# County of Santa Barbara, CA

Microsoft® Project enabled a small engineering department to automate a scheduling system for an annual workload of 2,000 tasks for 150 projects. The costs required to manage these resources fell by 20%.

Vital Statistics:
Road Engineering Division
Department of Public Works
County of Santa Barbara, CA
Robert Ooley, Analyst

Industry:
Municipal Public Works Engineering

Employees: 250

Software Programs:
Microsoft Project
Microsoft Schedule+
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Access

Hardware:
Pentium PCs

Results of Using Project:
"Microsoft Project allowed us to effectively deliver resources and manage them in a timely fashion."

The Road Engineering Division of the County of Santa Barbara, CA handles approximately 2,000 projects annually with only six engineers and a small staff of supporting personnel.

A paper tracking system used for project scheduling and staff assignments proved to be inadequate for managing the division’s limited resources. The agency needed a system that could quickly assess the impact of new projects on the existing workloads of engineers and other available resources.

Analyst Robert Ooley used Microsoft Project as the planning tool to create a scheduling system that automated and improved upon the existing paper tracking system. Robert’s challenge was to develop a system that created a master schedule for all department projects and standardized procedures for data input.

A new system was needed that would correct problems inherent in the existing paper tracking system. A major shortcoming was the lack of centralized project management scheduling. Engineers kept their own schedules, which required frequent meetings to coordinate dates and details when managing large projects.

Another problem was that the paper tracking system did not allow the division manager to see a comprehensive view of the workloads and schedules for all engineers. This was essential to accurately forecast future staffing and resource needs.

The existing scheduling system was not able to accommodate the changing availability of staff resources within the division. Staff contingency assignments made it difficult to predict how many engineers would be available to take on new projects. Two engineers take on specialist roles in the event of severe weather or other emergencies, which requires that their workloads be shifted or postponed on short notice.

Robert selected Microsoft Project to develop an automated scheduling system for the division because it was able to resolve all of these problems and more.

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