System Enhancement Road Map

Requirement

Our client, a major Travel and Transportation company responsible for the UK rail network investing over 20 billion during the five year period to 2014, has been using Oracle applications for over 5 years. Specifically they implemented Oracle Project Costing (PJC), Oracle Project Management (PJT) and Primavera (P3e) in 2005. Due to the versions available at the time, they implemented numerous related CEMLI’s (customisations, extension, modification and localisation, integrations) to enhance the use of the system.

(Other client info: Annual Revenue: £5,712m; Employees: 35,000)

The client wanted to expand their Oracle Projects (OP) footprint, having identified a number of additional applications and existing unused functionality that would deliver significant business benefits. The number and scale of the proposed changes was extensive with complex dependencies.

The client asked Prōject to:

  • Assess the viability of the proposed OP enhancements.
  • Assess and confirm the potential business benefits.
  • Determine the dependencies and relationships between the numerous aspects of the proposed road map.
  • Plan the OP enhancements program, detailing the correct order of approach and potential timeframes for implementation.
  • Investigate the feasibility and proof of concept for Project Resource Management (PJR), Project Performance Reporting (PPR) and the AIA PIP for Primavera (P6) integration.
  • Produce a requirement definition documentation for the OP enhancements program.

Solution

The solution involved looking at all aspects of the road map to provide a fully integrated project planning, scheduling and management application capability with shared global data sets. The focus was to take advantage of the integration features between PJR and PJT, Oracle Human Resource Management (HRMS), and project planning applications such as Primavera (P6) and Microsoft Projects (MSP). The solution involved the following:

  • Critically evaluating the standard integration between MSP / P6 and OP
  • Comparing the standard integration against the existing custom interfaces
  • Confirming the feasibility of PPR against the existing data set
  • Providing a proof of concept for the implementation of PJR, taking into account key dependencies and other related enhancement projects for the management of resources
  • Making recommendations to enhance the use of standard functionality such as change management, task attributes, deliverables, project performance reporting and progress management.
  • Confirming the feasibility and suitability of Project Analytics both ‘out of the box’ and with modifications for the client's project reporting requirements