P32PROFL

Product Profiles
P3
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Keeping the LA Metro on Track

Primaveras P3 maintains the schedule on $8.4 billion of budgeted projects
Its a construction project the size of Los Angeles: a rail system that will eventually move people from the San Fernando Valley down to Los Angeles International Airport, from Long Beach to Pasadena and East L.A. Seventy-nine miles of track, 72 stations, and $8.4 billion worth of construction. And all of it scheduled and managed with Primaveras Primavera Project Planner (P3). P3 handles projects of this size with ease, says Jeff Christiansen, Deputy Executive Officer for Program Management with Los Angeles Countys Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The MTA uses P3 to manage contracts, schedule the construction of multiple segments of rail line, analyze cash flow, and analyze contractors schedules and submittals. Its our one and only in-house schedule management tool, he goes on to say. The L.A. Metro project clearly needs a tool with P3s breadth of capabilities. The project involves simultaneous construction in different parts of the county. A recently completed section (the Red line) runs from Union Station to the Wilshire area; in time it will be extended north into Hollywood and then into the San Fernando Valley and east into East Los Angeles. While this construction is taking place, another segmentthe Green lineis being built in the median of the Century Freeway; when it is completed it will move passengers from El Segundo, near LAX, into the city, then on out to Norwalk. Another segmentthe Blue linewill move passengers into Pasadena. The MTA has schedules for each segment of the L.A. Metro project, for each may involve 40 to 60 contracts with a total value in excess of $500 million. Between the 40 to 60 contracts per segment, a project manager will be concerned about the orchestration of hundreds of major activities. And these activities are not slight: the project schedulers are working at a macro level, overseeing $170 million tunneling activities and $50 million station
P3 is very easy to use, says Christiansen, and its wide application in the construction industry makes it very easy for us to find people who know how to use the product. That helps when Im hiring people, which I have to do quite frequently. Almost everybody that I interview has had extensive P3 experience, so we dont have to worry about training people to use the system.
P3 on the Blue Line

We use P3 to manage more than 50 contracts on the Blue line alone, says Steven LeDuff, MTAs Senior Schedule Administrator on the Pasadena Blue Line project. Our schedule covers everything from the construction along the right-ofway and installation of the rail, all the way through purchase of the catenary system, our train control systems, telephones, and ticket machineseverything. We have a standard project schedule that covers all these contracts at a high level of detailit shows major construction and major procurementand then we have multiple interfaces and milestones between the contracts. When one contract ends, we can let the next contractor in to do the followon work. Thats how we track the critical path through the five years that it takes to complete these projects. In our database for all 53 contracts on the Blue line, continues LeDuff, we have approximately 800 activities. Thats at the summary level. At the contractors level, a contract may have 1,000 activities, sometimes 3,000 to 4,000 activities. One contract might cover installing the rail and the ballasts for a line segment; a follow-on contract would be for the catenary, which involves the poles and the overhead wires. LeDuffs job involves ensuring that each of these high level activities, some of which extend over more than 700 work days, begins and ends on time. In construction, you always encounter delays, LeDuff goes on to say, and thats where P3 is really handy. It used to be that you waited
P3 is very easy to use, and its wide application in the construction industry makes it very easy for us to find people who know how to use the product.
construction activities. In all, the MTA is using P3 to track thousands of major activities, each taking place along a critical path that stretches out over the course of more than five years. Twenty to thirty professionals, including consultants, use the MTAs P3 system actively, says Christiansen. A local area network in the MTAs offices connects the agencys schedulers; the consultants access P3 by way of a wide area network from their own offices. Schedulers are using both the DOS and Windows versions of P3 to access shared scheduling information.
until the end of the job, and then everybody sat down and tried to figure out who had impacted whom in order to settle the extra moneys involved. Now, because the software is so fast, we try to analyze delays on a monthly basis. With the rainy seasons in California, we allow for one to four days of rain each month, and the contractors have to factor this into their original schedules. Once weve exceeded thatsay, if we get seven days of rain in a monththen were able to go in and look at the schedule that the contractor submits at the end of the month and say, Yes, youve exceeded your allotment, we owe you three days. Well then move the completion date out three days. That might be a year from now, but the contractor knows that hes picked up three days on his contract and he doesnt have to worry about accelerating his work or working out of sequence to make up for that time. With P3 were able to get that instant turn-around each month, and that enables us to respond to the contractor much faster.
your own delay. And the only way you can do this is with a scheduling system like P3.
per yearand they want to know how long it will take to finish the job. So well go into P3 and start rescheduling activities. We revise the job based on the cash we have available. The Windows version of P3 enables us to do this right on the screen. We used to have to do this on a spreadsheet, and it would take us forever to go in and re-status all these activities to perform a what-if analysis. With P3, I can go on the screen, click on an activity, drag it across the screen, let go of it, and its rescheduled. That is phenomenal. I already have dollar values loaded on the activities, so I just move activities and their logic to the right until my cash flow comes within the allowable limits. Automatically we get a new what-if duration for the project that way.
Managing Invoices and Cash Flow with P3

Once contractors have been awarded contracts, they are required to identify the pay items associated with each activity in the schedule. For instance, they will indicate that a concrete wall will take three weeks to construct and will cost $20,000.
Monthly Updates from the Field

Because each of the contracts is so substantial in itself, the MTA requires each of its contractors to use a schedule-based project management system that is capable of sharing data with P3. Many of our contractors are also using P3, notes Christiansen. We dont require that, but most of our contractors have chosen to use it on their own. Its a great comfort to know that were all pretty standardized on the Primavera product. It makes reporting, transferring files, and generating data much more efficient for us. The amount of information that moves from the contractors scheduling system is not slight, either. Steven LeDuff explains that the MTAs scheduling specification, section 1310, requires the contractors to perform a lot of maintenance on the schedule. They have to update it monthly and make sure that the critical path is managed properly. If we get into trouble and something impacts the critical path, then immediately we have to go in and decide who is at fault and try to rectify that by either issuing a change order or by telling the contractor You delayed yourself, therefore you must mitigate
We used to have to do this on a spreadsheet, and it would take us forever to go in and re-status all these activities to perform a what-if analysis. With P3, I can go on the screen, click on an activity, drag it across the screen, let go of it, and its rescheduled.
They then pass this information along to the project managers at MTA, who factor the costs into the schedules in P3. We use P3 to help with all our invoices, MTAs Christiansen explains. Weve cost-loaded all our schedules, so the contractors only get paid when the activity is completed, and they only get paid for the value of that activity as it appears in the system. Were also using the Windows version of P3 to analyze our cash flow, Steven LeDuff goes on to say. Our budgets are really tighttax revenues and bond money have slowed down. It used to be that wed schedule the project, cost-load the schedule, and come up with our cash flow. It might cost us $200 million per year to build the project. Now, were in a different situation. The board of directors will say, for instance, that we can have $100 million
Keeping the LA Metro on the Right Track

Well be continuing to work on the rail program for quite a while, says Christiansen. There are large sections of the community that need rapid rail transit. However, rail construction is so expensive that we cant go everywhere at once. So well continue building the program in segments. We need some alternatives in Los Angeles, Christiansen goes on to say. The population continues to grow, the freeways are becoming more congested, and the travel times are becoming longer and longer. Fortunately, the MTA is well on the way to constructing this much-needed alternative transportation system for the county of Los Angeles, and P3 will play no small part in the delivery of that system. When budgets change or the weather impacts the critical path of major construction projects, P3 enables the MTA to adjust quickly and effectively. When the contractors submit their monthly updates, P3 is there to gather and analyze the information and to help MTA stay on top of its commitments and cash flows. And when the board of planners needs schedule and budget estimates to help them plan the next 20 years of development, you can guess where they turn: Primaveras P3, the MTAs management tool of choice.
Primavera Project Planner and P3 are registered trademarks of Primavera Systems, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are products of their respective companies. Part# GEN-M-PRO-LAR-1-84
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Managing More with Less at Cheetah Software Systems

P3 for Windows Streamlines the Management of Multiple Development Projects
At any given time, Cheetah Software Systems Inc. may be under contract to develop customized point of sale and service-delivery software applications for as many as 18 or 19 of the Fortune 100 firms. The California-based company has made a name for itself through credit-card verification systems, sophisticated vehicle routing and scheduling systems, and customer service systems. For a big software developer, handling the unique needs of 18 or 19 prominent clients simultaneously isnt all that impressive. But Cheetah Software Systems isnt exactly a big company. The firm has some 15 programmers on staff, and every project they undertake involves some kind of customization to meet customer requirements. So how does this small development group manage to work on 18 to 19 customized development projects concurrently? With help from Primavera Systems Primavera Project Planner (P3) for Windows.
Supporting Complex Project Management Requirements We share our human resources among the different projects, says John Darroll, Cheetah Software project manager, so our project management requirements are pretty complex. Yet Primaveras P3 provides precisely the kind of support that Cheetah requires. Darroll has developed a master project schedule that coordinates all the phases of each discrete development effort. Each customer project is managed as a subproject within the master project. In each of the subprojects there are design, testing and debugging phases, as well as quality assurance, implementation and user-training phases. Multiple subprojects are always underway, and Cheetahs engineers are always working on more than one project at a time. The projects are never synchronized to begin or end at the same time, so one programmer could be working
on the design of one project during one hour and debugging another for the remainder of the day. Moreover, while the fundamental designs of Cheetah Software products remain essentially the same, each application is tailored and customized for the client purchasing it. As a consequence, even subprojects that appear to be running in parallel can seem like very different projects. From a project management standpoint, this level of customization makes each subproject unique. There may be 500 discrete tasks in the master project schedule, Darroll explains, but each subproject has unique requirements and constraints because of individual client needs. Thats not something you can manage on paper or on a blackboard. There are simply too many constraints. Primavera has constructed P3 in such a way that it will map the resources we have against the tasks we have to perform, all the while taking into account the constraints imposed by the resources and the project itself. Theres simply no way I could do this all on a blackboard, not with all these constraints, the limited resources weve got, and the amount of detail were working with. I refuse to accept that this could be done on a blackboard.
A Schedule to Meet Each Need At the beginning of each week Darroll distributes an updated schedule to each of Cheetahs employees. I created different layouts for presenting the scheduling data to different people, Darroll explains. Management gets its own layout. They dont want to know all the different activity IDs that we use, so I prepare a report for them that shows how were using the resources by project. Project leaders, on the other hand, need a format that helps them manage all the individuals working on their project. The individual resources each get one that shows just what should be done. Darrolls schedules tell each individual the expected duration of a task, the percentage of the task that has been completed as of the beginning of the week, and the projected start and finish dates for any new tasks. Additionally, Darroll leaves blank columns that the individuals use to record actual start and finish times. At the end of the week, Darroll collects the schedules from the engineers and project managers. All of them know how much time is allocated for their portion of the work, when its supposed to start and when its expected to end. They fill in the dates they actually start and actually finish and the actual number of hours they spend. I take all that information and incorporate it into P3 at the end of the week. Additionally, I add in all the new tasks that have come in during the week, I relevel the project and I distribute the new schedules on the following Monday.
Part# GEN-M-PRO-CHE-1-77
P3 Helps Manage the Unexpected Projects and subprojects would be far easier to manage if there were no external interruptions, but rarely is this the case. While Cheetah Software developers are busy customizing their product for new customers, they also service requests from their existing customers. When
is able to help keep the companys development and support efforts on track.
We couldnt manage without P3. Its just too complex when the same people are working on all the different projects. You need a way to manage all the projects and resources together.
priority service calls arrive, one or more of Cheetahs engineers may have to stop working on a scheduled project and devote their time and energy into the service call. As a result, they may not get all their scheduled work completed by the end of the week. Moreover, if their portion of a project gets held up, that may in turn ripple through the overall subproject development effort. But P3 helps keep Cheetahs development efforts going, week after week. Service calls that were not immediately dealt with (or that remain uncompleted) are incorporated into Darrolls revised schedule and appear on the task lists that he distributes on Monday. Portions of projects that were pushed back because of the service calls are rescheduled. But because P3 can produce optimized schedules for very complex projects, Cheetah Software
Managing Beyond Microsoft Project Cheetah Software had tried to use Microsoft Project at an early stage, but discovered that it didnt allow Darroll to manage all of Cheetahs projects in a coordinated manner. Microsoft Project did not enable us to schedule our human resources across multiple projects, Darroll explains. Its good for managing low- to medium-level activities, but Project did not have the flexibility to manage the same resources across multiple projects, and thats our biggest criteria. Our business and the details of our projects are changing on an almost daily basis. For me to try to schedule all our resources using Project was as effective as me trying to do it on a blackboard. Its fine for simple projects, Darroll says, but we needed a tool that would control all our projects. P3 has the flexibility and the power to adjust multiple subprojects and to take into account the changes and permutations associated with multiple customer constraints and demands. Which is precisely why Primaveras P3 makes it possible for Cheetah to succeed with a small staff. We couldnt manage without P3, Darroll says. Its just too complex when the same people are working on all the different projects. You need a way to manage all the projects and resources together. If you cant tie them together, it wont work.
Robert West Consulting: Managing Complexity with P3 and Monte Carlo

Primaveras project control tools help clients manage complex development efforts with a high probability of success
The client was a medical device manufacturer, part of a Fortune 100 company with a strong track record for product excellence, but the new product it was developing was unlike any it had developed in the past. The firm was doubling the functionality of its devices, but in doing so was significantly increasing the number and complexity of its development processesall in the face of severe resource constraints and downsizing. Further complicating the management of the project, the firm was modifying its procedures to comply with ISO manufacturing practices and working to meet new US and European regulations on a wide range of frontswhich meant additional documentation, testing, re-engineering, and verification at numerous stages of development. Soon, the firms tried-and-true MacProject Pro-based project control system was simply unequal to the task. The system was completely overloaded, says Robert West, whose Tampa, Florida-based consulting company was brought in to resuscitate the project control system. The schedule had grown to include 3,500 activities in more than 150 linked subprojects, but linking two activities across subprojects could take as long as 10 minutes. Youd click on the one, then the other, and wait. Updating and revising the schedule took so long that the project was changing faster than it could be analyzed and controlled. In fact, West goes on to explain, the MacProject Probased system was so suspect by the time that Wests firm arrived on the scene, that company executives had no clear idea when the project would be completed. The system was providing a projected project end date, but no one in the company had enough confidence in the system to have any confidence in the information it was providing. It would take Primaveras Primavera Project Planner (P3 ) and Primaveras Monte Carlo to change that.
Microsoft Project or Primaveras P3?

Wests task was not an easy one. The clients project was already underway, so it was imperative that West implement a viable project management control system as quickly as possible. Because MacProject Pro could only export schedules in Microsoft Projects .MPX format, Project was a serious contenderbut West soon found that Project was itself going to be inadequate for the job. I moved about a quarter of the MacProject Pro files over to Project to get a sense for Projects performance with a large project. Two major issues quickly became apparent. First, as we moved the files over to Project, the Critical Path Management (CPM) view automatically placed the activities in a random vertical arrangement, creating an unmanageable, unreadable CPM diagram. The CPM always showed the entire project, and I couldnt zoom in sufficiently or filter a subset. Any chance of using the CPM view was nil. Second, and even more of a critical issue, we found that Project would not open more than 80-odd subprojects at a time. Since we already had 150-odd subprojects in our database, we would have had to merge files, and that didnt make logical sense for project control. So West turned to Primaveras P3 for Windows. Working with the PIPE import/export tool, West was able to import the .MPX format files into the P3 system, which he quickly discovered was just the thing his clients complex schedule required. West built a template of the overall master project, then established the master
activity codes, layout formats, and global project data. As he imported each of the 150 subprojects into P3, West ran a series of global changes to assign activity codes and IDs. Then, he added the subproject to the master project via P3s COPY function, where it took on the look and feel of the master project. Once in the master project, West goes on to explain, each subproject then needed to be linked to its appropriate predecessors and successors of other subprojects. This was a breeze with P3. With separate windows for the predecessor and the successor, the JUMP feature gave me the ability to type in a single ID, have it validated, and linked within secondsit had taken up to ten minutes with MacProject Pro. It took West only five weeks to move the entire MacProject Pro database onto Primaveras P3 for Windows. By the end of that time he had moved more than 3,500 activitiesconsisting of more than 140,000 data itemslinked 150 subprojects, validated the data, and begun to provide his client with meaningful information about the firms development efforts.
The Strengths of P3
One of the aspects of P3 that West particularly appreciates is the number of ways he can sort information. I can take my large projects and not only cut the database in many ways, but I can also make that translate into the CPM PERTs themselves. I need a PERT in order to look at and really understand where Im going, and certain tools just dont allow that flexibility.
West also enjoys the ability to customize his reports and layouts in P3. Every two weeks he produces at least fifteen custom reports, each tailored to meet the information requirements of the different people, groups, and vendors working on his clients project. Ive also just found it so easy to use, West goes on to say. The software is friendly and very intuitive. My associate had had very little experience working with project management tools, but I introduced her to P3 concepts and she took the three-day Primavera course, and now she does all the updates and basic maintenance. The documentation is great, West continues, and the technical support is excellent. The scope and complexity of my project and the conversion had me on the phone with Primavera support daily. They were fast, responsive, and they dug until they got me the answers I needed. West runs his project management system on a 100 MHz Pentium-based server supporting a three-user P3 LAN pack. He has also purchased five SureTrak licenses for future projects. When we start future projects I want the project engineers and supervisors to have copies of SureTrak on line, and I want them to get more involved in doing the updates on their own subprojects. I intend to set up subprojects that way, linking them to the P3 master database on the server. My associate and I will still be using P3 for the administrative schedule control.
Refining the End Date with Monte Carlo

West has also installed Primaveras Monte Carlo risk analysis software. The tool is helping West and his client develop a schedule that has a much higher probability of being completed according to plan. People are always wondering why projects are late, West explains, but when you look at a Monte Carlo simulation, you typically find that a CPM schedule has less than a five percent chance of ever being met. West goes on to explain that typical CPM project planning involves creating a schedule based upon the most likely time required to complete each task in the schedule. The problem is that the actual probability that all the tasks in a project will be completed in that most likely time is not high. One task will slip here, another there, and every single one of these slips, spread across a whole series of tasks in a CPM, adds up. Youre adding on, adding on, adding on time, says West, until you get to the point that youre looking at a couple months slip in a multi-year project. If youre just doing CPM, youre not taking this into account.
Running Monte Carlo from P3

Monte Carlo simulations overcome this problem by mathematically modeling a schedule based upon other than just the most likely duration for each element. For each task in his P3 schedule, West assigns activity codes for three durations: a minimum and a maximum,
as well as most likely. When he runs Monte Carlo, which he does right from P3, the simulation package assigns a duration to each task that is randomly generated somewhere in the range between the minimum and maximum figures assigned to each task. Monte Carlo builds a critical path schedule that gives a project end date, West goes on to say. And then it does it all over again, generating a new duration for each activity in the project, running a new critical path, and providing a new end date. And it will do this one hundred, five hundred, a thousand times. The result of a Monte Carlo simulation is a range of end dates, each of which has a number attached to it indicating the probability of completing the project by that date. You may find that the project end dates will run from November 25th to February 15th, and youll get a probability of completion on any given date. Theres zero probability that it will be done before November 25th, 30% probability that it will be done by December 5th, and so onup to a 100% chance of it being done by February 15th.
If youve got the luxury of picking a date to be done, West explains, you then know the probability of being done on that date. If you can pick a date like February first, with, say, a ninety-five percent probability of completion, you can then tell Monte Carlo to push that information back into P3. P3 will ripple back through and schedule, say, twelve days to all those tasks that the engineers were saying could most likely be done in ten days. Then, you can drive to that schedule and youve got a ninety-five percent chance of meeting it. Conversely, West continues, if the market dictates that you have to be done on December first, you go to management right away and say Weve got a ten percent chance of making this datewhat are we going to do about it now? By using the Monte Carlo software to identify the most critical activities, you can either focus in on those to make sure theyre not going to slip or you can start re-working the schedule as best you can so that the probability of meeting that December first date can rise. You rework, do what you have to do with resources, or schedule re-arranging, or whatever, to get that percentage as high as possible, then you drive to that schedule. Youre identifying your high-risk areas before you actually bump into them. Youre also not fooled by a single critical path and float, West goes on to say, because that can fool you. Monte Carlo will point out an activity that would not be on a traditional critical path. Because of risk, however, it is possible that this activity is going to be the gating item to your end date. For every single activity in your
Refining the P3 Schedule with Monte Carlo Probabilities

With the close integration between P3 and Monte Carlo, West is able to take the probability outcomes from Monte Carlo and use the information to refine the P3 schedule for his client.
PERT, no matter how big it is, you will get a number from zero to 100, indicating the percentage of time that that activity is going to be the gating item to the end date. With Monte Carlo you can focus in from day one on the activities that are going to cause you trouble. The Bottom Line: Making it Possible to Make Good Business Decisions Within the client organization, the response to the project management system that West has built on Primaveras P3 and Monte Carlo has been overwhelmingly positive. Throughout the company, West says, its been very well receivedespecially by the downstream groups, like Operations, who typically have projects thrown over the wall to them by people who say Okay, now produce it. Theyre thrilled with the level of scheduling and the level of information theyre getting out of the system. It helps them plan their jobs.
And the value of the system is not just apparent to the individuals doing the day to day development of this new set of products. Company executives are now in a position to make strategic decisions based upon data that simply was not available until the P3 and Monte Carlo system was put into place. Top management has expressed their extreme satisfaction with what weve put in place, says West. They are very satisfied that they have gotten a level of control that theyve never had in the past. Initially there was some grousing among people who didnt want to leave the Apple platform, but the quality of the data coming out of P3 has really silenced the critics. The data is there. They are able to look at projections and make business decisions based on where they are and what they see downstream. Theyre able to identify their trouble areas months before they happen. And using the Monte Carlo software theyre able to know what chance they have of making those dates in the first place.
How the world says project management

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P3 at the Army Corps of Engineers

Monitoring the progress of more than 130 million worth of projects in the Kansas City district.
Think about large public works projects and youll think of the Army Corps of Engineers. Not only is the Corps famous for their dams and earthworks, theyre the construction backbone of the Army. In the Kansas City district alone, the Corps of Engineers has overseen the construction of military base railroad heads, hospital facilities, barracks, base residential housing, and a host of smaller projects. Were running about $130 million worth of work out of this office, says Harold G. Chart, an Office Engineer at the Fort Riley Resident Office, Fort Riley, Kansas. And thats just right now. It varies dependent upon funds appropriations. We use Primaveras Primavera Project Planner (P3) for Windows to monitor contractors construction schedules, Chart explains. We have a requirement that contractors submit an electronic version of the schedule, and it has to be in a format that conforms to Corps of Engineers standards, and here that basically means P3. If the contractor doesnt use P3, Chart goes on to say, they are obligated to provide their schedules in a format that Chart can import into P3 for analysis. P3 has given us the software to convert many different formats, Chart notes. In this office, we can convert schedules from Microsoft, PlanTrack, just about anything. I havent run across a format that I couldnt open with P3, and Ive been using it since 1987. Chart goes on to explain that each contractor provides an initial schedule which the Corps can analyze. Thereafter, on a monthly basis, the contractor provides an updated version of the schedule. That way, says Chart, we can monitor his progress. We can look at impact for government activities. We can look at the effect of changes and claims. Actually, says Chart, with all the reporting attributes in P3, we can look at almost anything we want to.
Ensuring that the Services are Well-Served

The Kansas City District of the Army Corps of Engineers ensures that construction projects undertaken for the government stay on track and on budget. Charts group supports not only the Armys First Infantry Division, which is based out of Fort Riley, But also
supports the Air Force at McConnell Air Force Base, in Wichita, Kansas. For the services, Charts group has managed the schedule for a wide range of projects. Weve done barracks construction, a health care facility, and recently we completed a multi-purpose activity and welfare building called Emerald City at McConnell AFB. Weve done transient officers quarters, some reserve buildings. Were doing a crash and fire rescue building right now. All those buildings have schedules. Chart goes on to say that most project schedules are no longer than two years in duration. We also do housing, Chart adds. Were replacing base housing. At Fort Riley weve got two housing jobs, currently, which is around $25 million worth of work. Its two different jobsbut the same contractor. Theyre demolishing old base residential housing and building new housing in its place. That will take a year to a year and a half. One job involves 232 units, the other is 155 units. We also handle civil works projects from this office, Chart goes on to say. Theres Tuttle Creek Dam, Milford Dam, Perry Lake Dam, Kanopolis Lake Dam. Some civil works jobs require scheduling, too.
Managing Claims and the Critical Path

In the course of managing many projects of long duration, there are always claims and counterclaims. Chart says that P3 enables his group to analyze the claims and make sure that the claims are valid. We do a lot of claims analysis with P3, says Chart. We look at the period of time before there was a change or a claimusually the monthly update before and then we look at the period after. Then we look to see what effect its had on the network and try to figure out where the critical path flows and whether it had anything to do with the claim. Chart cites weather as an example. Our specifications require that adverse weather must be considered in the schedule. If a contractor is late getting his submittals into us, the weather hasnt effected him at all. It could be pouring down rain, but if hes not ready to do the work because he doesnt have his submittals approved or his materials arent here, were probably not going to give him any time. In that sense, Chart continues, youre analyzing his schedule to determine where the critical path is and whats really driving the train.
Easier Management of Complex Project Schedules

None of Charts projects are slight and none are uncomplicated. There is a seven-story hospital under renovation at Fort Riley, which must remain functional as a hospital all the while the renovations are underway. That requires a lot of scheduling and a lot of
coordination, says Chart. Typically, the kind of contractors bidding this kind of work are used to doing hospitals. Theyre used to working with us, or the VA, or the Air Force, and they know their business. Still, such complex projects require sophisticated management tools. And for Harold Chart, P3 remains the tool of choice.

Construction of Worlds Tallest Building Is Scheduled with P3

The last racehorses thundered past the winning post at the Selangor Turf Club in Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, situated in the heart of the Malaysian capital citys Golden Triangle, in August 1992. That final event signaled the commencement of work on the site of one of the most ambitious real-estate developments in Southeast Asia. The Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC) project will transform the 1 OO-acre former racecourse into an integrated, mixed-use development providing more than 18 million square feet of commercial, retail, hotel, recreational, and entertainment facilities in a park land setting which will be developed in phases over some 10 to 15 years. commercial and special-use spaces with a 1.5-millionsquare-foot retail podium above four levels of basement parking for 5,000 cars, all within a 14-acre site known as the North West Development. Fifty acres of park, public spaces, and infrastructure, together with surface parking for an additional 2,000 cars, make up the balance of the Phase I works. The landmark feature of the project will be the twin 88story PETRONAS towers, linked by a unique Sky Bridge at the 41 st and 42nd floors. Each tower will reach an overall height of 451.9 meters ( 1,482.6 feet) above street level and will, at least for a short period, be the worlds tallest building.
Coordination via P3
As part of its five-year project role, LMM established project-wide policies and procedures for project management, logistics, cost control, document control, planning, and scheduling and administration. This ensures a common basis of operation for all design and construction groups and facilitates LMMs man-
A Complex, Massive Undertaking Requires Project Management

Lehrer McGovern (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd. (LMM), part of Lehrer McGovern Bovis, New York, is providing project management consultant services for Phase I of KLCC. This comprises approximately 5.4 million square feet of
agement role and ability to interface and coordinate the various aspects of the projects, says Les Brown, Senior Planning Manager for LMM. Regular coordination meetings are held between the project managers, design consultants, and contractors to facilitate exchange of information and coordinate the work efforts. For project-wide planning and scheduling, Brown specified that Primavera Project Planners was to be the standard project management software to be utilized by all General Contractors and Nominated SubContractors. To facilitate coordination and integration of the various programs and schedules, LMM established a Master Schedule for the whole development with a series of sub projects for each building or major contract within the development. We manage the schedule for the design and contract procurement aspects, says Brown, while the contractors develop and maintain the individual sub projects. Logistics and site coordination become an interfacing process between all parties, managed by LMM. As part of this process, the contractors are required to prepare and submit regular standard written and graphical reports, along with a P3 data diskette of their project, updated in accordance with a common series of data dates specified by LMM. Monthly coordinated reports are prepared and submitted to senior management following review and analysis of the contractors information.
Project Template Has Multiple Calendars

Brown established a standard setup project for all contractors that incorporated a variety of work calendars (5-, 6-, and 7-workday calendars for Malaysia and for North America- where many of the design consultants are located) so that project dates could be coordinated, and all work activities could be assigned to the correct workweek. In addition, the setup project on diskette contained a series of 10 predefined hierarchical standard code fields for all project activities to describe, among other things, the project phase, stage, and task; building element, area, and level; contract and trade package; and various company and department responsibilities. This ensures that when separate contractor information is merged, information can be intelligently selected and sorted, formatted, and presented in a consistent and reliable manner, says Brown. We deliberately only defined what we believed to be the most commonly used coding fields for this type of work, explained Brown, and we made sure the contractor still had the flexibility to define specific codes for their internal use.
Special Activity ID Coding

Extensive use is made of the 10-digit Activity ID to define projects and work scopes, explained Brown. The first two spaces define the sub project, next comes a separator, followed by a five-digit number and then a two-digit suffix.
We use the sub project ID element to identify projects and buildings; a hyphen separator is used for core and shell work, and an equal sign for tenant fit-out work. That way we can combine both networks for a single building without number conflicts. The five- figure number field is also structured with specified ranges for various project activities...a bit Draconian, admitted Brown, but when everybody is playing music, it helps if we are all singing from the same song sheet.
learned from that project and modified our approach and requirements to provide us with a refined and improved series of procedures. The improvements and upgrades to P3, some of which were in response to our own P3 wish-list requests to Primavera, have helped us tremendously, added Brown. The switch to Windows was a major leap forward, but Brown is most enthusiastic about the move toward Concentric Project Management. We are evaluating SureTrak as the vehicle for our smaller contracts and specialist work to be integrated within our overall project management software without them being overwhelmed with full-blown P3 capabilities. Its looking very encouraging.
Big Project = Big Network

With networks for the twin towers currently running at nearly 7,000 activities each, we are dealing with a total of nearly 25,000 activities and 40,000 relationships in 29 sub projects, he added. To help us manage this volume of data, we operate the project management software on a local area network (LAN), so that individual project management teams can directly track their own specific information, but can also access project-related information for other contracts.
Going Up?
The twin towers are due to reach level 88 before the end of the year, with the initial occupants moving in during early 1997. However, the major focus of attention during June, July, and August of this year was the field assembly and erection of the 58-meter- span Sky Bridge that will connect the SkyLobbies of the towers. With components coming from Korea, the United States, and various parts of Southeast Asia, we needed an integrated approach to planning and scheduling. With all the primary contractors and subcontractors using P3, we had that common link to keep on top of the situation and achieve the schedule, commented Brown.
Why Les Chose P3

Les Brown came to Malaysia over three years ago, when the KLCC conceptual design was being developed, after four years at the Canary Wharf project in Londons Docklands, for Lehrer McGovern International. I d started using Primavera in late 87 for the Canary Wharf project, where we had also specified the software to be used project-wide by all the management contractors, said Brown. We took the lessons
With the retail component scheduled to open in the last quarter of 1997 and the international-class concert halls first performance targeted for January 1998, Les Browns team of six planners still has a lot of work
ahead. As future project phases begin, Les team looks forward to using P3 and SureTrak together as a Concentric Project Management solution that wont have them running around in circles!

Constructing Correctional Institutions the Correct Waywith Primavera Project Planner

P3 enables Gilbert/Commonwealth to Deliver On Time, Within Budget, and Without Claims
The Federal Correctional Complex in Allenwood, PA, was not built according to the old rules. Indeed, the $173 million project was the first of its kind: it was the largest project ever undertaken by the Federal prison system and it involved the concurrent construction of three distinct correctional facilitiesa minimum, a medium, and a maximum security unitin three adjacent villages on a 600-acre parcel of land. In all, the complex involved the installation of more than 60 buildings, a million-gallon elevated water tank, an off-site waste treatment facility, and a network of highly sophisticated internal, external, and perimeter security systems. Three general contractors, more than a dozen specialists, and one Project Manager were involvedand, at the center of it all, Primaveras Primavera Project Planner (P3).
Staying on Top of Progress

Managing the entire project was Gilbert/Commonwealth of Reading, PA, and the man in charge of the schedule was Scott Daelhousen. Not only was Daelhousens P3 network coordinating more than 20,000 activities, which would take place over the course of three years, but it was also cost loadedand Daelhousen was authorizing payment for the contractors based upon the progress recorded in P3. To monitor that progress, Daelhousen relied on a staff of eighteen inspectors. Each week, the inspectors would take copies of the 60-day look-ahead report and go out and do an assessment to determine what percentage of the work had been completed for each listed item. Daelhousen and an assistant would then update the status of activities in P3, and with the up-
dated information he was able to generate a report that summarized the costs for all the different categories of work on the site. Then, Daelhousen used the P3 edit mode to add a few lines to the summary report, quickly turning it into the actual monthly cost estimate for payment to the contractor. This P3 report was attached to the monthly pay estimate as the backup. Unquestionably, P3 gave us the cost control we needed in order to pay the contractors effectively on a monthly basis, continues Daelhousen. We literally generated our cost reports right out of P3. We summarized the costs by discipline and then printed that summary report, the numbers from which were then transferred onto a standard AIA form. We then passed that form on to the government for payment. Overall, we had 18 contracts to monitor, Daelhousen goes on to say. Without P3 wed have been sunk.
way, they would have a general sense of the overall completion state of any given building. This we accomplished by producing summary barcharts in P3, rolling up the detailed information grouped by area. I think the government was much more attuned to that high level of information rather than the volumes and levels of detail that was gathered behind the summary. I think that ability was extremely helpful, and the activity coding made it quite easy. Daelhousen also found that the activity codes made it easy to track the progress on change orders. Whenever we added an activity to the schedule, we coded it with the change order number, he explains. That gave us the opportunity to monitor when the change order work was started and when it was completed. We could always track the progress of the workand pay the contractor accordingly. If he got fifty percent of the work done, he got fifty percent of the pay.
Monitoring Progress via Activity Codes

P3s activity codes enabled Daelhousen to categorize and identify different buildings, locations, and disciplines, which not only made it easier to manage the overall schedule but it also made it much easier for him to create high-level reports that he could transmit to the ownersin this case, the Federal governmenton a regular basis. Every month we issued progress reports for each of the three major contractors, in which we would basically summarize the work activities by building. That
Analyzing and Approving Changes with P3

P3 was also useful to Daelhousen when projecting the impact of change requests. Whenever the owner, the architect, or a contractor submitted a design change fragnet, which was required prior to any consideration of the change request, Daelhousen used P3 to do a schedule analysis to determine the impact of the change. In one case, Daelhousen recollects, P3 really helped us prove to the government that one contractors request for time was unjustified. We did some resource
loading and looked at the changes that would occur based on the contractors manpower loading, and we leveled it, looked at it, put the changes in it, and demonstrated that the manpower loading considerations were not substantially affected by the condition. Could he have done that without the power of a tool like P3? Absolutely not, says Daelhousen. Theres no way. Manually you couldnt keep track of something like that, even if you were trying to keep up on some kind of spreadsheet system. You wouldnt be able to develop that kind of confidence. You wouldnt have the ability to manipulate the data to see what would happen.
The Bottom Line

For a complex project that was breaking new ground in multiple dimensions, the Federal Correctional Complex in Allenwood went in with no substantial hitches, an accomplishment that reflects well not only on Daelhousen, but also on Primaveras P3. It was a very, very successful operation, says Daelhousen. We completed the project on time and within budget, and we had no claims on the job.

Re-Engineering the Planning Process at PECO Nuclears Peach Bottom Station

P3 Increases Efficiency and Reduces Costs for PECO Energys Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station
Mainframes used to make sense for scheduling outages and on-line maintenance activities at PECO Energys Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station. After all, a refueling outage schedule for each of the two 1100 Megawatt nuclear reactors involves the coordination of more than 10,000 activities and 35,000 relationships. The dependencies are complicated, as are the individual activities themselves. Such a project requires the support of more than 3,000 technicians, working round the clock, for several weeks. Yes, a mainframe used to make sense until Primaveras P3 for Windows became available. Then, as PECOs Peach Bottom station soon found out, a PC running P3 would do an even better job. And it would save money. Lots of money.
Developing a Sophisticated Schedule Interactively

PECO Energys Peach Bottom Station was the first nuclear site to schedule refueling outages and on-line maintenance with P3, explains Lee Harrison, the manager of Peach Bottoms Scheduling group in Outage Management. Prior to the implementation of P3 they had relied on PREMIS, a mainframe-based scheduling package. But PREMIS, while powerful, did not lend itself to an efficiently engineered planning process. An outage planner, sitting on the fourth floor of the building adjacent to the reactors themselves, would fill out a PREMIS input sheet, specifying activity code data, relationships, or dates. Then, the planner would come down two floors and put the PREMIS input sheet into a drop box, from which it would make its way to one of the PREMIS programmers in Harrisons central scheduling group.
My people would input that request, Harrison relates, and the system would run a time analysis and produce the required output, generally overnight. The next day, the planner making the request would get a report that analyzed the impact of what he had done. If more work was required, hed fill out another input sheet with the change and then put it in the drop box, and the same cycle would start all over again. Now, Harrison goes on to say, with P3, the planners can run those kinds of scenarios themselves more times in an hour than we used to be able to support in a day.
Because we are now using P3, Harrison says, we no longer have a centralized scheduling group. I have a technical expert that oversees the P3 network while the end users plan and schedule their own activities in P3. They do all their own activity manipulation and get almost all of their own output, without having to go through a central scheduling organization. Indeed, since P3 was brought on-line, the outage planning group has changed dramatically. Prior to the implementation of P3, Peach Bottom required twelve outage planners and three schedulers to plan and schedule a refueling outage. Since then, PECO has eliminated the scheduling position altogether relying, now, on eight planner/schedulers who plan and schedule the plants outages using P3. Scheduling with P3 is not the science that scheduling with PREMIS was, Harrison goes on to say. I needed expert programmers to make PREMIS run. I just need somebody whos somewhat literate with a PC to operate P3 effectively.
Doing More with Less

Peach Bottom was the first nuclear site to plan schedules interactively, Harrison says, By interactively I mean that the planning and scheduling personnel work together in the same network, on the same project, at the same time, and without the use of a central scheduling group. Harrison goes on to explain that other utilities have used PCs as their main schedule processors, but that in most instances the utility simply substituted a PC for the mainframe they had been using without changing the process by which they created schedules; they simply applied the old mainframeoriented processes to a PC. But Harrison wanted to change the process at Peach Bottom. He wanted to realize a level of planner-processor interactivity that the old processes themselves had not allowed.
Managing a 10,000 Activity Outage with P3

Working with P3 may be much easier than working with PREMIS, but managing a refueling outage is no simple task. There are more than 90 plant systems that must be tested and maintained, and there are numerous regulations and requirements that dictate how and what can be done when. There is also a lot of planned maintenance that cant be done while the plants are running, as well as unplanned maintenance requirements that must be put off until the unit is off-line.
Harrison goes on to explain that PECOs Peach Bottom outage schedule holds some 10,000 work activities and 35,000 relationships. Many of these activities are repetitive, planned maintenance activities or plant modifications. A crew of around 3,000 workers, working round-the-clock, will complete an average of 400475 activities per day and complete the full set of 10,000 activities in just over three weeks. PECO is a recognized leader for refueling outage execution on US commercial reactors, Harrison says. Conventional wisdom was that a refueling outage took 90 days, and we had a goal to get below 60 days by 1996. As it was, by the time 1995 ended, the outage time had been reduced to 24 days at Peach Bottom and to a mere 22 days at PECOs Limerick station. Says Harrison, with P3, our schedule was better during our 24-day outage than it had ever been in the past.
We take a snapshot in P3 of what actually happened in the outage, incorporate lessons learned, change the template activities for the other unit, and then populate this new template with the work thats already in scope for next years outage. Its easy to strip out the onetime-only activities and make a new template every year. Peach Bottoms planners and schedulers also swap outage experiences with their counterparts at the PECOs Limerick station. Planners at each station provide copies of their actual outage schedules to one another in order to learn from each others experiences. Peach Bottoms planners can easily open up the Limerick outage schedule on their P3 system and planners at Limerick can just as easily review Peach Bottoms schedule on their copy of P3.
Building from Experience: Using P3 to Plan for the Future

P3 has made it easier for Harrison to plan future outages, too. Peach Bottom, like PECO Limerick, has two boiling water reactors, and each reactor is refueled in alternate years. Harrison used to keep a standard schedule template, but now he finds it easier to use previous years outage schedule as the basis for a new outage template.
Using P3 to Schedule Routine On-Line Maintenance

Peach Bottoms outage management organization also has six people using P3 to manage the on-line maintenance work week schedules one Work Week Manager per week on a five-week rotation, assisted by a P3 network coordinator. Each Work Week Manager (WWM) is responsible for scheduling all the on-line maintenance activities that will take place during a particular week. As one week concludes, the WWM responsible for that week will begin planning the schedule for a work week five weeks in the future. As that week nears, the WWM will gather information on
the work that needs to be done from the plants work order system, issue several iterations of a schedule for comments and input, revise the schedule, and finally execute the work according to the final version of the schedule when his or her week comes up on the calendar. Though they are each planning different weeks, the WWMs are relying on the same P3 project network, which contains between 3,000 and 4,000 discrete activities during any given five-week period. As one weeks work concludes, that part of the network is maintained for two weeks and then dropped
a way to integrate the networks when appropriate. Again, P3 provided him with the support he needed. We dont want someone out in the field having to work to two schedules that came from two different networks, Harrison explains, so Im interfacing the long term project planning network with the on-line maintenance network, which is where we actually do the installation of these plant modifications. SAS programs and P3 global changes make the appropriate conversions when moving the long term planning network information, which is initially scheduled on a daily calendar, into the on-line maintenance or outage networks, both of which are scheduled on hourly calendars. This way, I can off-load things from the long-term project planning network into one or the other of the production networks at the appropriate time so that the project managers dont have to schedule them twice.
Planning Other Projects with P3, Too.

PECO Peach Bottom is actually working with three inter-related P3 project networks at any given time. There is the annual refueling outage network, containing the 10,000+ activities and 35,000+ relationships. There is the day-to-day on-line maintenance network, containing the 3,000 to 4,000 activities that will be performed over the next five weeks (plus the history of what was performed over the previous two weeks). Then, there is a Projects network, which is used to plan long term projects, such as capital improvements, plant modifications, and other major projects that are not directly related to the daily operation of the Peach Bottom reactors. Yet because the execution of the tasks associated with any one of these networks has an impact on the schedules for the other two networks, Harrison needed
Integrating P3 with Peach Bottoms Work Order System

As at PECO Limerick, Peach Bottoms P3 system exchanges data with the sites work management system (PIMS, for Plant Information Management System). PIMS resides on a mainframe and contains vast amounts of information about the specific activities associated with virtually every aspect of running the nuclear station. Harrison explains: PIMS is where we document problems, where we report something that is broken and needs to be fixed. It has all our preventive maintenance programs in it, and it actually produces
the work orders, which are the detailed work instructions and authorizations required to do work in the plant. The work orders provide the step by step instructions for a crew undertaking an activity, Harrison goes on to say. They describe what procedures a crew will use, what radiation work permits they will be working under, and so on. The work group supervisors use PIMS, not P3, to status the work as it is underway. They log in PIMS the actual start times, the expected finish times, and the actual finish times all of which information is loaded, via SAS routines and an OS/2 download, from the PIMS system into P3 on a daily basis. After the planners work on the schedule, they will upload back to PIMS the actual schedule, including the scheduled start date for future activities, changes in activity durations, and changes in supervisory assignments. My goal there was to have the work week managers work only with P3, Harrison explains. Changes they make in P3, where they own the responsibility for that data, will get written back to the work order system automatically without them having to make the change in the work order system itself while supervisors need to work only in PIMS, with their information transferring automatically to P3.
first-time-user apprehensions. At first, Harrison says, people feared that they were going to become slaves to the computer, that they were going to spend the whole day trying to figure out how to work the computer instead of doing their real work. I was surprised to discover that that phase was pretty much over in a week or so. We found that our planners quickly became proficient and very creative. In general, once people found out how easy it was to get output and how easy it was to get what was in their heads into P3, it was very well received. The new users in Harrisons organization learned how to use P3 at a three-day course at Primaveras offices in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania; the remaining Outage Management users went to five days of on-site instruction. After that, the users were soon surprising Harrison. During the first refueling outage, a secretary in the group used Microsoft Query with Microsoft Excel and P3 to produce a daily outage status report in approximately 10 minutes. Previously it had been someones full-time job to produce this report. I didnt expect that people would get so good at it so quickly, Harrison goes on to say. Our biggest risk to being successful was that the users wouldnt pick it up and Id still have to maintain a high level of scheduling support. Our planners and schedulers got so good at using P3 that they needed even less support than Id thought possible.
New User Reactions to P3

The move from mainframe to PC actually introduced the first PCs to many people in the Outage Management group, and with that introduction came a host of
Outage Management is using Pentium-90 PCs running OS/2 and connected to a local area network; a multiuser LANpack version of P3 resides on a Novell server on the LAN.
Cost Reductions, Quicker Turnaround, More People In the Know

PECO Energy began to rely on outsourced mainframe processing support several years ago and when they did, the money that groups had been paying one another internally for computing support became very real money that was flowing out of PECOs doors. As soon as Harrisons schedulers stopped relying on the mainframe as their schedule processor, PECO started saving some $28,000 per month. Thats real money thats not going out the door, says Harrison, who calculates that the savings in mainframe charges alone paid for the P3 project in less than a year. P3 also enables us to get the schedule out quicker, explains Harrison, via electronic distribution of schedules over our LAN. Harrison goes on to say that his group also puts a clean version of the project on a LAN disk to which everyone in Peach Bottom has access. That way, other P3 users in the facility including users in chemistry, engineering, industrial risk management, even P3 users in the control room can have access to the latest on-line maintenance and outage schedules. Theres a lot of reporting done from that network copy that does not require my involvement any more, says Harrison. Overall, Peach Bottom has more than 110 P3 users, though only those in the Work Management group issue the official station schedule. The other users are looking to P3 for information about upcoming work that
Important P3 Features at Work at Peach Bottom

P3s Graphical User Interface (GUI) has proven to be very popular at Peach Bottom because it conveys information clearly, right on the screen. Imposing dates, creating and removing relationships these are things that we used to have to go through a long report to do, Harrison remembers. In PREMIS there was a report called an OR12, which could be 200-300 pages long and which described the relationships in the network. You had to shuffle through this lengthy report to try to get a picture of your work. With P3 its right there on the screen. Harrisons group also makes extensive use of P3s activity codes, and for an individual activity they use the same 10-digit activity ID that they use on the PIMS system. We use the work order to identify every piece of work that happens at the plant. Thats the one common denominator that we all know, so by making it the activity ID in P3, its very easy to establish relationships.
will have an impact on their departments. For instance, the users in the chemistry group will look at the schedule to see if any surveillance tests are planned. The users in the radiation protection group look to see if the activities coming up on the schedule have been reviewed for their radiation work permits.
cial benefit for PECO Energy. By enabling fewer people to accomplish more work, more efficiently, it has gained even greater financial benefits for the company. But Harrison points out that the benefits are not just to the bottom line of the company. The most significant Big Picture benefit that Ive seen is that it puts people in control of the quality of their own work, Harrison explains. With P3, an Outage Planner can be as good as he can be without having software, or a process thats less than efficient, in his way. Work Week Managers can really own their work weeks, because everything they need to make wellplanned, well-executed, well-scheduled work weeks is under their control, now. The old process got in the way of people being their best. Aside from the reduction in manpower and the reduction in mainframe costs, that, I think, is our most significant gain.
Tangible Benefits
Peach Bottom is contributing power to the power pool that supplies the whole Northeast corridor, so a lot of families and a lot of businesses depend upon the efficient production of power from the system. The plants dual-unit capability factor an industry measure of plant output is above 93% these days. Its even high on the units that that had outages that year, says Harrison, now that the outages are under 30 days. By saving in excess of $28,000 per month on mainframe charges, P3 has provided a very tangible finan-

P3 at PECO Limerick
Primaveras Software Schedules All On-Line and Outage Work at PECO Energys Limerick Generating Station
Keeping the two 1,000 megawatt nuclear units at PECO Energys Limerick Generating Station on-line and generating electricity at peak efficiency is no small task. On a daily basis, there are tests to run and systems to maintain and once a year, for a period lasting several weeks, PECO engineers take one of the reactors off-line for refueling. To schedule and manage these tasks, PECO used to rely on a mainframe-based scheduling tool. But when managers at southeastern Pennsylvanias principal electric utility decided that they needed a scheduling system that would be easier to use and more accessible to their planners, they chose Primaveras Primavera Project Planner (P3) for Windows. Planner/Scheduler for PECO. There are routine tests to perform, as well as preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, and plant modifications. PECOs Work Week Managers are responsible for scheduling and managing these routine activities. The five Work Week Managers work on a rotating basis, with each individual planning and managing the work that will take place during one of the next five weeks. When the current week is done, that manager will begin planning the activities for the week five weeks in the future; meanwhile, the Work Week Manager who has been planning the next weeks work takes over. The Work Week Managers rely on P3 to build a schedule for the activities that will take place during the week for which they are responsible. The number of activities for any given work order may not be great, Williamson explains. A work order for one task may have only a few activities: apply a clearance, disassemble a pump, inspect the internals, fix and repair the equipment as required, then reassemble the pump, remove the clearance, and test the equipment. Accomplishing these
Using P3 to Schedule Routine On-Line Activities

On any given day, the network for the next five weeks worth of on-line work will contain between 3,000 and 6,000 activities, explains John Williamson, a Senior
tasks efficiently, however, requires a high degree of coordination between the work groups responsible for carrying out the tasks on the work orderand that, says Williamson, is the real challenge. During a normal workday, the scheduling group prints out a 3-day work coordination schedule for on-line maintenance. Thats typically a 60-page schedule, Williamson says, and every morning and afternoon theres a meeting with the work coordinators from the various groups, and they go through the schedule line item by line item. The Work Week Managers then use P3 to move activities around during the week so that they better fit the work groups resource availability.
maximizes its control over the project. Each day during an outage, PECOs scheduling group publishes a twoday schedulewhich might be as long as 140 pages and the work group coordinators sit down routinely to review the schedule, identifying the hard spots, problems, and coordination issues. The size of the refuel network is not the only challenge that benefits from the power of P3. The interdependencies and the logical constraints that have to be factored into the schedule make it a very complex network to manage. There are a lot of interdependencies between systems and a number of tech-spec requirements defining what systems can be inoperable at a given time, Williamson explains, so from the standpoint of logic the refuel network tends to be more complicated than the on-line schedule.
Using P3 to Schedule Refueling Outages

Every two years we have to refuel each reactor, Williamson goes on to say. Because there are two reactors at Limerick, PECO refuels one per year, staggering the refueling so that both reactors are never offline simultaneously. When we first began to do the outages, the duration was in the 100-plus day range, says Williamson. Weve got that down nowthe outage weve just completed was 24 days. Refueling is complicated: the network has more than 11,000 activities. But the ability to plan at this level of detail is one of the things that makes it possible for PECO to reduce the duration of the refueling outage. Primaveras P3 enables PECO to schedule its 11,000+ outage activities in such a way that the company
Why P3?
PECO undertook a comparison of several non-mainframe scheduling systems in order to determine which product might best replace the mainframe system. We looked at activity ID capabilitiesthe system had to support IDs with at least 10 digits, as that was the length of the ID in our existing work management system. We wanted a system that would support a minimum of 20,000 activities per project. We looked at the number of calendars, how far out a project could go if you were, say, using hourly calendarsin other words, the duration limit of the project. We looked at what kind of graphical output you could get, how easy the prod-
ucts were to use, some performance issues such as how long it took to open a project, to do a schedule analysis, to level resources and prepare reports. And then there were questions like, Did it support hammocks? Resources? How many code fields and targets? Williamson goes on to say that when they compared the tested products based upon these criteria, Primaveras P3 for Windows was the clear choice with Primaveras Finest Hour coming in second.
Increasing End User Involvement

P3 has also provided PECO with a level of accessibility that it had not enjoyed with the mainframe system. P3 is a much easier tool to use, says Williamson, and it opens the scheduling arena to more of the mainstream workers. You dont need to be a mainframe scheduling professional to use the tool. P3 will allow us to get the work groups responsible for planning and performing the work to be more involved in the actual scheduling of the work. PECO still relies on a mainframe-based work management system called PIMS (for Plant Information Management System), which maintenance and contract planners use to plan work orders and work order activities. Because the information in PIMS is closely tied to the schedules developed in P3, the scheduling group relies on SAS routines to transfer information between the systems in order to keep the information in sync.
Each morning, the scheduling group downloads information from PIMS to P3; at the end of the day, they upload modified schedule information from P3 to PIMS, where the work order files are automatically updated. Each morning, PECOs Work Week Managers review the updated information brought into P3 from PIMS. When the network has been reviewed, and the daily schedule approved for issue, a copy of the project is made available to the end users on another LAN server. These users have restricted access in order to prevent any changes to the approved schedule. Providing this copy of the schedule is part of PECOs strategy to make the scheduling information more accessible to others in the organizationwhich, in turn, enables them to be more involved. In the past it was hard to set up a report, whether a graphics plot or a tabular report, that was exactly tailored for everybody, says Williamson. If you tried to please everybody youd end up generating a hundred reports that were all slightly different but basically the same. By making P3 available to the end user, if one of the standard reports isnt what they want to see, they now have the capability of going in and easily creating their own. They can run their own sorts or selects, print their own information, and so on. They dont have to be SAS programming experts or understand a mainframe program.
Williamson reports that the users at PECO also like P3s graphical interface and the fact that they can get information from the system immediately. No fussing with input sheets or batch jobs. Theres a lot more instant gratification when using P3. Williamson also notes that since PECO began outsourcing its mainframe computing, P3 for Windows has saved the utility money. Mainframe charges tend to get pretty expensive, says Williamson, and you can rack up some pretty extensive CPU time with a mainframe-based scheduling package. So one of the gains with P3 has been a cost-savings.
P3 - the Core of an Accessible Integrated Project Management System

P3 has shown PECO that it can be instrumental in getting more and more end users involved in the planning and scheduling process, that the need for a group of mainframe-oriented scheduling gurus has diminished. Schedules that work, that enable the plant to operate effectively and efficiently, are now well within reach of a wider group of users relying on PC-based tools. P3 for Windows has met our objectives, says Williamson. The fact that a lot of users without a strong scheduling background can do their own inputs and see the results of their changesand the degree to which they like itwell, thats been good to see.

Improving Efficiency at the UK Post Office Counters Ltd.

Primaveras P3 helps make 19,500 Post Office outlets more competitive
What do department stores and travel agencies have in common with the Post Office? In the United Kingdom, theyre competing with one another for your business. Since the government lifted the restrictions on the services it can offer, the retail arm of the Post Office, known as Post Office Counters, Ltd. (POCL), has been expanding and diversifying to compete more effectively with the other business on the High Street. For POCL, that has meant the addition of new Bureau de Change facilities, national lottery ticket vending operations, enhanced operations for selling travel insurance and collecting telephone and utility bill paymentshundreds of enhancements and new services, all of which must be made available in as many as 19,500 POCL outlets across the UK. Key to managing this expansion across so many separate facilities is Primaveras Primavera Project Planner (P3).
Improving Efficiency with P3

P3 helps POCLs London-based Project Management Services (PMS) division implement the organizations new programs. PMS works closely with the managers responsible for each new development, providing a range of services, from consulting to preparing detailed, computer-based plans for the many tasks in each project. A team of 25 planners, based in London and Chesterfield, works full-time on project management activities, meeting regularly with the project managers, whom they see as their clients, to discuss and update plans. Were trying to improve the efficiency of change at the Post Office, says Doug Warwick, Project Support Manager for the PMS division. Efficiency is fundamental to POCLs efforts for that will enable the organization to compete effectively for the customers business. Not only does POCL have to provide a better service than
the other shops on the High Street selling the same products, but it has to implement the infrastructure to deliver those services in an efficient manner in order to keep costs down. As many as 30 major projects are happening simultaneously, often with capital expenditures in the millions of pounds. They range from infrastructure projects like the Lottery machines or counter automation, through information technology developments to re-writing of staff procedures manuals or efficiency studies to reduce customer queuing times. All our projects are subject to a benefits analysis, Warwick goes on to say, and none of them get the goahead without the business agreeing that theres a benefit at the end of it.
We always need to communicate with the people who are going to be using the product or process were introducing, says Warwick, and were always communicating with all the members of the team that are developing the system were putting in. We spend a lot of time ensuring that weve got a communications strategy in place right from the beginning of a project. Communications go up and down the line, Warwick goes on to explain. The planners actually visit the project managers with copies of P3 on laptop systems, which enables them to sit with the managers and explore the details of a project in real time. Communication of new ideas and options takes place instantly unlike the days when PMS relied on a mainframe for its planning. The project managers keep telling us how much better it is to have their project data in front of them, with the chance to interact directly with the plans, notes PMSs Project Resources Manager, Bruce Thomas. This has helped with satisfaction levels that we monitor as part of our Service Level Agreements, which are currently achieving around 90% customer satisfaction. Warwick himself uses P3 to prepare monthly updates for POCL management, including Gantt charts showing project progress, a summary report, and a risk report. P3s graphics capabilities make it easy for him to communicate the information that he needs to convey.
Overcoming the Challengesfrom Coordination to Communication

In terms of the number of activities involved, POCLs projects are moderately-sizedprojects routinely run in the area of 1,500 activities. Many activities require different resources and special constraints, and P3 provides powerful support for managing the constraints and inter-relationships between activities. Given the number of sites at which POCL projects may be going on at once, one of the greatest challenges has not been the coordination of activities but the communication of information about the activitiesand P3 has been a powerful aid in this area as much as any other.
The biggest thing about P3, in terms of communicating, is the ease with which people can read the charts, Warwick explains. The colors help a lot. They really bring things out, so people can concentrate on the specific items that theyre supposed to concentrate on and not be blinded by a lot of the details. Warwick goes on to say that P3s ability to roll information up into summary bars is also helpful when it comes to conveying information clearly to the different participants. Its a real benefit, he continues, because we can generally get most of the plan on to one sheet of paper rather than having hundreds and hundreds of sheets of paper. That really does help, especially in the higher level presentations.
and in software license fees. Perhaps more importantly, we realized that adding new capabilities would mean an expensive upgrade, which we couldnt justify. The other major factor was usability and functionality. We wanted a system which could give us a higher degree of interaction with our clients, the project managers, as well as a more sophisticated range of reporting and charting options. At the same time, PMS needed a project planning system that was easy to learn and easy to use, that would reduce the pain of transition, and that would support large-scale project plans. Although we effectively started with a blank sheet of paper, PMSs Warwick goes on to explain, we had at least one guiding factor the use of networked PCs as the basic engine for the system, partly because Windows-based PCs are POCL office computing s standard, but also because we had a requirement for off-site portability that would be hard to meet any other way. Our evaluation team, which included project managers, planning experts, IT people and end-users, was therefore set the task of identifying a suitable PCbased solution with enough power and functionality to meet some pretty sophisticated project management requirementsquite a tall order. Identification by the project team of primary and secondary requirements led to a detailed specification, which narrowed choices down to a handful of high-end packages. We were able to discount the low-end solutions immediately, by comparing them with our list of
Replacing Mainframe Artemis with P3

PMS had been managing its projects with the mainframe-based Artemis Planning 9000 software, but the evolution of the operations required a solution that was simpler to use and more responsive. As Pauline Johnson, Head of Project Management Services explains, the costs of running the old installation, combined with a need to have a more interactive, userfriendly installation, forced PMS to evaluate options for a new-generation planning system. We originally bought our mainframe system to support a specific major project about five years ago. Unfortunately, although that system served us well, it no longer met our needs in a number of ways. It was very expensive to run, both in terms of the hardware costs,
must-have features says Doug Warwick. They just dont have the capability to handle major projects like ours, where we can have literally thousands of activities and resources to manage. The planners at POCL finally settled on Primaveras P3 after Primaveras distributors, Milestone, arranged a trial that would enable PMS planners to compare the three PC-based packages upon which they had settled as final contenders. Two planners were assigned to test each package with the same 750-activity network, assessing a broad range of features including performance, ease-of-use, and supplier support. Although each of the finalists had strengths, the end-result was a decision in favor of Primaveras P3. Users particularly liked the interface, says Warwick, and the quality of the graphics was excellent, an important benefit when working with our internal POCL clients.
The portability of the laptop systems enables planners to take the project plans with them when they visit POCLs project managers, whom they view as their clients. The planners can modify the plans as they are sitting at the meetings, which brings to the process an element of real-time planning that was never present when they were using mainframe Artemis. The planners used to have to return to the office, make the changes at a terminal, wait for a report, and bring the changed schedule backa process that often took at least a day. Now, says Warwick, the speed with which they can make the changes, and the ease with which we can modify plans, is tremendous. Multi-user access to the project data, which Artemis did not allow, has also helped us, Warwick goes on to say, particularly in times of stress when weve had to produce something very quickly. We can put several people on the task of entering data and we can get it done in a few hourswhereas it would have taken one person at least a full day to do it before. And then we can take it right back to our customer and say, Here it is. Weve managed to do thisis this the sort of thing you want? The customers are always impressed by that.
Scheduling on the Go
PMS is running P3 on 486- and Pentium-based Compaq laptop systems, complete with docking stations and 17 monitors that the planners can use when theyre not on the road. The project data resides on a server on Novell-based network, and ISDN WAN connections between PMS London and Chesterfield sites provide planners with high-speed connections to the data.
Evolving the Management of the Project to Meet the Opportunities

While P3 has brought tangible ease of use benefits and measurable improvements in the degree of customer satisfaction (to say nothing of the 500,000 PMS has simply saved by getting rid of its mainframe), PMS is also finding new benefits from using Primaveras software. The once clear edges between the project planners and the project managers have grown slightly fuzzy, and project planners are playing more of a managerial role and project managers are contributing more to the planning process. The result is a better planned, better managed projectan evolution that might not have happened if PMS had not moved to P3.
P3 has certainly helped us go along that route, Warwick says. If wed stuck with a mainframe system the project managers would not have gotten involved in that kind of planning environment, not where theyre sitting down and planning and doing what-ifs, playing around with the plan. The timing was just too wrong for it. With the mainframe system, you had to take the input away, have a go at the plans, and bring back the new plan. With P3 everything is much more immediate. You can carry on, sort to your hearts content, and then press the button and say, Yes, thats the one I want. That ones okay.


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