Sol Oriens, LLC

Managing Teams

How’s my team doing? Training OK?, Morale OK?, Team functioning well?

All projects require staff, specialized staff that includes key talents needed to accomplish goals. We seldom bring all the talent required to do a job, but we do help the teams form, work together, and operate effectively. Our experienced staff knows instinctively how well rounded teams work and how they are functioning today. Our wealth of prior experience allows us to help optimize their performance while strengthening their cohesiveness and morale.

Integrating Business Functions, Technical and Financial Reporting

We link strategic planning, operational planning, and financial planning for you to ensure that you know how your project is working to achieve your integrated business plans. We build and use daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports that include progress toward major milestones, challenges and accomplishments, and forecast. These may be automated queries from your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, manual compilations, or a combination that meets your needs.

Earned Value Management Systems (EVMSs), Cost, Schedule, and Performance Management

EVMSs—much maligned as difficult, inadequate, or as stressing the wrong principles—are still an excellent way to manage progress in a well-documented and planned program. Once a program’s requirement set has been agreed on and parsed into a reasonably granular hierarchical set of tasks called a work breakdown structure (WBS), then each task can be examined for resource requirements. The tasks can be arranged into a critical path, and the time-phased costs to execute the program can be estimated. Once initiated, resources and milestones can be periodically tracked, the earned value of the program can be calculated, and soon it will be obvious which parts of the program are running smoothly. Programs are hard to execute, so it is inevitable that there will be a trouble spot. Using EVMS to compare planned cost and schedule to accomplished activities flows naturally into performance management of the teams executing program work.