Project Management - Cradle bi-directional with Microsoft Project

Cradle Project Management

Most projects have a formal plan to manage their work and track progress. This plan divides work into a hierarchical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The WBS must be directly accessible to the project engineers, so that:

Tasks in the plan can be assigned to project engineers
Tasks can be linked to the information (such as requirements, user stories or test cases) to which they refer
Individuals can access their personal task lists
Actual progress by project engineers can be captured directly into the plan

Project management and Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)

This means that you need a tool that can:

Define one WBS for systems engineering and project management
Exchange data bi-directionally between engineers and project management staff
Link this common WBS to the systems engineering information
Collect progress information as part of the systems engineering activity directly into the WBS
Pass progress information from the systems engineering domain to project management
Pass schedule updates from project management into the systems engineering domain

The Benefits

With Cradle you will fully integrate the project management and engineering groups in your project teams and achieve:

Consistency: alignment of the structure of the project planning and engineering activities, so that project planning status and the engineering activities are easy to correlate
Completeness: this consistency means that project planning's and systems engineering's views of the work to be done are complete, avoiding unforeseen problems at the end of phase gate reviews of the work done and progress achieved
Communication: by having a direct link between the systems engineering work and the project plan you improve and streamline communication between project planners and the engineering team of work to be done and its timescales
Reporting: since the systems engineering team can directly report their progress in the schedule, regular progress reporting does not become a burden, which ensures that it will be done, regularly and accurately

The Cradle Solution

Bi-Directional Integration

Cradle provides a bi-directional integration with Microsoft Project^® that allows:

A Cradle project to be associated with multiple Project schedules
Bi-directional data exchange between Cradle and Project, either:

From Cradle, pushing updates to Project or pulling updates into Cradle from Project
From Project, pushing updates to Cradle or pulling updates into Project from Cradle

Activities in each schedule to become a WBS hierarchy in Cradle
WBS items to be assigned to users, creating task lists
Each user to have a personal task list, colour-coded by the tasks’ progress based on the current date and date information in the task, showing its immediacy, delinquency or completion
Updates to the plan, or progress against the plan, to be updated from Cradle into the schedule in Project

Cradle Features Include ...

Exchange activities between Project and Cradle WBS hierarchies
Assign WBS items to users, creating personal task lists
Enter actual start and finish dates, % complete and predicted durations
Link tasks to the items to which they refer
Send actual progress data and changes in the WBS back into Project

This allows you to:

Directly link the engineering data to the WBS activities that refer to it
Provide engineers with unambiguous visibility of their work
Capture progress information where the work is done
Maintain synchronisation between the plan for the work and the work itself

Cradle Features Include ...

Exchange activities between Project and Cradle WBS hierarchies
Assign WBS items to users, creating personal task lists
Enter actual start and finish dates, % complete and predicted durations
Link tasks to the items to which they refer
Send actual progress data and changes in the WBS back into Project

This allows you to:

Directly link the engineering data to the WBS activities that refer to it
Provide engineers with unambiguous visibility of their work
Capture progress information where the work is done
Maintain synchronisation between the plan for the work and the work itself