Online Project Collaboration

There always should be a schedule filled with the needed information in order to plan the completion of the projects online. While arranging your online project collaboration using the ConceptDraw PROJECT Server service developed by the CS Odessa, you can always upload as many as needed (but not more than 100) ConceptDraw PROJECT files into the Workspace.

Commonly used in the project management, a schedule is simply a listing of each of the projects’ activities, deliverables and milestones with the mentioned intended start as well as finish dates. The milestones, deliverables and activities can be often estimated by other information that is included in the project schedule of resource budget, allocation, linkages and task duration of the scheduled events as well as the dependencies.

Any schedule can be commonly used in the project portfolio parts of project management as well as the project planning management itself. The elements on a schedule may be related to the Statement of work, a Contract Data Requirements List or the work breakdown structure (WBS) terminal elements.

The maintenance and development of the project schedule are known to be used in many different industries, such as construction and engineering. It is the project manager’s responsibility to provide a full-time scheduler or a team of schedulers, depending on how complex the project is. There are lots of different techniques of scheduling can be used as all of them are well developed but, at the same time, inconsistently applied throughout the industry.

Promotion and standardization of scheduling best practices can be pursued by the Project Management Institute (PMI), the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE), the accounting purposes and the US Government for acquisition. It is important to mention that project management can never be limited to an industry. Anyone can use it in order to organize their own life, such as for arranging the homeowner renovation project, keeping a track of all the family activities, coaching your team (whether you are involved in the sport activities or some other ones), planning a vacation or a wedding.

Pic 1. Online Project Collaboration

ConceptDraw PROJECT Server project management software program provides the pre-made examples of the schedules to help its users with creating their own schedules. Project planning is an important part of any manager’s everyday activities which helps them complete all the needed tasks on time, even before the projects actually started. The duration of the projects as well as the tasks within each of the projects can be estimated through an average of normal, optimistic or pessimistic cases.

Before a project schedule is created, any schedule maker has to get a work breakdown structure, a resource list for each resource as well as an effort estimate for each of the tasks. If the mentioned components for the schedule are unavailable, then they can be made by using the so-called “consensus-driven estimation method”, such as “Wideband Delphi”.

Any schedule is known as an estimate itself as each date in the schedule is estimated. If the mentioned dates do not have the buy-in of those who are expected to do the work, then the schedule is known to be inaccurate.

In order to develop some project schedule, the project scope, the sequence of activities, the tasks that are grouped into five project phases (launch, conception, close, definition and planning, performance), the task dependencies map, the critical path analysis and the project milestones need to be completed.

Workspace Resource Usage page shows the utilization of shared resources from Workspace Resource Pool. For each of the resources in particular, there is a total load in percent on the time axis which can be seen by all the Users invited to the Workspace. It is always possible to expand the given resource’s tasks for making it simpler to see what exactly causes an overloading.

The Workspace Scheduler page was developed for displaying all the existing tasks of lots of different projects. They are shown in a calendar format so it is more convenient to track each of the projects’ implementation. Both Guest and Project Manager can view all the previously input tasks of the corresponding projects any time they want as there are no limits or restrictions for these users. At the same time, any Resource Manager can see only those tasks to which the mentioned resources he or she manages are assigned.

The next page, a Workspace Complete Activity one, allows tracking the tasks seeing if a task percent complete value was changed. In case it was, you can always see who exactly made those changes. Any Guest as well as any Project Manager can view all the available tasks of the corresponding projects. However, Resource Manager can only see the tasks to which the existing resources he or she manages are assigned.

The Workspace Users page was created for representing the full list of Users, who were previously invited to this workspace. Administrator of the Workspace can invite any users as well as remove any workspace’s users any time he or she wants. It is also important to mention that all the Users of the current Workspace have a Read Only access to this page meaning they can only read the information about the project, not being involved in the process of completing the tasks within each of them.

The Workspace Resource Pool page is available only to workspace’s Administrator, though. It is used for creating as well as maintaining all the shared resources. It is always possible to add the needed resources manually, to copy or to move them from all the previously downloaded projects. Also, the resources can be imported from the ConceptDraw PROJECT application in the ConceptDraw PROJECT file format, if needed.

Thus, working on the online project collaboration, you can always rely upon the ConceptDraw PROJECT Server as well as all the previously created examples of the projects with the schedules filled with the needed tasks where their descriptions are also mentioned.