Tenix Pty Ltd is the largest Australian defence and technology contractor. It is a fully Australian owned company employing in excess of 4,000 people, with total assets of approximately AU$1.2 billion, earning annual revenues (including joint ventures) of almost AU$1 billion. Tenix deliver a range of products and services to defence and commercial markets in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Philippines and the United States. This includes defence and shipbuilding businesses, infrastructure maintenance and engineering services, as well as property interests.
As a general rule, Tenix processes and procedures have been developed around large stable development projects and do not accommodate the dynamic nature of research projects. This AL project…show more content… Development projects usually have fully defined, well structured requirements and scope. The requirements and scope are usually provided by the Commonwealth at the start of a tender phase prior to project startup. These requirements are used to generate a work breakdown structure, thus, reducing the risk of investigating unsuitable technologies or prototyping unknown technologies and techniques. From this basis, a very detailed and solid schedule can be generated prior to project startup. Usually the requirement and scope for these projects remain stable throughout the project life cycle, and can only change through Contract Change Proposals. Tenix has developed a very good Cost Schedule process for this type of project. As the scope is usually stable in these projects, the Cost Schedule system is more cost…show more content… Typically a small change in resources, changes to the phasing of a task, or the addition of a new task can take many hours to update the schedule and rework reports. This time is usually spread over a week to complete a change, review and rework cycle. This is mainly due to the lack of availability of cost and scheduling resources as staff have many projects to service. Additionally the number of issues a Project Manager has to resolve on a daily basis leaves very little time available to rework schedules following changes to any one task. The window of opportunity to change a schedule to fit in with the current reporting cycle is small which further exacerbates this issue. Further inefficiencies can occur when the effect of changes are not fully realized until project reports are generated. By this time it is often too late to make changes to the schedule. This process leads to a lot of manual changes to the reporting data, and is prone to errors. The end result is out-of-date, inaccurate schedules that are retrospectively reworked to match what is happening in reality. Actual tasks have usually changed significantly from the schedule by the time the schedule is updated. This makes the updating of the schedule a difficult task and reports generated from the schedule usually have a number of errors that require significant rework. Contributing factors to these issues
