Management features of a large project

On a large project, you have to deviate from the methods and tools that you used to use on projects of smaller scale. I will share my own observations made on the ERP implementation project, where I work as the head of the RMO. And ask a question that can lead to a useful discussion about the use of tools for organizing collaboration of a large project team.

Before that, I had a very diverse experience in project management, but there was no such scale. A team of more than 100 people, 13 functional groups, a very demanding customer and unrealistically tight deadlines.
From previous experience, I learned clearly defined approaches to organizing the work of the project team. In order not to tire, I will try to formulate them very briefly:

• Delegation and distribution of responsibility between team leaders
• Intense personal communication with all participants.
• Using a centralized wiki to inform and exchange between project participants
• High-level calendar plan in MS Project for managing project deadlines and defining control points
• Centralized task management system for day scheduling
• Weekly informing the customer using concise reports that I prepare personally
• The maximum possible involvement of the customer in the project

On this project, my views have undergone some transformation. This is partly a result of scale, partly of subjective factors related to the composition of the project participants.

1. The project schedule in MS Project is practically not used as a management tool. It is there, and time is wasted on keeping it up to date, but not for the intended purpose. Detailed schedule in such a project is very difficult to do. As I have already said, there are subjective reasons that we are not talking about here, and there are objective ones:
   - Compressed schedule dictates the need to do many work in parallel (at least it looks like on a high-level graph). It is impossible to write completely design solutions, then specifications, and after that start development. As soon as one design solution is ready, the whole chain of subsequent works starts immediately. To depict these sequences in a graph with links you need to go down to the very details. If you try to do the whole project plan in such detail, it will be many thousands of lines, and it will be impossible to work with it. And the matter is not in the number of lines, but in the amount of daily updates.
   - A significant degree of uncertainty of labor intensity, duration and performance for all tasks. There are no statistics on team performance, it is not clear how much the customer will agree on the documents, how the requirements for the work results will be adjusted. There is a planned date for which everything should be ready, and under this the number of people in a team changes, the working day increases, the quality decreases (shhhhh, don't tell anyone!).
   As a result, the graph from the management tool turns into a picture and is purely illustrative.
2. Real tracking of work is done using metrics. For each group, we assign some set of indicators that they should reach at a certain point in time, and on a periodic basis (weekly or daily), we monitor the value of the indicator. For example, you need to issue so many documents. We divide the readiness of documents at the stage, we assign weight to each stage. As soon as this stage is completed, the group receives a certain number of conditional points. And so on for each key task. As a result, we have a sum of points, which integrally shows where the group is. There is a plan for this integral indicator, and in comparison with this plan one can roughly understand whether the group is in a graph or not. The tool is rough, but it turned out that this is easier than forcing groups to maintain their own detailed graphs in Project.
3. An insane amount of all sorts of lists and registries. Registries, requirements, developments, documents, comments, open questions, decisions, instructions, risks, problems, inter-project dependencies - there are dozens. To keep them up to date, you have to spend a significant amount of time and effort on consolidation and reconciliation.

Not the last point I would like to stay more. It turned out that there is no ready-made tool. At least to find it yet failed. All project management systems dance around project schedules and tasks. But none emphasizes the maintenance of lists.
Lists are traditional, and our project is not an exception, are maintained in Excel. But when you have 13 working groups, regular updating and data collection in separate tablets is quite expensive.
Imagine that you need to consolidate a file of comments of several thousand lines daily. Theoretically, everything is simple - each group works in its own file, in the evening the administrator collects it all into one file. In practice, someone did not update their file in time, someone changed the structure or changed the set of values ​​in one of the fields, just wrote some garbage ... And the very procedure of collecting and parsing a large file becomes nontrivial. And it is very scary to lose information.

Part of the lists rendered on SharePoint. These difficulties go away, but the interface does not come close to the capabilities of Excel. Project participants are reluctant to work with SP.

What would you like. I imagine an Excel-like system, but online, that meets the following requirements:

1. The ability to create tables of arbitrary structure, so that at any time you can quickly add the required field, determine its type, set or change the set of values ​​for individual fields.
2. The ability to link tables so that you can link to a record in another in one table. For example, to associate a table of open-ended questions with instructions that must be taken for each of them.
3. Multi-user access to tables, with blocking only one record when editing by the user.
4. Creating filters, reports, building pivot tables and graphs. Saving a set of such reports in the form of dashboards for general use. Ideally - a lot of dashboards for different purposes and audiences.
5. Convenient user interface - intuitive, in Russian, many fields fit on the screen ...
6. Built-in spell checker. Even Excel lists an insane amount of errors and typos.
7. Installation inside the corporate network. Using SaaS is possible, but may cause questions from the side of security.

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I would be grateful for comments and recommendations.