Every BMW vehicle project has various milestones – the start of communications, the availability of technical data, completion dates for the individual trades, and much more – all derived from the go-live date of the vehicle page. Until now, a project manager had to calculate all milestones manually, plan the capacities of the various trades and create the relevant tasks individually – with around 50 projects per year, this represented a significant, constantly recurring and error-prone manual effort.

I have set up a master template in Workfront from which project-specific variants can be derived as adaptations. As a PM, I select the appropriate template and simply enter the desired go-live date for the vehicle page – Workfront then automatically calculates all milestones backwards from this date, creates the associated tasks and schedules the relevant trades based on their allocated hourly quotas. The specific allocation of personnel within a trade is deliberately kept at the level where capacity decisions are made.