Building Project Models and Generating Forecasts with TeamPort

TeamPort project models capture three emphasized aspects of a project:

• the product or outcome of the project,
• the demands to achieve the product, and
• the supply and organization of capabilities by teams.

As a project unfolds -- especially complex, distributed projects-- the behaviors of teams with unique locations and habits become significant to overall performance, including cost, duration, and quality. At the same time, the architecture of the project - it's structure and how teams and scope are related - also drives what the project can realistically achieve.

No wonder that classic project planning methods -- which ignore these aspects -- are often so difficult to use and inaccurate. At GPD we've focussed to overcome these limits with decades of research and field experience, leading to a simple and more natural way to address real-world project complexity. We call the method Project Design. The software platform we've built is called TeamPort.

To create a model:

1. Define the locations for participating teams. Locations should be distinct in the model if their schedule or geography differs substantially. However, often teams will be co-located.
2. Teams are added with availability to do project work and assigned to the locations. These teams should be organized to represent reporting and hierarchy as it applies to the model, which may be different than what is typical of the organization sponsoring the project being designed.
3. Products represent the meaningful outcomes and deliverables of the project. Products should be structured in a logical breakdown. Higher level products may have no work directly associated with them.
4. Activities represent the demand for work to complete products. They are related to the supply of work - the teams - through contracts.  They are related to each other through dependencies to show the order of the flow of work.
5. Activities are grouped into Phases to better define the work demands. Most users will be familiar with creating a work breakdown structure.
6. Once modeled, simulations produce multiple forecasts of the project, which will guide further modeling and ultimately the actions of all the teams involved in implementing the project. Each forecast is a fully generated project plan.

GPD recommends models be created quickly in coarse detail at first and that finer details be added later as needed to complete the model. TeamPort can provide useful feedback early in the process with a minimum of detail, which leads to rapid iteration and discovery and ultimately the design team concentrating on the most salient issues first.