planning goes hand in hand with project execution and analysis, which you learn about next.