Fave raves

Five can't-work-without products, in readers' own words.

By Sandra Gittlen, Network World, 02/27/06

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Primavera Systems' Primavera

IN THIS ARTICLE CIO, Priceline: Primavera IT director, University of Connecticut: Enterprise Policy Manager IT director, Lucasfilm Entertainment: Remedy Help Desk IT director, Costello & Sons Insurance: Mimosa NearPoint Server IT director, Pentair: WebInspect

The biggest problem I hear about with delivering projects on time is that CIOs didn't plan enough resources or devote enough man-hours. If estimates are wrong, then there are all types of problems - the target date will be late, and that will have a knock-off effect on all your other projects. A mistake that leads to this is starting off project budgets with a blank page. You'll have greater precision if you use the history of a similar project as a starting point.

We use Primavera Systems' [Primavera] project-management tool to record and forecast the necessary manpower and resources needed for each project, and that helps us deliver more than 95% of tasks on time.

Ron Rose • Title: CIO, Priceline, Norwalk, Conn. • Years in networking: 30 “Primavera Systems’ [Primavera] project management tool ... helps us deliver more than 95% of tasks on time.”

We use it to archive details about all our technology projects - past and present. We log everything about networking and development for the almost 200 deployments we do each month. Using Primavera's tool lets us plan with precision and keep our resources aligned with business needs.

As we go through a project everyone enters the hours they spent and what skills were required. It's important that people record this information with discipline and the appropriate level of detail.

When forecasting a project, we can look at the history of similar projects to get an idea of what will be needed. For instance, we did a migration of a portion of one of our products from a Windows-based architecture to Java. We were able to dramatically increase the accuracy of our projection by going back and comparing two or three similar projects and benchmarking against them. It allows us to complete multi-thousand man-hour projects on schedule with relatively few surprises.

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