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The Client

Major construction company undertaking medium-sized building and civil engineering contracts throughout the UK.

The Task

To improve business efficiency and provide a common house style to Clients, the Client wished to establish:

• a common platform for project management within the business
• a common but flexible style for all project reports - capable of meeting the differing needs of managers within the business.

Background

The Client's task is to schedule many discrete project tasks having few logic constraints but within strict resource limits and required time slots (e.g. digging of cable trenches for BT).

The Client uses Hornet XK in a Unix environment to schedule many small projects (principally using the resource scheduler) and Hornet Windmill on individual sites for planning construction projects.

Specification

Hornet were asked to provide a system that would provide all Hornet's standard features, and in addition:

• provide a suite of reports included bar charts, progress curves and tabular reports, all including a specific design for titles and company logos.
• meet the standard engineering reporting layout for A1 and A0 paper
• provide additional space for notes and other contract details
• include legend panels for contract titles and reference details and a list of partners that were working with the company on the contract (architect, electrical contractor, etc.).
• allow automatic insertion of different contract details into reports prepared for different contracts.
• the options of adding extra data values to the report to meet the requirements of their users.
• a zig-zag style date line that emphasises where the project is running ahead or behind schedule. Re-design of Hornet standard reports to follow a similar style.

What Hornet did

In meeting the above specification, Hornet generated three additional custom reports:

Summary Progress Bar Chart: designed to show:

• the entire contract on a single sheet by grouping tasks under different section headings, and showing current progress by depicting the 'worst case' section within each group.
• an option allowing a single section to be printed - listing all tasks within the group and show the ahead/behind summary bar for each task in turn (allowing the manager to focus on any sections causing concern)

Progress Data Report: designed to show:

• summarised tabular progress data for the project.
• a comparison of the current progress of each task - using the specified Percent Work Done value - applied to both the current schedule and the original planned schedule dates - the difference being expressed as a duration, using the finish dates of the tasks for the measure.
• the value ahead/behind as part of the task data, listing these values for the current period and the previous period (the reports can therefore be used to show any trends in sections gaining or losing time).
• optional limited length reports - by omitting tasks recorded as complete as well as are tasks that have not been started - allowing a concise and focused report to be produced.

Progress Histogram Report: designed to show:

• the aggregated and totalled shift production count for all project tasks (essentially a form of Earned Value where the 'value' used as the overall measure is a simple count of number of shifts worked against each task)
• a baseline or archive schedule for the project, defining the original start and finish dates for all tasks and forming the baseline for all comparisons of actual progress against the plan. Current progress is recorded as a specified Percent Work Done value for each task - determining the value of the work done on each task as a realistic estimate of true progress (and not a measure of completed days over planned days). From these values a series of resource curves or profiles are calculated by Hornet Windmill.
• a facility to perform a 'duration based' calculation of the required values without having to set resource values against each of the project tasks. plot a duration-based calculation of values as a graphical histogram - showing each series of values as a cumulative or s-curve style (colour being used to distinguish the different curves and a legend added to the report footer).
• the effects of task Select and Sort facilities on the above calculations - permitting focus on a single section of the project (or in a multi-project environment, provide a separate report for each project) - making the report a powerful tool in monitoring all sections of a large project.

The Outcome

In addition to achieving the company's common reporting requirements, the Client received a number of custom reports capable of providing both detailed and overall analysis of the many projects undertaken by the company.

The custom reports have been added to Hornet Windmill and Hornet XK's standard Menus so that can be made available to other users.

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