The Customer

A large construction conglomerate based in Hong Kong, with operation over the entire Asia Pacific region.

The Challenge

The goal of this project was to have a project management tool for a civil construction project. Some of the primary requirements for this tool were advanced task scheduling and inventory management, project tracking, payment scheduling, measured works and re-measurement, and project status reporting. Standard project management tools had been evaluated, and were found to be totally inadequate to the complexity of the requirement. The biggest challenge in this project was to understand all the processes involved, and to produce a simple, intuitive workflow consistent with the customer's requirements.

The Solution

Since an understanding of the customer's process for setting up and controlling a large construction project was central to the success of this software, a dedicated systems analyst team, along with a senior project manager spent more than a month on-site understanding the entire project. During this time, a number of workflow prototypes were created and analyzed along with the customer's engineering team. These discussions were instrumental in both refining and streamlining the customer's project management process, as well as evolving a user interface that satisfied their requirements for configurability and ease of use.

Once the user interface, the workflows, and the functionality had been finalized and signed off upon, the Analytica team returned to our development center in Bangalore. The rest of the software was developed in "off-shore" mode. Customer visits to the development center were scheduled to coincide with major project milestones - usually the complete development of one of the major modules of the project management software.

The project was completed on schedule, and a small implementation team returned on-site to deploy the software on the customer's servers, as well as to hand over the maintenance of the project to the customer's MIS staff. Training manuals were developed, and selected project administrators were also trained in the use of this software.

Our efforts to understand an extremely complex, interlinked workflow and our ability to deliver on a promised schedule was greatly appreciated by the customer.