Project managers often struggle with the early phases of project planning—developing solid process rationale. While most planning and scheduling systems illustrate event sequences, they do not explicitly account for information flow. Much of the relevant information is obtained as byproducts of other processes. In other words, information enables work performance.
Managers may use Information-Driven Project Management (IDPM) to visualize, organize, and exploit information linkages between activities. IDPM augments a workflow view (task management) with a dependency view (managing information). Are you looking for PMP proxy exam? Then go across this article.
Project planning starts with establishing information flow, which necessitates task dependencies, and is followed by identifying sequences. IDPM leads to improved task descriptions and timelines by highlighting information demands and lowering project risk.
Project managers commonly "hardwire" a certain work order while planning projects. Processes that are specified based on how they have been done historically or how they would ideally be done neglect what is really accurate or achievable. While task performance and sequence may change, information requirements stay stable or constant, and a task must consistently provide a specified sort of information.
Starting Over
Although task managers understand what they need, they may not be certain who requires their job or the information they create. Interviews on person-specific and team-specific activities are used by project managers to create an initial project plan. This reveals the team members' direct information dependency pairings. It is vital to understand what questions to ask and how to utilize the responses.
Meeting Fixed Delivery Obligations
A software business in the United States reexamined its release process and drastically decreased cycle time using IDPM. On a six-monthly basis, the corporation supplied product upgrades and improvements to service-contract clients. It provided a CD-ROM with bug patches, version releases, upgrades, and new documentation every cycle. More than 80 phases and an 18-month completion cycle were needed for these assembling, testing, and manufacturing operations. Teams met for many months, using project timeline charts, to attempt to decrease the 18-month period to six months.
They rapidly spotted numerous possibilities to minimize the 18-month process with little risk by detecting the information requirements that caused workflow dependencies. The enhanced throughput by running concurrent activities and saving time by eliminating low-value operations. Furthermore, the team decreased rework and iterations due to missing or misaligned tasks. This reorganization also sped up the evaluation process. The firm attained six-month cycle periods after additional refining and by controlling creation-fulfillment sequences using a long-term planning procedure.
Important Customer Requirements
Projects may be guided from where they are rather than where they were supposed to be by identifying and controlling assumptions. A retail hardware distributor opted to replace its mainframe warehouse management system with a less expensive Unix system. The firm had certain special needs, but it depended on the competence of the computer manufacturer, software supplier, and value-added reseller.
The waterfall approach was employed as the software development strategy for the two-year warehousing project. This method works effectively for projects with consistent needs and well-understood technology. The next project phase does not begin until all questions in the previous phase have been settled.
The first problems arose 23 months into the project when the first test of the warehouse database batch update took more than 24 hours. The project was canceled, but not without heroic rescue attempts.
There was a lack of awareness of the assumptions made and when and how they should be validated. Rework on one job triggered a chain reaction of adjustments that disturbed both "completed" and "in-progress" tasks.
It would have been able to test base-system capacity to meet the nightly batch-processing need at the end of the third month for less than an 8% increase in the original budget and no extension of the planned completion date.
Summing Up
It is now feasible to use IDPM to assess if the main system batch-update completion requirement is doable and, if not, to cancel the project in as little as six months.
So now where is understand what's the importance of a project management simplified system?
