Good Time of the Day,
I am looking to collect thoughts on keeping pipeline projects in P6 in order to allow forecasting for resources, revenue, between secured work and potential work (tenders, PQQ etc...)
I believe it can be done in different ways. In the separate area of EPS I would create a new project which would have one or two activities for each project which would would roles and cost attached to them. Loading up all projects from EPS I can see role profiles into the future, for selected roles. However it is very high level and does not take into account a degree of confidence for the inclusion into the forecast.
The problem with resource graphs is that a single Project Manager (PM) can manage multiple projects at the same time, as well they have higher workload in the summer then in the winter. i.e. in the winter PM may spend 2h a day on the project, however in the summer it may increase to 8h - 10h day. Using buckets for it seems very manual and still requires some witchcraft to get values for the potential tenders, which are due to be released in 3 years time.
Another way is to create a new project for each potential tender in the EPS and put activities which would reflect project phases i.e. initiation, design, construction etc... in User Defined Field on EPS - confidence degrees can be recorded and thus filtered in/out forecast.
As a natural progression once the project reaches tender relise data it would ether be bid for and move into different area of EPS or can't be decided all together to be removed from the pipeline.
So the question is: How do you do "Project Pipeline Strategic Planning" in your company (project driven environment)? What processes do you use?
Regards
I think you are on the right track. Using a combination UDF's and having to dump the data into Excel would be the process I would use. You can use one EPS, I wouldn't recommend using more that one EPS...just keep it in one. Use project ranking fields in the EPS column to rate the future work. You can use, 100 for 100% chance for a prospective project and go in increments of 10. A less likely project could be 040, or 020, etc. Once you have all that set up, you can shift+click on all potential work in the "assignments" view, copy and paste into Excel and create graphs to show manpower requirements.
I would recommend showing all data in a graph, booked work, potential work and cancelled. The amount of cancelled work may be important to management. This can indicate a problem with sales, estimating, as to the amount of work that was lost. Just a thought.
As for the project management summer/winter work goes, just show management the raw manpower requirements, project management is a LOE type activity, I haven't been on a project that was able to schedule a project manager's time between projects. Or, attempt to show this difference by creating two PM activities, one for winter and the other for summer. It's pretty much a guess.
Try this approach.
Good Luck