Software for project management

 Home          Information on muliti site project management software
The use of software for project management has been done from the time personal computers have become available economically and with features to handle large volume of data with ease and speed. Project management packages were not a reality till the time when 80386 systems had gained its foothold. While software packages were available even before the advent of 80386 machines the slower speed of the machines really made it difficult to run the software packages of that time to handle any project of  complexity. While the packages as the Harvard project management packages of that time allowed project management they ran awfully slow unless it was atleast a 80386 machine and preferably it was a 80486 machine. 
 
With 80486 machines the project management packages were possible to be put to some real use . However , most of the project management packages deal with projects which assume that the work is limited to single activity at a single site and do not effectively take care properly of projects spread over multiple sites as is quite often with telecommunication projects and other similar projects spread over multiple sites. 
 
The project management packages while allowing the use of CPMPERT     techniques for projects limited to single sites are awfully short of features which can support works at multiple locations mainly because it lacks the facility of allowing the lag to be defined more than once between two activities. The failure to define multiple lags between two activities connected to each other is very serious in case of multiple sites. Consider that activity A depends on Activity B. If we define Activity Ai as the activity A at site  i and Bi as activity B at site i then Ai cannot start before Bi viz. A has SS lag  with B . But if the  activity B at the last site is Bl then Al cannot finish  before Bl which means that  A  now also has FF lag with activity B. The conventional project management package cannot deal with such a situation effectively. This problem can be dealt with by introduction of a dummy activity and defining the same activity at each of the sites as different activities . When the number of sites become very large this can become very cumbersome and will not yield any material benefit in spite of the complicated handling of the system.
 
MSACESS can be used for simple project management package for such activities at multiple sites without the need of great to learn new techniques. The need of a project management for multiple sites are the ability to define the volume of a  activity, the weightage of a particular activity, the resource of a activity and the relative time a activity takes for unit volume of work. There is also a need to define the name of sites where the work will be done . In a more real life situation it is also required to take care of  a number os projects at the same time. For monitoring a situation as this there is a need to define certain main activities and monitor these. There is a need to find out the dates when other activities should start or end  depending on the date of the completion of the last activity depicting the end of  a project. For demonstration of a simple project management package for multiple sites ask for more information on multi site project management software