Microsoft Project

Package #1: Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a collaboration tool to help the many different people or groups involved in a given project a common tracking tool to monitor project timelines, responsibilities and progress. The purpose behind Project in our organization is to ensure smooth transitions of a project between different areas of responsibility in order to meet the goals and expectations of our shareholders and customers.

Pros:

Microsoft Project helps members of the organization, especially the project management team, coordinate and track the many projects constantly in production. The tool provides a very nice layout for defining and customizing the many different tasks involved in any given project. These tasks can then be attached to a timeline, assigned to a particular individual or group and ranked by priority or contingency. This provides a single tool and place where all steps in the project can be monitored. At a glance the organization can see what stage a project is in and who is responsible for each stage.

Cons:

While the Project tool brings a degree of organization to the whole team that we didn’t have before, it is still a very tedious tool to use. After trying to manage the tool and data in house on top of all of the other responsibilities of the group, it was quickly realized that it was literally a full time job. This necessitated the hiring of additional head count in order to manage the tool. In addition to additional headcount, it also takes a lot of input from the different groups and individuals involved in the project. We currently have a four hour conference call once a week to cover all of the changes in the projects of the group. Changes in a particular project often require the recalibration of the whole tool

Package #2: Action Request System Remedy

Action Request System Remedy is a ticket based system that allows many different departments to have visibility to what is going on with other groups. Our ticket system is mainly used to track service affecting changes and issues that happen on the network. This gives a common interface to our surveillance, network operations, engineering and customer service groups to see what is happening on the network at any given time. It is designed to assign responsibility and give accountability to the appropriate people and group. It is also used to trend network availability and failures in order to identify weaknesses and develop better stronger, more robust networks.

Pros:

The Remedy tool is a very uniform, defined tool that allows for the tracking of various issues and tasks on the network. The tool can be customized to segregate service affecting and non-service affecting issues and can define different escalation levels for each. It allows supporting departments, such as network engineering, to open tickets on items that need to be addressed before they become visible to the customer.

Cons:

The tool can allow too much flexibility to the end user to change the severity of an issue. For example, if I open a ticket as a Severity One because it is a major outage, those technicians responsible for resolving the issue have the option to lower the severity of the issue.

Package #3:

Microsoft Office is the third group collaboration package that is used in our organization. I separate this package from Microsoft Project