Malcolm Pirnie Project Management Information System

Enhancements and upgrade to the Project Management Information System using the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management Solution with customization of Microsoft Office Project.

The Client

Malcolm Pirnie (Pirnie) is one of the largest firms in the United States focusing exclusively on environmental issues, and for more than 100 years, has provided environmental engineering, science and consulting services to over 5,000 public and private sector clients. Pirnie has a staff of nearly 1,800 engineers, scientists, consultants, designers, architects and technical support personnel in more than 60 offices nationwide.

The Challenge

Pirnie wanted to better serve its clients with a more professional project management approach and a more consistent project management process, which would include the use of a project management tool to create project plans during the pursuit stage and to build on these plans during project execution. However, to date Pirnie was only using an in-house-developed Project Management Information System together with a timesheet system that was compliant with government auditing requirements. This timesheet application was the cornerstone of the billing system and whilst providing the ability to record time worked at summary levels within a project Pirnie wanted to improve this functionality with the ability to record actual time worked on detailed project assignments along with an estimate of remaining work for those tasks. Furthermore, Pirnie was using a web based application to calculate the profitability of projects and this application required that the Project Manager enter estimates of remaining work and direct costs such as travel expenses. The challenge was to provide a single, seamless application to the Project Managers for project management and project accounting.

The new timesheet showing time booked against detailed Microsoft Project tasks and the facility to re-estimate remaining work.

The Pcubed Solution

Pirnie selected the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution to manage their portfolio of 3,000 projects, and had embarked on an initiative to update the organization's project management processes and to provide training to all Project Managers on the new processes and tools. Pcubed worked with Pirnie to design and develop a solution that combined the existing timesheet system with the power of the Microsoft Office EPM Solution:

• All employees use the existing timesheet application as the starting point
• All assigned projects appear on the timesheet
• If a project plan exists, then the employee is redirected to a new timesheet window (see previous page) where work performed can be entered for each of the project's tasks as well as estimates of remaining work
• The existing timesheet application shows a summary of all hours by project and it is approved in the normal Pirnie way, with the exception that Project Managers can now update their project plans with the timesheet information

Pcubed created a customized Project Guide in Microsoft Office Project Professional that allows Project Managers to see timesheet entries from the Pirnie timesheet application by task and resource in a project plan. Once timesheets are approved, Project Managers can update the project plans with the approved timesheet entries.

Using the same Project Guide, Project Managers are enabled to create a budget for internal and external labor using the resource loaded tasks from the project plans. A data entry function allows the managers to include other direct costs using multiple cost categories. The total time and expense budget can be baselined to compare with the actual time and expense during execution, and calculate project profitability. The actual entries are combined from Microsoft Office Project Server and Oracle Enterprise Financials.

The Results

Improvements in project estimating, planning and execution are leading to profitability targets and completion dates being achieved or exceeded. The future potential for improved resource management as a result of this effort will further improve client satisfaction.