A New, Interactive, Online Project Management Tool
Procter & Gamble Europe, Rome Office
In May 2018, Edoardo interned in Rome, for the second time with the P&G Supply Network Operations team, more specifically in the Customizations department. He was tasked to build a new, interactive online tool for project management.
What He Did
In just below 3 months, Edoardo studied and mapped the current process, identified points of improvement to then engineer, design and develop an online, unique tool for initiative tracking for all stakeholders in the business. He used the tools at his disposal, including MS SharePoint, MS Access, and coding the front end mostly in JSON. All the work was based on Process Flows designed from scratch.
After building a functional online tool, he trained the Rome office team and introduced the tool to a portion of the Warsaw office. His work will save at least 300 hours of work per year, per user.
Process Map
To create a tool allowing for a coordinated project management across multiple users, it was necessary to map the entire process first. Using Systems Engienering methodology, and a scheduling dependencies diagram often used in Construction management, Edoardo mapped the entire process. This took interviews with all the team members having a role in the process. Edoardo created multiple process maps for each individual role type, and a master one (see image above). Each box representing a step, it is placed in the row corresponding to the user that has to execute the action. The arrows indicate dependencies, and the numbers in the action cells represent, from left to right: the latest possible day on which the action should start to avoid delay, the duration to complete the dask in days, and the latest possible day it can be achieved. SOS is the date of launch.
Evaluating Current System Limitations
Project management was tracked on individual spreadsheets that were offline and did not communicate with each other. Dependent information was exchanged via emails and alignments were done on weekly or bi-weekly meetings. The consequence was a process generating inevitable duplication or triplication of tasks, loss of information, delays, lack of accountability and more.
Solution Development
The solution I envisaged for a better online tool avoiding duplication and allowing instant alignment was a M SharePoint platform powered by a unique database. Every user would have a personalized view of the information contained in the database, a projection of their choice and interest. Any change made to the information on their table would be reflected in the database and therefore would be visible to any other user. To create such tool, Edoardo had to learn to use MS Access, MS SharePoint functionalities and coding the interface in JSON, a computing language he had never used before.
Result
The resulting tool had a user friendly, intuitive interface. Most importantly, it included a number of interactive functionalities: dependencies of each action were coded in the backend as well as their allowable duration, due dates appeared and were color coded, completion of steps would be automatically indicated upon entry of the date of completion, the executor of the subsequent step would be notified when a previous step was completed, allowing for timely work to happen. Of course, all changes to a field would be accessible to anyone who had that field in their projection, almost real time. After testing and validating the tool for all the user projections, Edoardo held a few weeks of training for the entire team, role by role, and constructed a user manual and a developer manual in case changes had to be done to the foundational process.
Value
Significant quantitative and qualitative value is derived from this new tool. Firstly an estimated time savings ranging from 100-300+ hours of work per year, per employee - time saved that can be allocated towards more profitable and value-adding work. Benefits include: a swifter process, more connected workplace, with no redundancies, limited possibility of discrepancy, constant alignment with no weekly benchmarking necessary, less manual tasks, informaiton gathered in one single spot (no emails, notes, conversations scattered elsewhere containing precious information).
