Have you ever had a debrief at the end of project or task within a project to determine where the bottlenecks\delays occurred? I've found myself on the end of questions like "why did we end up late?" and "where did the delay occur?" and had to respond with "leave it with me, I'll find out". And then the investigation begins.
For those of you who have had pleasure of seeing Autodesk PLM 360, you might well have seen the project management capabilities that allow you to track and manage your projects and data that is managed within PLM 360. But did you know you can also identify where delays occured?
The Project Management app provides you with a live view of where all the individual tasks\items within the project are up to, as they are moved along their process by the people managing that part of the project, the top level project automatically updates accordingly. You can also quickly and easily link through to view any of the data that is being tracked and managed within each of the project tasks (assuming you have the permissions to do so).
Each item\task within the Project Management Schedule is driven via Milestones which allow you to set the time frame and deadlines for each stage of the process. As a project manager you can set the date you need to reach each state within the workflow process.
In the screen shot above, you can see that I've applied Milestones to a REACH Declaration to make sure that each stage of the process is reached (sorry, no pun intended) by a particular date. Each of the states listed relates to each of the states we have defined in the associated workflow process.
One of the key things for here is that even though we have successfully reached the first two milestones, they are still colour coded red and orange - the first one is red because we didn't reach the milestone before\on the date specified and the second one is orange because we were close to missing the milestone event.
So to get back to the question in the title of this post, you can use the colour coding within a projects milestones to determine where bottlenecks and delays occurred within a project item\task.
If you want to see the Project Management within Autodesk PLM 360 in action, have a watch of this video from our PLM 360 Wiki Help:
http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/PLM_360/enu/community/Videos/Project_Management_Application_Tutorial
Enjoy your weekend
