Project Management & Resources

[r.wagner]

Hello,

we have a company with 25 developer. The Project Teams are up to 8 people.

This tool is very good for developing projects, but is it possible to use it "instead of MS-Project"? I am not intrested e.g. to plan resources in EA and in MS-Project. Can I use EA for planning a project "from soup to nuts".

Is it possible to use the task- and resourrce-management from EA? As far as I see, it is possible to assign resources to elements and to view all tasks.

Here are my questions/problems:
- notification-e-mails for new tasks?
- Can I connect perhaps from my Intranet the EA-task-db?
- Tracking of working-time? (e.g. work-load for each developer)
- Sharing resources between multiple EA-files

Please give me reply asap.  Thanks!

r.wagner

[Bruno.Cossi]

Hello,

I understand your intentions and agree with you that being able to merge the modeling toll with the project management one would be beautiful. Enterprise Architect does much to bring the two together, but not completely, and I am not sure if that ever will be possible.
The main flaw is the fact that in order to be able to assign resources to objects, the objects must already exist (obviously). The plan you could build in the modeling tool (i.e. in our case Enterprise Erchitect) could not possibly include creating these objects then. The initial modeling would still have to be planned outside of the EA.
One thing that would be hard (even though not impossible) to model would be dependencies between tasks. Also, the EA currently does not allow to allocate more than one task to the same resource on the same object.
Then there is all variety of things you can do using MS Project but not EA, that you may currently be using (and likely are), or not. Ability to keep baselines, to easily identify critical path, to see how the time needed for to complete a task would be affected by changing the resources, ability to maintain resource calendar etc. would be missed - and team of 8 people would definitely benefit of those.
What I suggest is to keep using both tools. Do the planning in MS Project and keep modifying the plan based on the information you extract from EA.
We have put in place a methodology that deals with it and that is currently being used by several of our clients. I would be happy to discuss this more and hear any thoughts you might have on this topic.

Bruno