Developing a Scheduling Tool

The Daniels Corporation is one of Canada’s foremost builder-developers, with a reputation for quality and integrity that has been reflected in the wide range of residential communities they have created over the years. Daniels has developed and built over 18,000 homes and apartments in a diverse range of master-planned communities throughout the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).

Procept was hired by Daniels to create a Scheduling Tool in Microsoft Project to track and monitor projects across departments in order to ensure adequate resourcing and staffing. Some issues that Daniels was facing were schedule management, integration, and managing multiple projects. The Scheduling Tool was for use primarily for Daniels’ high-rise projects.

The scope of the project included:

• Analysis of the existing IT hardware and network environment and a report on the IT environment with recommendations to accommodate Microsoft Project Enterprise 2007.
• Microsoft Project Template (Scheduling Tool) with reporting functionality.
• Training in use of the tool.

After review and approval of the project schedule, our team started with requirements analysis to ensure migration from a standalone pilot solution to enterprise one is seamless. We provided recommendations on selection of the server and its various features required for enterprise wide implementation.

To develop the Scheduling Tool, Procept conducted several workshops and one-on-one interviews with main stakeholders and team leaders. The preliminary template was reviewed in small workshops of 2 to 4 team leaders and a presentation of the Working Demo was arranged with key team leaders and staff and feedback was incorporated into the final template.