To send that message, Long now sets project deadlines for Pro Mold's engineers, and he insists that customers sign off on deadlines for designs and other deliverables. In exchange, Long faxes weekly progress reports to each customer. Those high-level views of the Gantt charts--which he generates using SuperProject--indicate whether a job is on schedule; if not, why not; and how much work remains on each task. "This is a nice way to go to the customer and say that by not getting back to us, they're delaying our schedule," Long says. "They're so impressed, they want to know where they can get the software."
But before anyone rushes out to buy a project-management package, it's important to understand that more than other office-productivity tools, project-management software requires a huge up-front effort before it bears fruit. "Project-management software is not going to be very helpful to companies unless they understand what project management as a discipline has to offer," says Marty Doucette, author of Microsoft Project 98 for Dummies. "You have to determine goals, who has decision power, and how much can be quantified and measured. The software doesn't take the place of some hard head scratching and pencil sharpening."
Long agrees with Doucette that buying the software was the easy part. Pro Mold purchased its copy of SuperProject through a consultant for about $700, but it took six months and countless hours to develop a project template that accurately captured the tasks of a typical Pro Mold project. At first it seemed an impossible challenge: Each mold is unique, comprising as many as 500 steel components. And those components are cut by custom cutter paths through Pro Mold's 40 machining centers. After much trial and error, Long settled on a template comprising 32 activities common to almost every Pro Mold job--steps like part building, cutting three-dimensional cavity detail, and ejector-pin formation. For each task, SuperProject allows Long to specify not only its share of total project time but also its dependencies on other tasks. So, for instance, when Long uses the template to create a project schedule, SuperProject takes into account that cavity polishing can't begin until after a mold comes out of final machining.
The templates Long developed are competitive assets that codify the way Pro Mold does its work. But the first time Long used a template to schedule a job, the results looked anything but promising. It was May 1997, and a mold for a new headlight lens was due in December. Scrolling across the SuperProject schedule, Long saw there was no way Pro Mold could ship before the following April. "It's a good thing we plotted it out," says Long. "Otherwise we would have gone home thinking we were fat and happy." The revelations of the SuperProject schedule convinced Long that he should institute a regular night shift. The headlight mold did ship on time.
These days Pro Mold uses four SuperProject templates--one that assumes a normal 55-hour workweek, an accelerated schedule that draws on the night shift, and a variation on each of those for making two-cavity molds. Eva DelRegno is the production assistant at Pro Mold who prepares day-to-day SuperProject updates and printouts on a PC that also runs Windows 95. When a new job comes in, based on its deadline she chooses the appropriate template. The template lists tasks and dependencies, but to generate a schedule and cost estimates, DelRegno needs to enter a time for accomplishing each task. To get that information, she sits down with Ray Haney, a veteran mold maker whose 40 years' experience helps him estimate how the demands of every job will affect, say, the man-hours necessary to cut cavity detail. DelRegno prints out charts for each job and, with Long's approval, distributes them to salespeople and project managers. Later, if there's breathing room, she'll spread the extra time among the remaining tasks.
But scheduling is only part of project management. To make sure that ongoing projects meet deadlines and stay within budget, Long has DelRegno sit in on the Monday meetings. One after another, the project managers announce the status of their jobs. "Close out the mold base, Eva," says one. "We'll finish the electrodes by the end of the week," says another. And when DelRegno adds that information into SuperProject, it generates charts that illustrate the progress made on each task. She also uses SuperProject to track employee time-sheet data, comparing man-hours budgeted with man-hours actually worked, task by task.
The Monday morning meetings foster cooperation as well as a healthy dose of competition. It's hard to understand why grown men would vie for time with a piece of equipment known as the Ingersoll, unless you know that until recently, Pro Mold had no faster machine for carving out fine mold detail. In the past, when two teams wanted the Ingersoll at the same time, Long had little on which to base his decision. His usual solution was to give the machine to the team whose ship date was closer. But in addition to engendering hard feelings, more often than not his decision meant further congestion down the road. Now, knowing each team's weekly target dates, Long can shuffle assignments so both teams meet their deadlines. "The software provides a tiebreaker that takes me out of the loop," he says.
Long believes the well-defined intermediate targets have a positive impact not only on delivery dates but also on employee morale. "By meeting their goals, they feel better when they're driving home," he says. "People want to feel they accomplished something. I don't know how you can do that without a goal."
Powers of Communication
Unlike Pro Mold's Long, Glenn Isaacson, 61-year-old principal of San Francisco-based Conversion Management Associates (CMA), doesn't enjoy the luxury of executing projects under the roof of his $5-million company. But Isaacson, who founded CMA in 1993 to manage construction projects for owners who lack in-house expertise, doesn't need help planning projects: roughly 15 of CMA's 23 employees are essentially project managers for hire. Some of them are so well versed at plotting tasks on timelines, they refer to the format as "good ol' Mr. Gantt." Isaacson's challenge is to smoothly run to completion the construction portion of development projects--despite the fractionalized nature of the real estate business. "You buy everything in pieces," he says, "the design talent, the construction. You even lease the building and borrow money in pieces. It's an unbelievably complex process, and anything that can tie together a group of people that are a team--rapidly, without friction--is really welcome."
