Project Management Software Application Analysis)

Under certain constraints, project management aims to efficiently achieve the goal of the project owner, and carry out economic accounting based on the personal responsibility system of the project manager and the project as an independent entity, effectively plan, organize, coordinate and control system management activities according to the internal logic of the project. The core technology of project management is network planning technology. Network Planning Technology is a scientific plan management technology developed in the middle of 1950s. It has two origins:
First, in 1956, DuPont first used CPM (Key Path Method) in the chemical industry for planning and arrangement. Second, when the US Navy established the Arctic star missile, it adopts the PERT (Plan Review method) Technology proposed by Buzz Allen. These two methods gradually penetrate into many fields and are adopted by more and more people and become the mainstream of Network Planning Technology.
Since the middle of 1960s, with the advocacy and personal guidance of Professor Hua Luogeng, a famous mathematician, China began to pilot the application of the network program in various national departments, comprehensively arrange the guiding ideology, and name this method "overall planning method ". The Network Planning Technology has been effectively promoted in domestic production and construction.
I. Development and Current Situation of project management software
The development of project management technology and computer technology are inseparable. The emergence of project management technology was also the time when computers were born. Therefore, the early development of network planning software was running on the mainframe and mainly used in national defense and civil engineering. The cost of project management software in this period is also very high, and often a set is about to sell for $ more than 0.1 million.
In 1980s, with the emergence of micro-computers and the rapid increase in computing speed, project management technology also showed a prosperous development trend. A large number of project management software emerged, and the software price also dropped significantly. At the same time, many colleges and research institutions in China have also developed many project management software. However, due to the impact of the planned economic system, many domestic software have been developed as a subject and the results have not been commercialized or maintained or upgraded. As a result, the development of domestic project management software is very slow.
After nearly 20 years of development, project management software that cannot survive in the market economy has been ruthlessly eliminated by the market. Currently, project management software is divided into two levels based on the function and price level: one is high-end project management software, which is used by professional project management personnel, generally, the price is more than USD 2000, such as Primavera's P3, gores Technology Company's Artemis, Abt's workbench, and welcom's openplan.
The other type is low-end project management software, which is used in some small and medium-sized projects. Although such software is not fully functional, it is cheaper, such as timeline, projectscheduler of scitor, suretrak of Primavera, and project98 of Microsoft.
1. High-end project management software
Taking Primavera, the leader in international project management software, as an example, we will introduce the current situation of high-end project management software.
Primavera is a professional company engaged in project management software development and service. It was founded in 1983. That is, in 1983, the company launched the Primavera project Planner (P3) 1.0 for DOS, which will become the leader in project management software in the future. The latest version is P3 3.0 for Windows.
P3 is a project management software based on the theory of broad network planning technology. We know that the traditional network planning technology is studying progress issues, and the analysis is mainly about the duration analysis. In fact, both resources and investment restrict the progress. Resources and investment factors must be taken into account for a reasonable period of time. P3 processes a maximum of 0.1 million processes per project. The number of resources is unrestricted, and the number of resources available in each process is unlimited. P3 also provides the resource balancing function to automatically solve the problem of insufficient resources.
The node number in P3 can be compiled at will. The node number of the traditional network technology can only be a number, and the subsequent node must be larger than the previous node. This restriction does not exist in the broad sense network technology. In P3, the node number can be a number or a letter. The node number of subsequent jobs may not be larger than the node number of previous jobs. In addition, P3 can also use calendar to set different holidays and working hours, and use restrictions to indicate special requirements of the project. For example, an outdoor job of a project must be completed before the arrival of winter, to meet this requirement, you only need to add a condition for completion not later than the beginning of winter.
P3 adopts the target management mode to control the project. It saves the optimized plan as the target plan and compares it with the current progress and resource consumption at any time to easily find out which jobs are ahead of schedule and which jobs are lagging behind, does it affect the entire construction period. In this way, it is very helpful for the project to be completed on schedule.
P3 can decompose the project's work scope from large to small based on the project's work breakdown structure (WBS) until the operational work units are available, organizations can also be decomposed step by step (OBS) to form the most basic organizational unit, and each work unit can be implemented to the corresponding organizational unit. P3 then makes statistics and summarizes at any level of the work breakdown structure or organizational breakdown structure according to the requirements of different management layers. In addition, P3 can filter, group, sort, and summarize jobs based on project properties. For example, we can divide a project job into three-level networks and set the network level of all one-level network jobs to one. When looking at a level 1 network, you only need to select a job with the network level equal to 1. In this way, the Project Manager can call up the required data in the shortest time.
As a commercialized software, P3 has complete data interface functions. It can be output to traditional DBASE databases, Lotus files, and files in ASCII format. It can also receive data in DBASE and Lotus formats. Program Exchange data. You can use the P3 batch processing program to execute most of P3 functions through simple programming. In addition, P3 provides the development engine Ra. programmers use other programming tools such as Visual Basic, Visual C ++, and PowerBuilder to read and write P3 data through RA. Primavera also provides two-way interfaces with the Oracle database datastore.
P3 also provides the Primavera postoffice post office software. Project Construction personnel can use the post office software to open the work arrangements of the headquarters and report the actual progress to the headquarters. Primavera also provides Webster for Primavera, which allows various organizations and individuals using the software to access and update project data through a browser.
2. Low-end project management software
At present, there are a large number of simple project management software on the market, and there are also many "public" Source code Project management software. These software generally only completes a certain stage of project management and a certain aspect such as planning, personnel management, risk analysis and other functions.
Project scheduler 7 is a popular project Event Arrangement and management program. It provides a unique style and cost-effective function, and is easy to use. You can complete basic work on the desktop, or process large and complex programs with SQL database. It includes wizard, tips for the day, and domain-level help. It is also flexible and suitable for organizing, merging, and viewing project conditions. It also provides an HTML web page publishing program that allows you to quickly and professionally exchange project progress.
Microsoft Project 98 is an easy-to-use, well-featured, and award-winning project management software package. It is a powerful planning, analysis, and management tool that allows you to create a project management solution with high requirements on specific tasks for the enterprise scope. By breaking down a project into easy-to-manage steps, this program can visually analyze the most complex plans and show you how tasks interact with each other, this is critical for you to make a comprehensive plan. At the same time, you can find the bottleneck and the future overhead of the entire project. You can also merge several projects to assess whether it is reasonable to share resources, Team workload, and multiple projects you are planning at the same time. You can even automatically communicate the project status. The built-in link to Microsoft softexchange allows the program to easily publish the properties selected by a project, and can connect to Microsoft Mail, schedule +, Microsoft back office (TM) or hundreds of additional programs.
2. Application Status in China
The application of project management software in China started earlier, and many enterprises started to use it in the early 1980s S. At this stage, many project management software have emerged in China. If the previous project intends to use computers for project management, a team of engineers will be invited to develop a set of project management software. Some projects attempt to introduce foreign project management software. The first project introduced P3 in China is Shanxi lu'an coal mine. In these projects, our project management personnel are basically in passive use, lack of understanding of foreign project management, and lack of understanding of foreign project management models.
In 1990s, many domestic enterprises had received the idea of foreign project management, and many enterprises had introduced advanced international project management software, I have accumulated some experience and data. Currently, there are thousands of projects and enterprises that use the project management software for project management in China. Based on the application in China, it can be divided into the following types:
(1) Use the project management software to orchestrate the schedule and use the software to prepare the plan prior to the Project Bidding and project start-up. Some enterprises are still in the passive use status, because the project management software is required in the project bidding documents for project management, and the corresponding software is forced to use.
(2) Use the progress and resources together to analyze whether the resource intensity and resource usage arrangements meet the requirements. Many enterprises and projects have tasted the sweetness of using the project management software. They hope to rationally configure resources through the resource analysis and cost management functions of the project management software to make the schedule more reasonable.
(3) Prepare the progress and resource plan according to the construction organization measures, arrange the production according to the plan, and control the progress through the plan. Some projects have beautiful plans and reasonable resource allocation, but the on-site construction is not implemented as planned. This requires that the plan preparation personnel should prepare the plan according to the construction scheme, the on-site construction personnel should arrange the production according to the plan, and timely feedback the actual process to implement dynamic tracking. This has basically reflected the functions of the project management software. Some projects in China are currently under dynamic control in this mode.
(4) Project management data is integrated with the enterprise management information system (MIS) to reduce repeated input through data sharing. The interface function of the project management software is used to connect to the enterprise's management information system. This part of work can be done by the enterprise's project management system. This requirement is not required for non-ultra-long-period projects.
(5) Control Remote projects through the Internet and Intranet. Project data distributed across branch offices or project sites around the world is transmitted to the headquarters through the Internet and Intranet, where the headquarters is summarized and arranged in a unified manner, and instructions are sent to the branch or site by email. This application can be promoted for enterprises and projects with long fronts.
Iii. Outlook
Using the project management software to assist project management has become the consensus of the project managers. How can we get started as soon as possible and make full use of the management capabilities within the limited life cycle of the project? This is a problem that needs to be solved urgently in front of every project and every engineering company. The following sections discuss how to use the project management software for projects and enterprises.
1. Project
To apply the project management software system to a project, we must first solve two problems: independent development or introduction-oriented, and then perform secondary development? What is the core of Project Management?
Through long-term practice, developers can find a new project management system after the project is immediately launched. It has been proved in the past 10 years that it is not feasible, for the following reasons: it may take about two years to develop any software system, from Requirement Analysis to programming, to debugging, modification, and trial run, the total construction period of many projects is only 3 ~ 5 years. Therefore, we advocate that we should focus on introducing core software when dealing with project management software. On this basis, we should do a small amount of secondary development work to meet some special requirements of the project.
For the core issue of project management, some people say it is progress management, some say it is cost management, and some say it is contract management, which depends on the different circumstances of the project. After determining the core, a project management system should be built around the core. Determine the core software first, and then start to develop and introduce peripheral software systems. Do not make the entire project management software system very large and comprehensive, with little emphasis on it. The core data is lost in the whole project information.
To build management software for a project, you must first select the core software during the bidding phase and use the same software in the bidding documents and future contract documents. Secondly, before the project starts, it is necessary to organize relevant personnel of all parties to conduct training and unify WBS coding, work coding, and resource coding, and formulate implementation measures for the project management software. Finally, after the project starts, collect the progress of the project on a regular basis, and use rewards and punishments to encourage all units to organize production in strict accordance with the plan, and timely and accurately report data to ensure that the entire project is under control.
2. Enterprises
As an engineering company, the use of project management software for project management can improve the level of project management, enhance the implementation of the Plan, improve the effective allocation of resources, strengthen cost management, and improve the competitiveness of enterprises. When configuring project management software, enterprises can choose software of different grades at different levels. However, the data generated by the software used at different levels must be universal. Generally, the company configures the online version software at the first level, which helps many people to use and share data. The branch or large project general contracting can be equipped with stand-alone or online version of high-end project management software as needed; for subcontracting projects or small and medium projects, you can consider using stand-alone high-end project management software or low-end project management software. For construction teams or operation teams, you can use post office software or Webster to access or update project data.
When using the project management software, an enterprise can sort out its historical data, including bidding documents, contract documents, monthly project reports, and fixed database, gradually form a unified coding library, price library, and material library for enterprises, and formulate detailed implementation rules for enterprise project Computer Management. The detailed rules should include the organization form, project-related code, Standard Work Packages, various report formats, and detection and tracking methods.