Do you prefer a specific Project Management app solution? Have you used one?

This entire post just scrambled my brain - from the Star Wars reference to the "hoo-blah" at the end of your statement.

Anytime, sir. I do my best.

Anytime, sir. Like I've said - I'm here to share and learn.

This is the third time you've replied to this thread.

You're saying MS Project and Project Server are the standard norm, sir ?

MS Project, Oracle Primavera, and Project Server are good for managing schedules; but there are many other components of the Project Plan that require maintenance during the execution a control phase that is often handled with MS Word templates if the organization does not have an enterprise application.

SGT (Join to see) - Agreed. During my post retirement career (just over 20 years, as with the military) I have work for Canadians (the best), Germans (you vill do as I say), and Japanese (purely cultural issues).

Another well experienced man saying Canada is the best at something. I'm starting to sense Canada might be a great place to be.

SGT (Join to see) - Be sure to check the taxes, a lot of them move here.

Thanks for the tip.

SGT (Join to see) - You are not supposed to ask questions like that of your elders. I have been retired too long. When I got started on this aspect of my training Microsoft Project had not been brought on line yet....Lets see obviously ease of use would be one especially in complex projects. The problems I had with Project included being able to present it to a customer or management because even the master schedule could get complex and therefore hard to share visually
I think that you have to be able to show slips so that your people and higher management can understand the impact. I often wished that there was an ability to annotate a slip or other significant event maybe with a hyperlink so that you can recall what happened or reveal why a certain event is a critical milestone.
Being able to identify costs associated with the skill sets required to complete certain evolutions was useful because it helped you cost out the project and it also helped you to evaluate options. I need to think about this some more. I will post this and come back later. You have brought back memories. Some good some not so good but at least for me it is behind me. Now I just play in the woodshop and go to estate sales.




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I didn't mean to push you down an uncomfortable memory lane. But I do appreciate the insight. I'm not sure how much I'll have to deal with this directly, but my curiosity may benefit someone at the very least.

SGT (Join to see) - Not so much a memory lane as it is the possibility of outdated information. I can look like an idiot on my own without assistance. Anyhow I alluded to some issues in my prior post. Working Joint projects especially where you are relying on capabilities from other services or commands can be a challenge. It would be nice to be able to link critical schedules from other services but that requires everybody use the same program or at least interoperable variants. The problem that I would like to head off is a delay in the schedule of a supporting function being developed by another service can impact the your effort. The ability to link schedules at the higher level would be nice. I am still trying to recall the situation in Project with linked tasks. It seems that you could link the start time of one task to the end time of another but if you wanted to link in the middle you couldn't For instance suppose you have two assemblies say a tail section of a missile and the fin assembly and it takes four fins for each tail assembly Well I could start on the fab of the tail section and the fins and everytime I had four fins I could put them into the tail assembly but if I am running behind I could do the tasks in parallel so that the fins complete mid task but there was no way of showing that so if you are making several assemblies the cumulative effect could throw off your calculations. That is probably a poor example and there are may be ways around that now but it was a hassle. TH ability to notate certain key events would be useful too especially in production briefings. Being able to "what if" at a high level would also be nice especially if it was easy. That was the problem I had with Project that everything was so cumbersome and then when you were trying to present it you could not project a large enough expanded view for say a In Progress Review or other customer briefing. Scheduling and production planning are often underappreciated tasks until you get involved and again you can have great control but if your "higher higher" doesn't understand or ignores then you can get in trouble in a heartbeat. As I look at this the first project I worked on in a scheduling capacity was a proposal to build a Navy for the Saudis. The system was completely manual and you had to be able to do a pitch every week. We were going to be building everything from bases, overhaul facilities training facilities the whole nine yards. Still brings back tremors. We didn't win which I guess was a good thing. Although if we had I would have changed jobs to do some of the other functions (Ship building for instance looked interesting.) Sorry that is all I can think of now Not sure how much help it is.

It did a lot. Thanks.