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WHY ARE YOU NEEDED IN THE ORGANIZATION?

A few years ago, a senior engineer in my organization said, “I don’t think any planning engineers are required in our company. In fact, I believe no planners are required in any company in the middle east.” He was only slightly hesitant to extend his hypothesis to the rest of the world and I was vastly in shock, to say the least. I wasn’t sure which was the bigger insult; implying that my team were worthless to the company or the insinuation that we were a sham and being paid for it.

It shook me up. But it also made me introspect and honestly evaluate whether I and my team were adding value to the company. I started closely monitoring our contributions to various project teams and other departments. It turned out we were actually providing valuable information to the project managers, the senior management, the procurement department and our accounts guys but there was room for improvement. More importantly, the shock motivated me to strive and make my department an integral part of the company. I pushed my team to make themselves indispensable by sincerely trying to make the Project Manager look good by improving project performance any way they could. The reward came when I went to a site to facilitate relocation of a site planner to the main office. The project manager somehow knew why I was there and as soon as I entered his office the first thing he said was not Hello but “Don’t even think about taking Engr. ——- from my site.” It is one of the best greetings I have ever received.

In short, if you are dedicated to your work and can 'honestly prove your value to yourself', the organization will automatically see the value in you.

Regards,
AFS

What are the limitations when using Primavera, MSP and BIM?

This question was posed to me in another forum. Here's my take on it:

Limitations are linked, among other things, to the level of the user’s expertise.

Primavera P6:

* Could use better graphic options when dealing with charts and other visual reports.
* Doesn’t convert all MSP formats to xer.

Apart from these I personally don’t find many other deficiencies or limitations.

MSP:

* Doesn’t work at the enterprise level.
* Severely limited in the number of activities per project.
* Primavera provides ways to shuffle around on-screen activity organization (views) using grouping/sorting besides WBS. This is helpful in a lot of ways and is not an option in MSP.
* Limit on number of baselines (10 or 11 I think) as opposed to no limit in Primavera.
* Activity steps, expenses, risks, issues, work processes & documents, etc. are other areas where Primavera scores over MSP.

BIM:

The term BIM is being used generically in the question. There are several software applications which fall under this category, the same as P6 and MSP fall under the project scheduling software category. The focus of any BIM software is graphics. I personally don’t have much user experience with any of them but what I have seen is they present a kind of detailed holographic database / image of the project. One may click on any major or minute portion to find out the specifications as well as the planned dates and status (of a Window, for instance). However, these applications don’t provide the functionality to ‘develop’ the schedule itself. They have to be linked/synched/programmed with a scheduling application (e.g. P6) in order to generate the nice looking image.

* Comments regarding BIM are based on my own very limited exposure to such applications.