- [Instructor] Hi, and welcome to module eight
of advanced geographic information systems.
In this first lecture,
we'll talk about managing GIS projects.
And while these concepts relate mostly
to large-scale projects, there's certainly a lot
of helpful things to think about
as you're designing small-scale projects
or independent workflows.
Project management is the application of knowledge,
skills, tools and techniques
to the required project activities
that are necessary to meet
or exceed the needs of the stakeholders.
Now, when I talk about stakeholders,
I don't just mean the customer or the end-user,
but also the project manager, the project team
and the client as well.
Each stakeholder brings their own perspective to the table.
And as we'll talk about later,
it's really important that everyone's objectives align
in order to implement a successful project.
Now, Murphy's Law of project management tells us
that no major project will ever be completed on time,
within budget and with the same staff that it began with,
don't expect yours to be the first.
The project management book
describes five different process groups
and nine knowledge areas related to project management.
The first of these process groups
is the initiation process.
This is where the project gets defined,
where the scope is also defined,
project goals are identified,
as well as resources, deliverables
and the time schedule you're expected to adhere to.
The initiation phase typically involves
the top level management as well as
the client and end-user stakeholders.
At the planning stage, you engage in information gathering,
you review the available resources
to ensure they're adequate for a successful project.
You conduct a risk assessment and identify potential areas
that need to be monitored
throughout the life of the project,
develop a management plan, a time schedule
and a cost per task.
This is an iterative process
and involves all of the stakeholders.
It reinforces what's been developed at the initiation phase.
From there, it's time to execute the project.
You'll develop the project team.
Maybe you need to recruit new talent.
Maybe you need to shift some talent around
within your organization.
You execute the project
and ensure that all of the pieces are flowing smoothly.
It's likely up to you to perform some quality assurance
or quality check on the intermediate
or final results as they're developed
to ensure the highest level of quality
in the products that you produce.
You're also in charge of information distribution,
communicating with the stakeholders
to make sure that is up to date on the progress,
understands any potential stumbling blocks
and knows when to expect the deliverables.
Once again, the execution of the process
is a bit iterative based on project fluctuations.
Monitoring and controlling
is the process where you observe progress,
you identify any potential issues
and you seek their resolution.
This process group spans the entire project life cycle.
It's important to evaluate any proposed changes
to the project to ensure consistency with the goals.
Delays in data collection or data processing,
shifting priorities or even a change in the composition
of the stakeholder group
can all yield new suggestions for project directions.
But again, you need to ensure consistency
with the goals of the original project.
Sometimes if for no other reason,
then due to contractual obligations.
Now, the last of these process groups is the closing process
and this terminates the project actions and activities.
You hand off all of the deliverables,
the contract has been signed off
and the client knows that they should no longer expect
to be billed for any additional work.
Now, in terms of knowledge areas,
we have nine different knowledge areas
that we can focus on for project management.
Project integration and management is the application
of the specific skills, techniques and knowledge
to complete the task at hand.
As the project manager,
you're the one responsible for development
of a unifying theory of the project workflow.
And this involves all five of the process groups.
Project scope management,
this knowledge area identifies what needs to be completed
and what should be avoided.
Things like mission creep,
expanding the data collection effort, for example,
just because you're out there.
You need to stick to the original plan,
so that you can also remain on budget
and within the timeline.
Project scope management is centered
on the planning and monitoring
and controlling process groups.
Now, time management, this one's key.
All projects are subject to time constraints
and it's up to you as the project manager
to ensure a smooth workflow
and that any subsequent tasks
that are dependent on input data
are delivered on time
so that you can keep the project on schedule.
Project cost management means that you need
to develop task level budgets
and stay within those constraints.
This involves planning and monitoring
and the controlling process groups.
Quality management means
that you need to identify the quality standards
and ensure that they're met.
You need to evaluate stakeholder expectations
in light of the quality that you're able to deliver
and make sure that those two match.
You also need to be responsible
for monitoring any project outputs,
providing that QA QC assurance
so that the products you deliver are of the highest quality.
There's human resource management,
acquiring, developing, organizing
and overseeing the various team members responsible
for all those different moving parts within the project.
Communication management means
that you need to maintain open lines of communication
with the stakeholders.
Who needs to communicate with whom?
At what frequency?
These are all things that should be identified
in the project planning phase.
You also need to communicate with your team.
Make sure everyone knows where the different phases
of the project are at
and where folks could lend the helping hand
if they're ahead of schedule with their own work.
In terms of risk management,
you need to identify and mitigate project risks.
This could be anything from staffing and budget
to data collection and processing.
Project procurement and management means
that you need to outline a process
to acquire these different product services
and results from outside the team.
Ensuring that they fit into the overall workflow
and that they're affordable
within the price constraints under which you operate.
Now, I mentioned scheduling a couple of times already.
When you have multiple different options for the ways
that you might lay out your schedule.
Essentially scheduling
is a process for coordinating task completion
throughout the project life cycle.
Now, we'll look at two different methods
for scheduling tasks within a project workflow.
The first of these is the Gantt chart.
Now, the Gantt chart is nice
because it displays dependencies
between or among the various tasks in the project workflow.
It offers dates and the timeline to completion
and it works well when you have less than 30
or so sequential tasks as part of your project workflow.
Now, a Gantt chart's not really suitable for large projects.
You can't put it all on a single page
and at some point once the task number becomes too large,
it becomes difficult to conceptualize.
You need to understand the timeline at the outset
of the project in order to set the Gantt chart up properly.
And if things change along the way,
it's somewhat difficult to update the Gantt chart.
More tedious than difficult, I guess I should say.
Here's an example of a very simple Gantt chart
where you lay out your tasks in the first column
and the timeline and subsequent columns across the page.
Then you just fill in the cells for the different tasks
and when they're expected to be worked on
and their expected data completion.
Again, much more sophisticated options are available here
but I think you get the general idea.
A PERT scheduling approach refers to program evaluation
and review technique.
And once again, its primary task is to coordinate
the completion of the project life cycle.
The focus here is on events, not necessarily on dates.
In a PERT schedule estimates the optimal, the normal
and the pessimistic time that it might take
to complete individual tasks.
From that,
you can estimate the expected time
with the formula that you see.
Now, the PERT scheduling uses this expected time
to identify critical paths,
the longest possible project duration and it maps that out.
Somewhat similar to a network analysis.
In terms of pitfalls, the PERT schedule
is a little bit less clear on the time to task completion,
instead focusing solely on those events.
And like the Gantt chart,
large projects do become difficult to map.
In reality, it might be easiest to mix and match
using a PERT chart for the big picture scheduling
of the project workflow and Gantt charts
to handle subsections of that overall schedule.
Now, many different aspects to project failure,
but certainly poor planning would be at the forefront.
And that could be anything
from green-lighting a project
that should never have been given a go
to neglecting to include all of the stakeholders
that should be involved.
Probably goes without saying,
but unresolved political issues never really help
when you're working on a project.
You might have a lack of support, staff, funding
or even institutional support from above.
If you lack a project champion,
it's likely project failure's not far behind.
Poor management.
A project manager should have the experience, education,
leadership abilities, be a skilled negotiator,
communicator, problem-solver, planner and organizer.
Who doesn't possess that skill set?
The more complex the project,
the more adept the project manager should be.
And lastly, in terms of project failure,
a lack of client focus or end-user engagement.
You need to make sure the end-users
are participating in all stages of the project.
There's nothing worse than getting
to the end of the project delivering some content
that the client said was what the end-user needed only
to have the end user tell you that that's not
a workable solution for their current problem.
I'll offer my two cents.
On the human logistics side,
communication cannot be stressed enough.
Human interaction's always difficult
and managing the various personalities of a team
sometimes really, really drawn all of the skills
of a project manager.
You need to help maintain both individual
and team identities.
You need to make sure that the stakeholders play nicely
with one another, as well as with the project team.
And if there are any outside contractors,
you need to keep them on task as well
so that the overall workflow
can be met within the timeline that's been promised.
On the technical logistics side, once again,
I put communication right up at the top.
Communicating with your stakeholders,
communicating with your team,
communicating with the managers above you
in the staff hierarchy.
You need to be ready to troubleshoot at all times
and figure out innovative ways to play catch up
when you get behind on the timeline.
It's up to you could develop file naming
and metadata standards.
I've displayed a couple of different examples
of the way that I work through different projects.
Maybe that works for you and maybe it doesn't.
Whatever the case,
you can't let individual team members make decisions
about how and whether to document data
and how they plan to store that data.
And then lastly, data storage and archival
are critical, because you never know when you might need
to come back to a project.
Now, two other things to mention here,
application development and creating maps series.
Now, as the project manager, you might get to a place
in the project workflow and decide that
the off-the-shelf software isn't necessarily working.
And at that point you have a couple of different options.
You could customize existing software packages
and we've seen examples of this already.
Creating layer files, for example,
to define color schemes and class breaks
for specific data sets that will be used in the analysis.
We recently learned about ModelBuilder,
sequencing geoprocessing operations
to standardize geoprocessing workflows.
You could also create custom scripts
in something like Python or Visual Basic or Java,
or even Pearl and build that
into the geoprocessing workflow.
Sometimes maybe that's not enough
and you need to look more towards the development
of a standalone software package.
I do encourage caution here.
While a standalone software package does sound attractive,
it does bring in a whole host of other difficulties
that you might not have to face
if you're using a more off-the-shelf solution.
Most of the time you're going to build on top
of existing open source software applications
and you can draw on the shared libraries
for things like file formatting support
and geoprocessing operations.
At the extreme end,
you would create your own standalone GIS software
that's specific to the project that you're working on.
And the last thing I'll mention here
is this notion of a map series.
We're moving away from this a little bit
because of all of the different methods
for presenting results online.
But if you find yourself in a position
where you need to create a set of paper maps,
say for tax purposes or parcel mapping, for example,
a map series would be the way to go.
And again, you can use this to present intermediate
or final outputs.
It's up to you to decide on the standardized map elements,
things like the north arrow, the scale bar,
the scale of the maps themselves, titles, legends
and so on and so forth.
There are challenges when you have these large study areas
or maybe linear study areas.
You're working on a highway or a pipeline project,
for example, or disjoint study areas,
you're collecting field samples from all
of the different national forests on the eastern seaboard.
In this case, once again, a map series is the way to go.
And you can use these tools within ArcGIS
to generate a series of maps based on boundaries
that you define.
If you go into the layout properties of a map layout,
you see that map series is one of the options
and you can define spatial boundaries.
So maybe it's quarter, quarter quadrangles
or maybe it's county boundaries or town boundaries
or state boundaries.
You could also use bookmarks.
Maybe you've just bookmarked
all of your different study area sites
within a single map project
and you could use those bookmarks
as the basis of the individual maps of the map series.
You select a layer that defines
the map series.
In this case,
we have our USA States Generalized data set selected,
and I'm going to use my state name
as both the name field and the sorting field
for generating those maps.
In the map extent section,
you have a number of different options
about whether or not you want to standardize the scale
or use the best fit for each one of those individual maps
that you create within the series.
You also have the option to clip to the index feature.
That just means
the individual boundaries that you're using
to generate the map series.
So the town boundaries or the state boundaries, for example,
in the example that we just looked at.
And once you click okay, and generate that map series,
in the contents pane of the map layout,
you see sequentially numbered maps,
one for each in the series.
Double-click on any of those,
and ArcGIS will take you to that specific map layout.
Well, that's it for project management.
Join me in the next lecture and I'll demonstrate
how to create a map series using ArcGIS.