| Sizwe
Sizwe is a successful entrepreneur. He established a niche business based on industry experience which he gained after his university education, and his firm has a reputation of doing quality work in tender projects.
The challenge
Sizwe's keen intuition had enabled him quote on tenders based on a sense of the overall costs and time, and the business has always managed to make money. However, he had always known that without the proper apportionment of costs to specific actual activities, and without a way of comparing the detailed actuals to the planned costs, he would never be able to optimise his business, because he did not know exactly where money was being made or lost.
What happened
Having done a course and read a few books on Project Management, Sizwe decided to request Project Assistance from ProjectManagement.co.za. He wanted to learn to use Microsoft Project in a manner that would make reference to the Bill of Quantities codes in his tender documents, and then to keep track of what was spent based on the reports generated from his accounting system. With Project Assistance at the start of a new project, he was placed in the position to plan the project accurately, and also to use the customisations made in the project file to develop a template for future projects. | Daniel
Daniel had a passion to empower communities via education. He had received a grant to implement his idea for providing learning throughout South Africa, and had engaged the enthusiastic involvement of an array of experts from all over the country.
The challenge
Although he had completed a postgraduate short course in Project Management shortly before starting the project, Daniel was unable to apply the theory to a real-life situation. The project's outcomes, deliverables, reporting structure and procedures were not clearly defined, and no risk analysis had been done. He had not done a breakdown or sequencing of the required activities and as a result, no estimates, resource requirements and cost allocation could be done at task level was needed in this project.
As the project got underway, Daniel realised he may need assistance. His sponsor was expecting him to report back on how far along the project was, but he did not know how to measure the progress.
What happened
After a day with ProjectManagement.co.za which was spent analysing the project, Daniel realised that the agreed budget of R5 million and the deadline to which he had agreed, could not possibly be met.
With this realisation, he was at least able to go back to his sponsor and explain the situation and agree to make a new plan and a less ambitious target, instead of simply pushing forward — which would inevitably resulted in complete failure. |
| Caetano
Caetano is an independent consultant who is well qualified in financial management. As someone who had grown his career by taking on new challenges, Caetano — in spite of not having a formal background in Project Management — had secured a contract to manage a project for a government in Lusophone Africa.
The challenge
Caetano had created a high-level Gantt chart in Microsoft Project, but had done his costings and updates in a spreadsheet under different cost categories rather than in relation to the tasks themselves.
The government official to whom he reported had scheduled a meeting with him to find out how much progress had been made and how much money had been spent in respect of each task.
What happened
Caetano contacted ProjectManagement.co.za on a Monday morning, a week ahead of his meeting, to request Project Assistance. He arrived in South Africa on the Wednesday afternoon, and on the Thursday and Friday he was assisted in preparing the basis for his project report in terms of activity-based costing in Microsoft Project, whilst maintaining the cost categories and unique type classifications which he had used in his spreadsheet. At the same time, he was learning how to use the software to be able to do this without assistance in the future. By Friday afternoon, he had a template for the inputs.
Caetano flew back on Friday evening, worked on the project over the weekend, and presented his report on representative on the Monday morning. | Karl
Karl is a professional project manager who works for a respected firm based in the SADC region and specialising in mining, engineering and construction projects.
Karl is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), and his extensive experience in the successful management of projects in Europe and Africa has placed him in a position to take charge of large projects. As such, he did not need assistance from ProjectManagement.co.za in troubleshooting his projects.
The challenge
However, Karl had previously worked with Primavera, a scheduling tool well suited to his line of work. He was now being required to work with Microsoft Project, which does not have the same functionality. Having received Consultative Tutoring in Microsoft Project from ProjectManagement.co.za the year before, he got in touch again when he was faced with having to manage multiple projects for a large customer.
ProjectManagement.co.za recommended a specific platform-independent multi-project software package that would be scalable and would allow for remote role-based access and multiple project. However, there was no time to implement a new system. Karl needed to be able to integrate his projects in Microsoft Project and export information to a Web-based portal where issues and risks could be tracked.
What happened
At short notice, ProjectManagement.co.za provided Karl with Project Assistance at his office in his country's capital, from time to time also working with his assistants while he attended to urgent stakeholder issues.
A few days later, and having had little sleep, Karl was able to present the overall plan for all the projects to the customer. |