Telus is Canada's third largest telecommunications company. Based in Alberta Canada, Telus manages of $4.4 billion in assets. Telus Communications is responsible for switching and service to thousands of subscriber's homes and businesses in the Edmonton area. Needless to say, project management is a critical aspect to Telus Communications' business process. The Telus Communications Network Engineering and Construction department designs and constructs inside and outside networks, central switching and cabling for all subscribers. Open Plan is in use here for these highly visible projects.

Ron Hanchurak is a Systems Project Manager who administers local area networks and interfaces for any project that affect both the systems networks and mainframes. Ron has been involved with the implementation of an integrated project control environment at Telus Communications for over two years.

Two and a half years ago, Telus Communications projects were being managed by an in-house designed Engineering Management System (EMS). The system had evolved over the previous 6-7 years and provided abilities to manage forecasts, expenditures, time and functionality breakdowns. The EMS system included an estimating function based on historical data. The only thing missing from the system was a graphical scheduling system.

In 1994 a decision was made to upgrade the EMS as a client-server solution. "We had outgrown our existing structure," according to Ron Hanchurak.

"Our strategy was to reuse, buy or build," says Hanchurak. "We couldn't find anything that met all our requirements for a scheduling module so we decided to purchase. We wanted to buy and integrate as many components as we could."

With many packages available on the market, Ron and his team narrowed the search criteria. "We were looking for something that was SQL compliant. That was our number one criteria," says Hanchurak. "The second was 'What If' functionality. We're very much into that here. Our workload changes daily."

Telus Communications considered several options before deciding on the Open Plan Professional/Desktop combination in 1996. The different levels of product suited Telus according to Ron. "We have an area responsible for scheduling and Open Plan Professional is perfect for that," he says. "We also wanted to put something on desktops that wasn't so complex. Not everybody out there is a scheduler but they still want to see what's happening and to plan their resources. Our engineers can see the project and update progress.

HMS Software, the Canadian distributor of Open Plan has been closely involved with Telus since their first contact. "We've done some on-site consulting to assist Telus with their implementation," says Stephen Eyton-Jones of HMS-Software. Steve is in charge of technical services at HMS. "One of the key factors was adjusting the standard training materials to the particular situation at Telus. This customized training was delivered on-site in Edmonton to the Open Plan implementation team.

"Stephen trained us based on our job," says Hanchurak. "Stephen made the training easier by customizing it to the Telus requirements. We can't say enough about him."

With the implementation still in its initial stages, Telus threw the project team yet another curve. In September 1996 Telus committed to implementing an SAP system.

"We wanted to leverage our investement in Open Plan," explains Ron. "We had committed to move our EMS system to Oracle and link Open Plan to it directly. It was the graphical tool we'd been missing."

The Telus plan was to move first the EMS system to an Oracle Data Warehouse, implement Open Plan on an Oracle database then link the Open Plan Oracle Tables directly to the EMS system.

"We're already in the acceptance phase now," Ron says. Final training is scheduled for March with roll-out of the scheduling system to begin immediately.

With the SAP implementation scheduled to ramp up through 1997 and roll out in early 1998, the strategy now includes a new component. Ron and his team will be linking the SAP Project module with Open Plan as it comes online. It's expected that the SAP system will supplant many of the functions now managed by the EMS. Their first stage of the SAP/Open Plan implementation will include using the SAP-Open Plan link co-developed by SAP and Welcom Software.

"We were already structured in an integrated manner," Ron explains. "So from a project management standpoint, we don't anticipate any significant culture shock moving to SAP."

With the telecommunications industry so dynamic, the project management environment will be under close scrutiny in the coming months at Telus. Don Lowry, the President and Chief Operating officer at Alberta Government Telephone Limited, one of the key Telus companies was a keynote speaker at the 1996 PMI Canada Symposium. He said, "Project Management techniques have allowed us to attain the most significant milestones in our company's history." "It is a fundamental part of all we do,…"

Ron and his team are implementing the tools to support those techniques. "We've moving towards more timely decisions," he says. "We've always had the data and always had the skills to make decisions but it just wasn't timely enough. The integration of Open Plan and our EMS system will let us do that.