Everything about Project Management and Microsoft EPM

It is very common to be told that executing contracts in India is a complex matter and hence text book theories of project and construction management can seldom be applied and are not practical!!.

This article examines the validity of such a statement and also the various options available to those in the construction and contracting business who wish to improve their efficiency and scale up their operations.

All projects revolve around an owner or promoter who initiates a plan or proposal to set up an asset to fulfill a particular purpose. Although most often their own teams are set to work on such projects, it is not unusual to invite specialist project management consultants to step in and provide the complete project plan commencing from obtaining licenses, government clearances, project funding and the most important financial closure of the project. Thereafter the engineering detailing, identification of sub vendors for procurement and construction is finalized and contracts are awarded according to a set procedure.

To a casual observer all these activities may appear to be fairly straightforward and easily achieved. However beneath the surface of any project, its survival is dependent on various issues and factors of all the stakeholders involved and their expectations. Many projects are thus not meant to exist or are destined to fail by design during the initiation stage. Numerous examples can be cited to illustrate such cases in both the private and the public sector domain. A classic case of the 2^nd World War involved a construction of a bridge which was made into a successful movie and was titled “The bridge on the river Kwai”. Thus it is of great importance for a contractor to carry out a background check of the project prior to accepting a contract or bidding for it by planning for the necessary risk mitigation required.

Project planning is a popular expression being used by all those involved with projects. Many organizations create such a department with limited capability of skill sets needed to use the Project Management tools effectively. Essentially they limit its function only to pay lip service to the demands of some of their stakeholders. Most often, the extent of diligence needed to track the plans and schedules is far from sufficient although there are an equally large number of projects which are successfully managed till their formal closure. The difference lies in the professional approach of the promoters and the project managers employed to oversee the project development besides the methods and processes being used for monitoring the project activity.

Most contractors and managers tend to believe in management by crisis where attention is given to problem areas as they crop up rather than preventing them in the first place through structured planning and scheduling. The additional effort required is considered more fulfilling and purposeful despite the overwhelming wastage of resources that it entails. Project management is therefore sacrificed since it requires adherence to discipline and processes with methodology which is essentially a culture that every organization has to evolve. As a result, erosion of planned margin and poor cash flow management, the contract suffers. This is one of the major reasons for the failure of many contracting companies who are either unable to cope with their financial needs and wind up or are unable to grow in a structured manner.

This brings out a another paradox. With the best of breed IT and communication systems that are available and used by all, most contractors seldom use it for tracking their plans and schedules to improve their efficiencies. On the contrary greater faith is vested on installing ERP systems, ISO and Six Sigma processes which in reality cannot substitute project planning and scheduling. In most cases such systems only serve to be displayed and advertised as an organizations list of achievements.

HR issues are largely overlooked by most contracting organizations due to lack of performance metrics and its recognition as a career enhancer. This in turn leads to non- conformance to discipline or a mismatch in features of any new initiative with the organizations culture. It is therefore fairly common where organizations have reluctantly admitted that such investments have yielded low to medium satisfaction if not complete failures. Most often, such initiatives are rejected by the organization due to lack of buy in from the interested groups when consensus driven decisions are not encouraged.

Another unique situation in the construction industry is for promoters to turn to contractors for funding their projects. This is more often outside the scope of the original contract and usually informal in nature. Payments are therefore exchanged for part of the project assets or are deferred indefinitely. In both cases if the situation is unplanned and has to be accepted under duress, it impacts the cash flow of the contractor concerned. In such situations the relationship dynamics between the various stake holders is held to ransom for future opportunities.

The challenge therefore is how does an organization develop its contract management capabilities, methods and processes and perform as an island of efficiency?

The answer lies in encouraging the use of Planning and Scheduling for efficient resource utilization. Risk management and mitigation plans and also an issue register helps control the project development track to plan. Also deploying Enterprise Project Management systems help and assist collaboration and communication among the various stake holders of the project. It also enables innovation and transparency within the project teams. The benefits of informed decisions are best demonstrated and experienced for others to emulate. Imitation is therefore considered a better form of flattery and thus leadership positions can be easily established to capture growth opportunities.

One of our clients recently had a problem publishing their projects. We have seen quiet a problems while publishing projects and we though it would be a easy problem to resolve. But I guess those are famous first thoughts.

Note: Before doing anything with a production server make sure you have recent backups of all your databases including your SharePoint database, so that in case anything goes wrong you can revert back.

The exact error we were seeing was

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>

<errinfo>

                    <general>

                                         <class name="">

                                                             <error id="23000" name="ProjectPublishFailure"

uid="74f92baa-b6d3-49ba-83c9-3d7b2add8af1"

projectuid="21c15ef4-a0b2-4e7d-9cc4-0a02c288e041"

messagetype="Microsoft.Office.Project.Server.BusinessLayer.QueueMsg.ConflictResolutionMessage" messageID="180" stage="" blocking="Block"/>

                                         </class>

                                         <class name="Queue">

                                                             <error id="26000" name="GeneralQueueJobFailed"

uid="db80e836-b3cd-4ed7-b518-df1fd30f654a"

JobUID="e96bd390-f0b7-4e8b-86f2-2ae8fe5c892d" ComputerName="PSAPPServer"

GroupType="ProjectPublish" MessageType="ConflictResolutionMessage"

MessageId="180" Stage=""/>

                                         </class>

                    </general>

</errinfo>

Quiet often the publish fails because the local copy in the Project Cache gets corrupted. So had them delete the local cache and open the project from the server. But that did not help.

Next we checked to see if the project had any corrupted tasks and we did find a few, we fixed those but that did not help either

Finally we deleted the project from the published database and republished the project to see if the project in the draft database would fix the problem, but then I guess this was just not meant to be a easy request.

In this case Google was no help either.

Finally after 2 days of trying we finally got in touch with Microsoft and they got back to us pretty quickly with a solution.

The gist of the problem is that there are invalid Summary Resource Assignment(SRA) records.

The work around is to find the records that exceed the range that Project Server or Project can handle and eliminate them.

Below is the script to detect the condition and remove the invalid records. There is no data loss as the SRAs are regenerated when the project is published. But then the standard rules apply, you need to have a back up (I cannot stress this enough, I have lost track of the number of times we have landed up at a clients place where things have gone wrong just to find out the option to revert back is not there because they did not have any recent backups)

The query to identify if the error condition exists is

select * from MSP_ASSN_ENTERPRISE where proj_uid='11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111' and assn_finish_date > '2049-12-31 17:00:00.000'

The query to clean up the records is 

delete from MSP_ASSN_ENTERPRISE where proj_uid='11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111' and assn_finish_date > '2049-12-31 17:00:00.000'

Some additional steps to troubleshoot the problem

1. Check the ULS log for a message that includes: "Microsoft.Office.Project.Server.BusinessLayer.QueueMsg.UpdateSRAMessage".
2. Run a SQL profiler trace, and search for thefollowing message: "exec MSP_ProjQ_Set_Group_Error_Info"
3. Scroll back through the Profiler trace for an entry similar to this: "exec MSP_SRA_GetData @PROJ_UID=’11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111′,@ITEM_UID=’7CD01021-E744-4A05-A385-20EF4F32CB94′" (the PROJ_UID of all 1s indicates a Summary Resource Assignment [SRA]).
4. Run the query from step 3 in SQL Management Studio and look for erroneous information (in my instance the end date was 3/18/2050 and Project only schedules out to 2049).
5. Open a project that the user from the query is in and check for any bad entries, correct any other than the SRA.
6. MAKE A BACKUP then Delete the user’s SRA from the MSP_ASSN_ENTERPRISE table (it will be regenerated).
7. Test publishing, there may be multiple resources that cause this problem.

Now that was a long process but finally we were able to publish the project.

Hopefully this article will save someone some time.

Prologue: Global economical downtrend has driven governments to infuse more money into the business world. In India Infrastructure projects for Power, Roads, Airports are undertaken as part of the natural process of economical developments. The actions in such cases have led to many major projects being taken up with construction as the basic need. As a result an important revelation and concern is that the majority of Construction projects are behind schedule and over budget which get further weighed down by litigation and dispute settlement issues

In India, contactors, Banks, Clients and also insurance companies, need to evaluate the impact of delay. In most cases the predominant questions to be answered relate to time overrun due to delays. In all such cases it becomes mandatory to establish the actual delay and its shared responsibility between Client and Contractor.

The Global Practise: In the previous decades a different methodology was commonly used to establish the quantum and responsibility of delays for any settlement in courts or out of courts. Courts in America usually did not accept claims for concurrent delays. The CPM analysis brought in a new dimension to delay analysis. In the present times many refer to the  AACE International (RP) Recommended Practice No. 29R-03. OR The Society of Construction Law Delay and Disruption Protocol.

AACE International in the RP 29R-03 states: “Forensic scheduling analysis refers to the study and investigation of events using CPM or other recognized schedule calculation methods for potential use in a legal proceeding. It is the study of how actual events interacted in the context of a complex model for the purpose of understanding the significance of a specific deviation or series of deviations from some baseline model and their role in determining the sequence of tasks within the complex network.”

In India: There is a need for expertise and experienced analysers to be able to use the protocols. It is to be based on an expertise and knowledge in CPM/PERT and also the understanding of scheduling software like Primavera ® P6 or Microsoft Office Project 2007 EPM. The experts also need an understanding about contract law and contracts. Knowledge about quantity survey as applied by standard procedures is also  an added requirement in many cases.

Such expertise is considered essential in cases where there is delay which is attributed to both parties to a contract.

A common example of a  conflict is when a contractor commences work knowing that a part or the whole site is under the process of acquisition from original owners of the land.

Hence stakeholders like banks, insurance, material suppliers, sub-contractors, need to consider fixing of responsibility for any delays.

The general practice that is now being followed is to form panels of expertise by attaching experts to arbitrators and law firms and to avoid forming separate bodies for redress. As a result it is now increasingly common for banks or insurers to retain on their rolls, consultants or a panel of experts to deal in such matters.

We have been in the Project Management space for a long time or atleast it feels like a long time. During all that time what we have seen is that there is a lack of good resources on project management. Yes there are a lot of technical articles on Project Management and Project Management software, but we were hard pressed to find good sites going into real life details of project management. Well that ends now. The idea behind this site is to share our real world experience on project management. We will be getting our consultants both internal and external to put down their real life experience about project management and their outlook for the future. We will also be discussing some of the initiatives we are taking up internally and with our clients. We will tell you what works and what does not. But that being said there will be a mix of theoretical articles also, what practice will we have if it is not backed up by theory.

We have a strong internal culture that tells us that we need a Why for everything. If something does not bring out true value then we should not be doing it and that is what the Why helps us with. It helps us understand if we should be doing something or not. So why did we start a blog, we could have gone with any one of another dozen options. But this being 2009 we wanted to have an interactive medium where you could give us your feedback, rather than having a one way flow of information. We tried out Wikis but they were a bit too restrictive in the sense that they have to be technical and they lacked the personal touch and the other main reason was that with a blogging engine we could get up and running in virtually no time. This allowed our people to focus on delivering content rather than having to sit down and design a content delivery system.

So keep watching this space for articles on Project Management and Project Management software.