EA Project Manager

EA Project Management

Background

EA (a of release 17) has some functions which you might think will let you do some simple project management.

For example, there is a ‘Gantt’ view in EA, accessible from all kinds of places, but it’s a special king of Gantt chart. In most project management tools, the ‘task’ is the central idea, which may or may not be associated with the resources needed to do the task.

In EA, the resource is the central idea, and resources are allocated tasks, and then they can appear an a Gantt chart.

Also, the main reason we find Gantt charts useful is that they show the dependencies between tasks: Task B can’t start until task A is complete.

The EA Gantt chart doesn’t support this, and that’s a huge missing piece of function.

It also doesn’t support the idea of a Project Network Diagram.

This diagram just shows tasks and their dependency relationships, with no idea of time – that’s what the Gantt chart does. Many project manager find that the network diagram is useful before they try to schedule the tasks in time – it gives a simpler view.

What the EA Gantt diagram does do is provide a really advanced ‘to do’ list for individual model users, which, if that’s what you need, is useful.

But if what you want to do is simple project management, and associate tasks with EA ideas, then something else is needed.

eaTeamWorks approach

We started building this function because we wanted to think about a project of our own.

A typical way to start is to list a set of tasks which need to be done to deliver the projects, explore which tasks need to be done first, and which need to come later.

EA already has enough function to do this really well. A simple EA diagram, with some ‘Task’ elements dropped onto it:

We can then add some connections to show the dependencies between these tasks.

The correct way to show that Tasks 2 and 3 depend on Task 1 is to draw an arrow from Tasks 2 and 3 back to Task 1.

But we’re trying to show a flow from Task 1 to 2 and 3, so we decided to draw the dependency the other way:

And this is all we need for a basic Project Network Diagram: tasks, with dependencies.

Adding time

To start adding some idea of time to this, we can start to add information about how long tasks will take. For this, there is a ‘Duration’ value available for each task – just edit that either using EA Properties, or, to do it in bulk, use eaSheets.

Now that we have tasks, relationships between them and durations, we have enough information to create a normal looking Gantt chart, one which has:

1. Each task
2. relationships between the tasks
3. duration of each task

All that’s needed is a start date for one of the initial tasks, and, if you haven’t added a start date to any of them, EAPM will assume they all start today.

A true Gantt chart

eaTeamsWorks can now draw a Gantt chart like this:

Editing the Gantt chart

eaTeamWorks is NOT trying to re-implement everything in tools like Microsoft Project. We are just trying to provide the basic function, do let you do what we think are the most important project managent activities, but do it in EA.