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Information disparity is often the biggest obstacle to managing large, technical projects like those in the mining, oil & gas industries. Rob Stummer of IFS says information integration can be the key to success for these kinds of projects.
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Because projects are temporary endeavours undertaken to create unique products, services or results, organisations have temporary resource requirements that need to be accommodated. But how can organisations avoid resource conflicts between operations and projects and among multiple projects? Guy Wilmington provides the answer.
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If you haven’t already discovered the game Angry Birds, you may be missing out on some valuable project management lessons, writes Liz Pearce. Now, if only PMI would grant PDUs for the time we spend playing it…
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For a professional services firm where skilled staff such as project and engineering consultants represent both their biggest cost and biggest source of revenue, effective resource management is critical to creating client value, enhancing profitability and maintaining a competitive edge.
...read moreJuggling client expectations and internal ROI
All businesses strive to manage their resources as efficiently as possible. But for a professional services firm where skilled staff such as project and engineering consultants represent both their biggest cost and biggest source of revenue, effective resource management is critical to creating client value, enhancing profitability and maintaining a competitive edge.
Clients want to know that their investment will improve their business, whether by lowering costs, enabling efficiencies or expansion into new markets. They also need assurance that a project will complete on time, on budget and within the agreed parameters. If a deliverable does look likely to slip, then they expect to be informed as early as possible.
As such, professional services firms need complete visibility across their business. Projects must be planned, resourced and executed in a way that allows a firm to find the right combination of team members and skill-sets to maximise billable hours at lowest cost and achieve the best possible margin.
They also need to be able to bid for contracts safe in the knowledge that they have the headroom to deliver on what they have set out within the tender. This is particularly challenging in the current economic climate, where headcounts have been reduced and recruitment programs frozen. The more prospective projects there are in the pipeline, the greater the risk that resources will be overstretched.
Author: Dean Lewis
Review status: N/A
Engineering, procurement, construction and drilling support services supplier ICON Engineering will implement project-based ERP suite IFS Applications to manage its operations and expansion, indicating the growth of project management in the oil and gas sector.
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Mega-projects and project alliances have often been plagued by poor contracts, which cause grief to all parties when it comes to distributing risk, costs and resources.
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Project managers are poised to benefit from positive employment expectations despite negative global sentiment about the economy, according to global recruitment specialist Hudson.
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Capital project risk and labour shortages are just two of the top 10 challenges that will face the mining industry this year, according to the Tracking the Trends 2012 report issued by leading professional services firm Deloitte.
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Current critical path method (CPM) scheduling fails to deliver successful project outcomes, in part because the automatic resource levelling systems in most tools, most of the time, produce sub-optimal results and changing a few settings in any of the tools can produce wildly different outcomes.
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