Advanced Project Management beyond Microsoft Project, Using PROC CPM, PROC GANTT, and Advanced Graphics

The Challenge: Instead of managing a single project, we had to craft a solution that would manage hundreds of higher- and lower-priority projects, taking place in different locations and different parts of a large organization, all competing for common pools of resources. Our Solution: Develop a Project Optimizer tool using the CPM procedure to schedule the projects, and using the GANTT procedure to display the resulting schedule. The Project Optimizer harnesses the power of the delay analysis feature of PROC CPM and its coordination with PROC GANTT to resolve resource conflicts, improve throughput, clearly illustrate results and improvements, and more efficiently take advantage of available people and equipment. The CPM procedure is a project management tool based on the Critical Path Method of scheduling. Activities are assigned times based on their precedence relationships, starting with activities having no predecessor. The critical path is determined by making a backward pass from the end of the project to the beginning. A delay in a so-called critical activity will cause the project end date to be extended. PROC CPM is able to accommodate work shifts and holiday calendars and can schedule activities constrained by shared resources. This procedure uses a heuristic to find a good, feasible solution, so there is no guarantee that the span of resulting project schedules is at a minimum. The Gantt procedure works seamlessly with PROC CPM to aid in visualizing the schedules produced. PROC GANTT can compress larger charts both horizontally and vertically to produce the desired number of output pages. Both Portable Document Format (PDF) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) among other formats are supported using the SAS Output Delivery System (ODS). PROC GANTT has extensive annotation capabilities for labeling charts. Primitives like text and lines can be drawn directly using a detailed annotation data set. Or a label data set can be used to similarly apply text to every activity. Options for controlling precedence line drawing are also provided. The same holiday data set provided to PROC CPM is used by PROC GANTT to differentiate holidays visually. Now we describe the project we tackled. CHALLENGE We were faced with a scheduling task in which common resource pools are shared among large numbers of otherwise unrelated projects. Each project was previously managed via Microsoft Excel ® or Microsoft Project ®, and resources were assumed to be unlimited. Our mission was to help our users create realistic project schedules and to get an overall handle on the number of projects, the priorities of the projects, the deadlines, and the available resources. This needed to be done at both the division and corporate levels. However, before using the CPM procedure to schedule the projects, we realized that we needed a global view of the human resource capabilities within the organizations. To this end, we obtained a list of projects that were scheduled to be completed over the next three years. We worked with the users to learn priorities, skills classifications and resource requirements. We grouped the resources into seven categories, and obtained availability estimates. Our first output was a graph showing workload against availability over time. The result for one of the resource categories appears in Figure 1 below. FTE is Full-Time Equivalent, a normalized measure of one full-time employee's work. Please note that there is a resource capacity shortfall during some time periods, while at other times there is a surplus of resources.