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Program Management

In Hydra Manager you gain:

Better program and project management:

• Manage, report and schedule projects and programs across multiple teams, time zones, resource pools and functional units.
• Maximise the return on your resources by delegating and sharing work across managers, teams and locations.
• Assign tasks and responsibilities to individuals who can then report back their accomplishments, issues and remaining effort.
• Create individual work plans for staff that report into multiple projects and managers.
• Delegate work, loan resources and share plans with other executives across the world by Hydra's interlinking of plans and remote working capabilities.
• See the effect of using one person for a task versus another, by scheduling against availability and skills.

Better access to program and project information:

• Eliminate time-consuming manual tasks with Hydra's unified architecture design. This offers more accurate and timely reporting of work done, estimating of time to complete, submission and approval of timesheets and updating of plans.
• Maintain and display easily understood plans for every manager regardless of any transfer of resources or responsibilities between projects, tasks and teams.
• Simulate the take on of new work, additions to, or reductions in resource availability, by being able to analyse all work in a single plan.
• Easily and automatically track and monitor problems, issues, risks and respond to events as required.
• Drill down from program level through projects and sub-projects to individual personal plans.

Key Concepts of Hydra Manager:

Delegation

Hydra uses this term for the transfer of responsibility for any work. So at a program level, a program manager would delegate projects to project managers. Project managers may then, for example break the project into further detail and delegate work packages to functional managers. The delegation process continues up, down and across the organisation, to the point of assigning individual resources to tasks. Hydra is automatically creating links between all delegations to allow for seamless updates. A program manager is then able to drill down through the delegation chain right down to an individual's personal plan.

Any manager may delegate to any other manager and so, unlike the hierarchical approach seen with traditional project tools, the overall picture might be very complicated. Hydra maintains the data flows, irrespective of complexity, and each manager only has to view their own plan to be made aware that they have been requested to do work for other managers (and the timing and costs agreed) and that other managers have agreed to do work for them.

Capacity Planning

Delegation in Hydra provides a means of distributing both the responsibility for doing the work and the overhead of planning that work. Capacity planning gives the program manager a number of tools that enable any or all work to be brought into a single plan for 'what-if' analysis. The program manager can simulate the take on of new work, additions to or reductions in resource availability and the effects of restructuring resource teams throughout the organisation.

Should that work be given to the New York or London office? What happens to project timings and costs if the IT department's requests for additional contract staff are approved? When will this new work be done if it is made the highest priority? These are all questions that can be answered easily and accurately using Hydra's capacity planning facilities.

Resource Loan Agreements

Delegation agreements keep track of work, which is passed from one manager to another. Resource loan agreements allow one user to lend one of their resources to another manager / managers. Resources are lent for a specific time period and may be given on a full-time or part-time basis. Where organisations have specific resource managers, special resource pool plans can be created to manage resource loan requests between managers and the processing of loans. Of course, managers may also request resources from other managers, which starts the resource loan process.

Pre-emptive Resource Levelling

Whenever a manager assigns a person to a task, Hydra helps by scheduling that task immediately against that person's availability. In this way, the manager can quickly see the effect of using one person as opposed to another.

Hydra allows individuals to be grouped together according to skills, so if the manager is not sure which individual ".net programmer", for example, will finish the work soonest, then Hydra will suggest the individual who will do just that. It will also show the manager the effect of using any of the other ".net programmers", to complete the work.

Hydra also offers a third dimension to resource management - the ability to organise individuals into teams, allowing the manager to see the effect of using a person (e.g. "John"), or a job title (e.g. ".net programmer") or a job title from a location (e.g. ".net programmer" from the London team) and multiple skill scheduling (.net programmer from London who speaks French).

From a program perspective the program manager is assured that when projects are delegated, they are realistically resourced. Hydra never allows accidental overloading of resources.

Publishing the Plan

By this mechanism, Hydra creates individual plans from the resourced project plans. Each individual receives a plan and uses that plan as the basis for reporting their progress. Where resources are loaned between manager's plans an individual's work plan may include work for more than one manager. When the individual reports progress, the actual information is reported back to all managers who have given that person work to do. Actual work done updates the manager's plans, and in turn they update other manager's plan until the program plans are updated. The Program Manager then has the ability to drill down through all levels should they wish to do so.

Remote Working

Hydra brings together the whole program team by interlinking plans. Managers use Hydra to delegate work, loan resources, update their team and receive timesheets. Now Hydra takes this unique level of communication away from the limitations of a local area network (LAN), wide area network (WAN) and even the Internet by making connections between plans around the world simple and secure. To the user, Hydra looks exactly the same, but remote working makes it possible to delegate, loan resources and share plans with another users anywhere.

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