Futron supports you in developing the Integrated Master Plan (IMP), Integrated Master Schedule (IMS), and Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and using them to ensure excellent outcomes for your projects. Project Management, particularly for large, complex efforts, includes thousands of decision opportunities. Futron combines these three tools and processes, the IMP, IMS, and WBS, as part of an integrated decision management solutions approach to program and project risk management. Common project management practice captures the higher level decision opportunities in a program plan, a program schedule, and a work breakdown structure, all of which are designed to aid the project manager in identifying decision moments and tracking the decisions that are made as well as the results of the actions taken to execute the decisions.
The Integrated Master Plan (IMP) is an event-based, top level plan consisting of a hierarchy of Program Events. The three elements of the IMP are:
1) Event: a program assessment point that occurs at the culmination of significant program activities;
2) Accomplishment: the desired result(s) prior to or at completion of an Event that indicate(s) a level of the program’s progress;
3) Criteria: the provision of definitive evidence that a specific Accomplishment has been completed.
The (IMP) is expanded to a time-based Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) to produce a networked, multi-layered schedule showing all the detailed tasks required to accomplish the work effort contained in the IMP. The IMS flows directly from the IMP and supplements it with additional levels of detail. It incorporates all of the IMP Events, Accomplishments, and Criteria. To these activities, it adds the detailed tasks necessary to support the IMP criteria along with each task’s duration and its relationships with other tasks. This network of integrated tasks, when tied to the start date, creates the task and calendar-based schedule that is the IMS.
The IMP/IMS is related to the product-based Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) by giving a second type of view on the effort for different audiences or to provide a combination which gives better overall understanding.
Benefits
Integrated scheduling is a key component of effective project management.
Defining and publishing an integrated master schedule provides a standardized way for you to communicate what needs to be accomplished to all of your team members, the time required, and the interaction between project elements, thereby helping to enable the effective execution of activities towards project success.
Integrated scheduling enables critical path analysis.
Through an IMS, the critical path is identified. As the project progresses, changes to the critical path can be identified and the impacts evaluated. Identification of the critical path also facilitates the calculation of schedule margin, or “float time”, in non-critical path project elements.
The IMS provides the necessary foundation to help you to assess the impact of resources and technical changes on the cost and schedule execution of a program or project.
The IMS is used to perform routine Schedule Risk Assessments to evaluate the level of confidence that the critical path can be met. Cost and technical problems often first present as schedule risks. The IMS facilitates an understanding of the project’s schedule, allowing risk assessments to be conducted to enable cost, schedule, and technical risk mitigation actions to be taken. The IMS allows for the tracking of schedule execution and is a prerequisite for accurate technical and budgetary resource loading.
