Project Structures
Almost any sizeable work effort in the professional world can be treated as a project and is governed by a few fundamental rules or best practices. Oracle Projects is one module of the Oracle E-Business suite which helps address the business need for different project structures for planning work and finances. In addition, it caters to other integration methodologies so that there is no repetition of data entry; there is the extraction of the correct data from the right source, and a clear representation of the business case exists.
A project structure can be set up in four different ways to cater to how the projects are planned, executed, and controlled:
Fully shared structure: A single structure of tasks is used for workplan and financial plan functionality. These include the work plan, progress, budgeting and forecasting, costing, billing, etc. A fully shared structure is helpful when projects are planned with few work details, which could complicate managing the project’s finances. In addition, only one set of actuals will be displayed across both the work plan and the financial plan, which means greater consistency and ease of managing and controlling finances.
Partially shared structure: A single task structure is used. However, the higher-level task nodes manage finances, while the lower nodes are left to order work and resource planning.
This is particularly useful in the Engineering and Construction industry, where the work plan is highly detailed, and the financial plan has a simplified structure of the work plan using selected higher nodes. This allows the financial plan to use the same work plan’s top node structure without creating a separate economic structure.
Non-shared, mapped: Two tasks, one for workplan and progress functionality, the other for budgeting and forecasting, costing, billing, etc. This allows information captured on the work plan to be used on the financial structure by mapping work plan nodes to the lowest financial tasks.
This is particularly useful in professional service companies where multiple tasks like business requirements gathering, development, etc., can apply to, or ongoing for, multiple functional domains of a project.
These tasks will make up the detailed work plan structure, while finances will be managed only according to the (higher-level) project domains—the progress collected for jobs map to each domain. Domains are rolled up from work plan tasks to the financial structure. This helps with financial management. For example, budget generation can use the mappings to generate a budget from the work plan.
Non-shared: Two different sets of unrelated tasks. Workplan and progress data are independent of financial data.
Workplan Structure Versioning
For better control of the planning and execution of the project, the work plan structure can be versioned. Workplan versioning can utilize an approval mechanism to control publication and re-planning of work. This helps maintain historical data for the work plan and progress functionality to do what-if analysis at various stages of project execution.
Project Managers can leverage rich features of scheduling tools like Microsoft Office Projects and Oracle Primavera by implementing the integration with these project structures.
Choosing the right scheduling tool, coupled with the right structure type, versioning, etc., will make Project Managers more efficient and give them better control over the project during the entire life cycle.
