Aid workers introduce a project management culture that never before existed, and Primavera's SureTrak is the project management tool of choice.
Quick Links to Main Topics:
Introducing
Project Management Skills
Building the
Templates for Rebuilding the Country
Why Primavera?
A Rich Feature Set
in SureTrak
Primavera and a
Legacy of Lasting Value
Imagine a world in which projects were remotely planned by central committees, in which local workers and engineers were given goals and general expectations for rates of progress, but in which there was no project manager who controlled the activities or who had oversight of the entire effort.
Such was the former Yugoslavia under communism. And now, as the new Republic of Bosnia tries to rebuild after the fall of communism and after a civil war that devastated so much of the region's infrastructure, the problems arising from this absence of a project management culture are becoming manifest. So many of the reconstruction projects will depend upon international aid agencies and funding from donor nations--and those aid agencies and donor nations expect that projects will be managed with the disciplines of project management as they have been practiced outside the communist bloc.
And thanks to the efforts of Dick Sklar and George Milder, the project management disciplines that donor nations will be expecting are taking root in Bosnia. Sklar, the former Special Assistant to the President of the United States and the Secretary of State, asked Milder, a Senior Project Control Specialist with Louis Berger, International to teach the fundamentals of project management to engineers from all over Bosnia. Their project management tool of choice? Primavera's SureTrak Project Manager®.
Introducing Project Management Skills
"This is almost hard for us to envision as Americans," says Milder, whose firm is working under contract to the U.S. Trade and Development Agency to provide project management assistance in Bosnia. "Project management is just so much a part of what we are--but it is so much not a part of what they are."
Milder has taken the traditional sixteen-hour Introduction to SureTrak course and spread it out as a twenty-hour course that meets over ten days. Part of the reason for this has to do with the novelty of the information--though Milder's students tend to be professional engineers by training, they are completely unfamiliar with some of the concepts taken for granted in countries where project management disciplines are well established. For example, when Milder comes to the point in the hands-on exercise where the students have to identify a "down payment" as a resource, he sees blank faces looking back at him. "When I ask if anyone knows what a down payment is, nobody raises a hand," he says--whereupon he has to digress into the whole concept of down payments, credit, and purchasing principals.
Other areas of project management precipitate similar digressions. In the course of talking about SureTrak's ability to calculate earned value, Milder explores such fundamental questions as what is a budget? and how do you create one? He moves into questions about estimating systems, and, when addressing the matter of determining the progress of a project towards completion, appraisal systems.
"These issues are new to the people I am working with," says Milder. "They involve some simple mathematical concepts, but they are all interrelated and it is impossible to focus on one without involving the others."
The other factor informing the decision to spread the course out over ten days has to do with the language barriers. Milder teaches through an interpreter, so there is a constant starting and stopping as he speaks, then she translates, then he speaks again. At first, Milder and his interpreter worked hard to try to find Bosnian equivalents for some of the terms used in traditional project management--"float" for instance, and "hammock"-- but it soon became apparent that there simply were no appropriate analogs. The Bosnian engineers are finding that they prefer to use the English terms to describe the new concepts they are learning.
Building the Templates for Rebuilding the Country
When he is not teaching the Bosnian engineers how to use SureTrak to manage projects, Milder has been working with different aid organizations in Bosnia to develop a set of over-arching project management templates in Primavera's P3®, templates that may provide a way to manage the entire set of reconstruction efforts that will be taking place. Milder has developed a massive activity coding structure that will allow the Project Management Assistance Group to keep track of a wide range of project-related information.
"We've got activity codes for donor nations, for sectors--such as whether it was the energy sector or the transportation sector, or health and education--activity codes for the area of the country where the work would be undertaken, including separate activity codes for cantons and municipalities. We have identified activity codes for all of the contractors that will be working in Bosnia, both Bosnian and international, and we have identified activity codes that give us the ability to identify contracts by contract number, by project identification. If we had a large enough effort where we had several contracts that constituted something we called a program, we have codes for that, too."
"Our vision was that we would use Primavera's P3 as the master program scheduler and that we would manage the individual projects with SureTrak. We would use the same activity codes in SureTrak that we had set up in P3, and we would use P3 as a reporting device. With P3's ability to do activity code sorting and summaries and to make summary schedules, we could have the best of both worlds."
"In engineering and construction," Milder explains, "Primavera's tools are rapidly becoming the industry standard. They were simply the obvious choice for us in Bosnia. P3 and SureTrak use identical file formats. A schedule created in SureTrak doesn't need to be exported as a P3 document. There is no translation involved--so nothing is lost. As a matter of fact, it's becoming standard practice in the U.S. to use P3 as a master project tracking system and to use SureTrak for the specific areas within a project. Project managers update their schedules in SureTrak, and the master schedule is updated as they bring in the SureTrak schedules."
In Bosnia, this model--the Concentric Project Management model--works particularly well. While the overall costs to reconstruct the country after the war are estimated to be in excess of $5 billion (US), those estimates devolve into a large number of smaller projects whose individual costs are generally less than $15 million. Each of these smaller projects involve only 300-400 activities, which are easily managed with SureTrak.
A Rich Feature Set in SureTrak
Besides the matter of compatibility with P3 and the popularity of the products among others in the industry, Milder chose Primavera's SureTrak as the tool to teach to the Bosnian engineers because of the rich feature set that it provides. SureTrak's powerful activity coding features are a perfect example.
"When I teach project management," Milder says, "I stress the importance of using activity codes. They are a very powerful tool. You can use them to sort and summarize, to create different management level reports that you can give to a variety of people and departments. The ability to sort by activity code allows you to tailor reports easily. If you give it enough thought in the planning, you can probably give totally different reports to different departments, yet working off the same database of information. The sorting and the reporting make them look completely different, and that to me is an extremely powerful tool.
"Project management functions on information," he goes on to say, "and if you take away the information flow from project management, you take away project management. Project managers simply cannot function without a flow of information. The ability to tailor reports and the ability to be able to use activity codes to organize and structure reporting or to be able to organize and structure the schedule and group activities is very powerful. The students can all see that because we go through that exercise with the sample schedule that we build. And it never fails to impress. They're all impressed by that and they all understand it."
Primavera and a Legacy of Lasting Value
Milder's courses in SureTrak are going a long way towards helping the Bosnian nation rebuild itself, but Milder is quick to deflect the credit. That, he insists, goes to Dick Sklar, the former Special Representative to the President of the United States and Secretary of State who first saw the need to teach project management in the emerging nation. "He did not want to leave Bosnia without giving the Bosnian people something of real lasting value," says Milder. "That something was the skill and ability to plan, schedule, and manage their projects."
Having identified the opportunity to provide a legacy of lasting value, it was not hard for Sklar and Milder to identify the way to delivery that legacy. Says Milder, "he and I both agreed that the ideal project management software was from Primavera."