Schedules are an integral part of every process, product, project. It was Basil Walsh who said “If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you expect to get there?” The OP³IT’s scheduling tools provide major benefits over what is commonly used by most organizations. It simplifies tracking progress and warns management when actions should be taken to assure milestones and deliverables are within schedule and budget constraints.

Our Management tools monitors that every schedule task includes an action (verb) so the individual responsible for accomplishing the task knows exactly what needs to be accomplished. For example, if one were just to see a task specified as “User Guide” then one would not know if they were to create a user’s guide, review a user’s guide or approve a user’s guide.

In OP³IT, every terminal project task has a resource assigned. Without a resource there is no one that can be held responsible for the task’s accomplishment.

The major feature of scheduling tools, including OP³IT; is the support of dependencies. With dependencies when one task becomes later or earlier than it was supposed to occur, the rest of the schedule automatically adjusts to the change. With “Fixed Dates” there is no adjustment. Critical path tasks directly influence when the project will be completed. This is a key for managers, for it is the critical path tasks that must take the majority of a manager’s scrutinyas they manage their project.

Probably the biggest mistake we have seen relative to project schedules is that they are not updated in a timely manner. With OP³IT, a project schedule is updated every day because if not, the value of the scheduling tool diminishes. What makes the schedule update so critical is that the “Critical Path” is constantly changing as tasks are completed or the estimates adjusted. OP³IT simplifies maintaining project schedules by allowing project team members to report their progress on each assigned schedule tasks in approximately 5 seconds. managers can then daily accept/reject the project team members reported information in a like amount of time and automatically update the schedule accordingly.