Task Masters

State of the Art

Do you have the personnel, equipment, and capital you need to meet your deadlines? Project-management software can help you optimize and organize your resources

Monday mornings like this one used to tie dave long's stomach up in knots. Presiding over his weekly project-management meeting, the 55-year-old cofounder of Pro Mold & Die has just learned that a major vacuum-cleaner manufacturer wants its mold for a new part delivered three weeks early. The project manager on the job is headed to the hospital for bypass surgery, and his replacement, Dave Baldassarre, who's a master of the machines that cut, grind, and burn various-size steel blocks into molds for everything from headlight housings to cell-phone antennae, has never led a project. Baldassarre is starting to panic.

At almost any other time in the 25-year history of the Roselle, Ill., company, Long would have responded to the customer with an unconditional yes and prayed that things would turn out OK. As the deadline approached, he would have counseled Baldassarre to mandate 16-hour shifts, but likely as not that wouldn't have been enough. "Quality is always within our grasp," proclaims the sign over Pro Mold's shop floor, but in the past, timely delivery had often been out of reach: at one time, the company's on-time delivery rate hovered around 50%.

Today, however, seated with his three project managers and two top salespeople at a conference table overlooking his shop, Long is certain that Baldassarre will make the new deadline--still a month away. The source of Long's confidence lies in a stack of red loose-leaf binders, the main focus of everyone at the meeting. Two years ago Long switched from management by cattle prod to management by the content of the red binders. They contain charts that lay out the schedule for every task of every ongoing Pro Mold job, from writing the computer programs for three-dimensional cutting to shipping products that meet inspection standards.

As he does every Monday morning, Long checks the progress on each of the 26 projects currently under way. When he gets to Job #3464--the vacuum-cleaner part--he walks Baldassarre through each of the task deadlines: "You can finish the mold base by here, right? Core polish a week later? Components around the same time?" Baldassarre nods yes to each question, and a look of relief spreads across his face. Only one obstacle stands between him and his target date: the machine he needs for cutting the mold cavity is being used by another mold-making team. Pointing to the chart for the vacuum-cleaner part, Long shows Baldassarre that if he burns the cavity while he's waiting for the cutting machine, he'll nail the ship date.

Long's charts, known as Gantt charts by project-management professionals, have shifted the focus of everyone at this $7-million company from the confines of their own job descriptions to what customers really care about: successful projects. Job schedules are not new to Pro Mold, but earlier schedules specified only start and end dates for each job, leaving 12 to 16 weeks of blank space in between. Because the new Gantt charts set weekly deadlines for each high-level task, the project managers know early on if a job is running into trouble. The results: an on-time delivery rate that tops 90%, few last-minute marathons, and peace of mind for Long and his 45 employees. "I'm not saying we never have 12-hour days," says Long, "but all that sense of panic is a thing of the past."

Systematic Solutions
Pro Mold's Gantt charts are the products of CA-SuperProject, a Computer Associates work-scheduling and tracking package that falls under the broad category of project-management software. As a discipline, project management has its roots in such midcentury military initiatives as the Manhattan Project and the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine programs. The number and interdependency of tasks, coupled with the need for accountability and transparency, forced managers of those uber-projects to get rigorous about planning and tracking. According to Lew Ireland, president of the Project Management Institute (PMI), in Newtown Square, Pa., that rigor is trickling through the economy, and smaller companies like Pro Mold are turning to project-management software to meet deadlines and stay on budget. "As big companies set the pace," says Ireland, "small companies doing subcontracts have to use similar tools and techniques to build confidence that they can meet requirements. Even if they're doing their own separate projects, they still have to give that assurance to their customers. We're getting away from 'Trust me' and instead laying it out in a logical fashion to say, 'Here's my commitment to you."

Jim Lewis, whose Lewis Institute teaches project-management skills to businesses, says project-management tools come in handy whenever accomplishing a goal involves a set of standardized tasks. "So cooking a meal becomes a project, and doing brain surgery is a project," says Lewis. "The more important your time deadline, the more important it is to do a project plan. Small companies sometimes fall into the trap of thinking, 'We're too small--we can't afford to do this.' But studies show one-third of project work is rework, so if they want better productivity, they have to practice good project management."

PMI's Ireland says the category of project-management software includes packages that handle any of three functions: work scheduling, resource allocation, and communication for keeping projects on track. Scheduling-and-analysis software like CA-SuperProject helps managers understand whether they can achieve a goal within fixed time and fiscal constraints. Communication tools use computer networks, including the Internet, to distribute project information among geographically dispersed teams, and they give managers the ability to issue remote kicks-in-the-pants when deadlines loom or financial limits are threatened. "If one task slips, it can impact several other tasks, so you have to throw up a flag and say, 'What's happening here?" explains Ireland. "With virtual offices and home offices becoming more common, these communication tools are key to modern projects and how they're managed."

Target Practice
When Pro Mold's Long tested SuperProject's Gantt charts by tracing the schedules of completed projects, he realized that it would take more than cracking the whip on his shop floor to finish Pro Mold projects on time. Each job begins with an engineering phase, in which Pro Mold engineers use customers' computerized drawings to design molds. Using E-mail, the engineers and the customers send the designs back and forth until they get approval. When Long entered approximate start and end dates for the engineering phase of several old jobs, he discovered that engineering had been gobbling up as much as 50% of each project's elapsed time, even though it accounted for only 15% of billable hours in the company's quotes to clients. Digging deeper, Long noted that he'd never set target dates for design approval: neither customers nor Pro Mold's own engineers felt any sense of urgency. They were sitting on decisions, leaving the shop to pick up the slack. "We needed a way of hitting them over the head," he says.