OT: Project Organization

I work for a small but growing systems integrator. Up to now there hasn't been much of a system around how we organize and share our data for projects, but we're getting to the size where we need to have a more organized and thought-out approach to this kine of stuff. I'm interested to know how you guys tackle this problem.

Here's the kind of stuff we're looking at:

• We have Office365, so we have Sharepoint. What is the best way to utilize this?
• How do you control (revision) documents such as I/O lists, interface documents, parts lists, etc?
• How do you share the documents listed above?
• Do you have a set folder stucture for share drives, etc?
• Does anyone use OneDrive for Business to share docments?
• I know this one has been disscussed here before, but how do you handle drawing numbers (particularly differentiating between electrical, mechanical, pneumatic, etc)?
• Source code control, both for text code such as .NET and PLC/HMI code (mostly AB)
• Are there any tools/software packages that you use to manage this kind of stuff?

Any though/experience you guys have with these or related topics would be greatly appreciated!

-Benaiah

This will NOT be a quick change, everyone must learn to work together.

I will give you am much detail as I can from my experience.

you will need to create customer folders on your pc.
each customer will get subfolders depending on how much business you do with them. keep the folders sorted based on 100 jobs, the year, month...
for each job, create a folder with the following subfolders.
Quotes, PO's, ammendments, change orders, Mech dwgs, Elect dwgs, Air-hyd dwgs, plc, Panelview, drives, HMI, PC code.

when you get a quote, the original quote is xxxx-0. xxxx is the quote number that can be converted to a job number. the next revision to the quote will be -1 and so on.
the po, amendment, change order folders contained the scanned / electronic documents.
drawings should be xxxx-Ayyyy-z. xxxx being the job number,
A meing the type of drawing. M - mechanical, e - electrical, p-pneumatic, h-hydraulic, pl-plant layout of the install area and so on.

Here's the hard part.
teach everyone how to use the system.
Only ONE !!! person does the document control, purchasing, final inventory.
that person takes all the drawings AFTER the project is done and makes a copy of all the drawings. he then gets with each department for the final version and puts it in the final project folder. any changes made on the job site in regards to anything goes through the one responsible for document control.

MOST important, make a daily incremental backup and a complete backup on the weekend. store it in a secure location where only the administrator can get to it. an employee that gets fired can do a lot of damage on an unsecured network - this is first hand experience. he didn't know we did backups and it saved out butts.

hope this helps,
james

This is an interesting topic.
I have not much input on this I guess. where I work things are not that much structured... We agreed to put things (plc project etc) on the network... still... always looking for the right version one a couple of laptops... concluding... you can think up whatever system you like, but it comes down to a little discipline.

about...

We have Office365, so we have Sharepoint. What is the best way to utilize this?

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I don't like proprietary software, well we're stuck with it for life for plc's I guess... but for documentation? Even different versions of Word are troubles to maintain shared docs. different sets of fonts on pc's.. same trouble. so I would recommend to always export/print doc's to PDF, so anyone can view/print it. same goes for drawings. not everyone has that drawing software or viewer to view the original, and you don't always want everyone to be able to edit the original...

Benaiahhenry

James has given you a good layout. We do much the same thing as he described we use a Job # but ours is not based on quote # the job # is sequential and is only issued when we have a po.

We have a server where the folder sits and is named with the job # if you don't have a server you could use a NAS (Network Attached Storage)

We have a Database of job #'s and it cointains details like date, Company, Primary contact,Etc.

We use serveral tools for version control such as Rockwell Asset Centre, AutoCAD Vault, and Bit Bucket https://bitbucket.org/

We also use OneNote and Sharepoint a lot both for in process revision control and notes and documents.

Thanks for the input so far! Lots of good ideas.

The Plc Kid said:

We do much the same thing as he described we use a Job # but ours is not based on quote # the job # is sequential and is only issued when we have a po.

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How do you guys handle change orders, or feature requests as far as job numbers? Thus far for us, those are a new quote and therefore a new quote number, and finally a new job number since our quote numbers become job numbers once we get the PO associated with that quote. I don't personally handle that part of things, but I think those quote numbers come from QuickBooks.

I like the idea of putting a job number in the folder name on the fileserver, but that would get complicated for us with change orders/features etc since all the data/documents the are needed for the "new" job number are already in the "parent" job folder. Maybe keeping an association of "parent jobs" to "child jobs" and then putting everything in the parent job folder would work.

-Benaiah

in the "programming world", that is... pc/computer programming... where most things are based on text files... the versioning problem is pretty much handled. but in the world of multi-thousand dollar/euro/anything this still is a problem.

benaiahhenry said:

Thanks for the input so far! Lots of good ideas.

I don't personally handle that part of things, but I think those quote numbers come from QuickBooks.

-Benaiah

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We are a small company but we use QuickBooks and years ago I set up our system so the quote number generated by QuickBooks is our job #. I used to have directories on our NAS drive in the format of Customer/Year/Quote Number-Job Name. Example "NASA/2014/Q14025 - Last Outer Space Job". But after several years I changed it so it starts with the year first. I did this because when I finally got to the point where I wanted to start purging some projects off my NAS drive it was extremely tedious to find all the older job files within each customer directory. If you only have a few customers its not a big deal but if you've accumulated lots of customers over the years it suddenly becomes a big deal! Now by sorting by year first I just take the entire 2005 folder for example and burn it to a few DVDs, or USB key, or online backup or whatever and boom its gone off our NAS only to be referenced on a rare occasion.

I set up my QuickBooks for quotes to always start with a "Q" to quickly identify it as a quote. Invoices start with a "V"; I didn't want to use "I" because it looks too much like a "1". The next two digits are the year so for example anything that starts with Q14 is a quote from 2014. I know, I know, it will be a problem when I get to the year 2100 but I'm willing to bet neither I nor QuickBooks will be around then. Then the last three digits are just an incremental number that QuickBooks assigns.

Every job I quote gets assigned a number in QuickBooks and gets a directory on the NAS drive. It starts with one subfolder called "Quote". Then if the job is awarded we add "Customer POs" and eventually Drawings, Programs, Documentation, Miscellaneous, Invoices, etc. We recently just started saving electronic copies of all our QuickBooks documents such as invoices and POs to suppliers. What a time saver that was. Now I don't have to chase down the file wherever it may be to find out if we ordered that part or not.

The next step I want to do is get into a system like SharePoint where we can have a workspace that points us to common files, e-mails, etc. but I'm not versed in the capabilities. As soon as I have time (been saying that for the last several years) I will be looking into it.

Good luck in implementing whatever you chose. There are so many different approaches it really is a matter of putting some thought into what your requirements are (which you are obviously doing) and thinking about how it will be used as a group and not from an individual's perspective.

benaiahhenry said:

Thanks for the input so far! Lots of good ideas.



How do you guys handle change orders, or feature requests as far as job numbers? Thus far for us, those are a new quote and therefore a new quote number, and finally a new job number since our quote numbers become job numbers once we get the PO associated with that quote. I don't personally handle that part of things, but I think those quote numbers come from QuickBooks.

I like the idea of putting a job number in the folder name on the fileserver, but that would get complicated for us with change orders/features etc since all the data/documents the are needed for the "new" job number are already in the "parent" job folder. Maybe keeping an association of "parent jobs" to "child jobs" and then putting everything in the parent job folder would work.

-Benaiah

Click to expand...

We have quotes as a sequential number in the DB as well as feature requests and change orders. Change orders on the same project are still the same job # as the job # is the project number. We have a folder structure in the job # folder for quotes document change orders feature requests. We archive all emails in both outlook format and pdf format.

We have a folder in the structure called related jobs so jones on the same line or equipment are included as shortcuts.

The power comes fron the database as I can search a customer and see all jobs or search a job and See all quotes or all change orders etc.

For active projects nothing beats share point and onenote and used with one drive and / or O365.

The Plc Kid said:

For active projects nothing beats share point and onenote and used with one drive and / or O365.

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SharePoint does look pretty useful, what parts/features have you found particularly useful? We've used shared OneNote notebooks before and found that to be a great help, and syncing documents to SharePoint and other people on the project with OneDrive looks great as well. Do you use Sharepoint for tasks, issue tracking, etc?

-Benaiah

benaiahhenry said:

SharePoint does look pretty useful, what parts/features have you found particularly useful? We've used shared OneNote notebooks before and found that to be a great help, and syncing documents to SharePoint and other people on the project with OneDrive looks great as well. Do you use Sharepoint for tasks, issue tracking, etc?

-Benaiah

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Sharepoint is a data collector more than anything. We use it in that way. We use MS Project and Outlook and Lync for meetings. Sharepoint can send emails alerts based based upon events in MS Project.

We use it to sync tasks and use tasks in outlook. I use tasks in outlook but primarily using ToDoist.

We also use sharepoint with our database also. Sharepoint is very flexible and can do most anything. I do a lot of sharepoint, Visual Studio and SQL development so I have it fairly polished. It's one of those tools that once you have it you constantly find new uses for it.

The Plc Kid said:

We also use sharepoint with our database also. Sharepoint is very flexible and can do most anything. I do a lot of sharepoint, Visual Studio and SQL development so I have it fairly polished. It's one of those tools that once you have it you constantly find new uses for it.

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Do you end up writing a lot of custom code for your Sharepoint sites? And if so what is it around? How large of a job does managing Sharepoint become? We are a small company so we don't have anyone the can be dedicated to that kind of stuff, it's us engineers that will have to do most of this type of management as we do the jobs.

-Benaiah

benaiahhenry said:

Do you end up writing a lot of custom code for your Sharepoint sites? And if so what is it around? How large of a job does managing Sharepoint become? We are a small company so we don't have anyone the can be dedicated to that kind of stuff, it's us engineers that will have to do most of this type of management as we do the jobs.

-Benaiah

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I have written a lot of custom code for our implementation to automate some things and to connect with other non MS systems but for your needs it sounds like SharePoint Online would be best for you.

We use Share point online and also have share-point sever in house. Having SharePoint server in house can be a bit to maintain for a small shop.

From your description I doubt you would want to go with server or any custom coded apps. At least not to start with. I would say get your feet wet with SharePoint online and the standard features first.