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Lockheed
Martin saves time and money
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with automated Milestones schedules
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Lockheed
Martin is engaged in the research, design, development,
manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems,
products, and services for government and commercial customers.
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| When I
started as the Program Controller for Lockheed Martin on one of
their satellite programs, everyone maintained his own schedules.
Each release owner (system engineers responsible for a
given software and/or database release) had his own MS
Project schedules for each of the releases assigned to him.
The resulting schedules differed in task naming conventions, what
tasks they were tracking, and key dates.
From those disparate schedules, the project manager maintained his own “master” MS
Project schedule of key tasks. There had to be a better
way. |
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| Standardized
and "Big Picture" scheduling |
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| The
first few months, I spent most of my work week interfacing with
the release owners and maintaining the “master” schedule.
The master schedule consisted of anywhere from 6-10 pages
of the key tasks for each of 10-20 releases in progress.
While the schedule was impossible to maintain, the real problem
was you couldn’t get the “big picture” after looking at so many
pages of an MS Project schedule.
To further complicate matters, everyone had his own
version of the key dates--dates that did not necessarily jibe
with the other Lockheed folks or the Government.
After enduring months of frustration, I began looking for
a scheduling tool that was graphically oriented, easier to
maintain, and less complex than MS Project.
After all, the “master” schedule was meant to be a
high level depiction of the wellness of the program, and
it was doing a poor job of it....until I found KIDASA Software's
Milestones project
management tool. |
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| One-page
"Wellness" reporting, in one hour, in one tool |
| My first
impression of KIDASA Software was how responsive they were
to my queries. However,
the selling point of Milestones was that I could keep a detailed
schedule and develop a much higher level schedule that would
satisfy management’s need. Do they want to read a
sixteen page schedule "summary"? No. They want a
measure of wellness, while leaving the day-to-day or
hour-to-hour progress to the release owner's MS Project
schedule.
I then began a regular, weekly,
one hour meeting to go over the Milestones “master” schedule
with management and release owners. I also presented Milestones
schedules developed for other ongoing efforts by the team. Many times I have developed entire custom schedules in under
an hour for special needs. |
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| Schedule
automation and centralized project data |
| Needless
to say I was extremely happy that I had “automated” much of
my job, but there was still one nagging problem--the same dates
were maintained in various types of schedules throughout the
project. That’s
when I remembered the interface that KIDASA developed between a
NASA schedule database and Milestones.
From KIDASA's sample Visual Basic code, I developed a
program that populated a Milestones schedule directly from MS Access data.
I was
in heaven! Not only did I have a great scheduling tool, but now I had
the means to build a central repository for all schedule dates
and related data! Now,
I spend 1-2 hours a week maintaining the MS Access database and literally seconds generating the schedules.
If we were allowed laptops in our building I could get
even more sophisticated and present directly from it during my
weekly meetings.
The
database interface capability now insures that all schedules are
talking the same dates and allows different views simply by
using different queries to drive Milestones.
I’m working now to have our administrative assistant
perform the weekly data entry for the database, freeing up even
more of my time. |
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Learn
more about Milestones and OLE automation. |
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Contact
us for more information. |
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Learn
more about Lockheed Martin. |
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