EPM, Microsoft Project and You

This article, written by Collin Quiring, first appeared in Wellington Project Management newsletter in December  2011. (http://www.projectserver2010.co.uk/2011/11/08/resource-management-with-project-server-2010/)

Last time we started this two-part article by asking some questions about resource management that might be on your mind.  We focused on six questions.  They were:

• ·         Who is working on what projects?
• ·         What tasks are they doing on those projects?
• ·         When are they doing those tasks?
• ·         How many hours of work are assigned for those tasks?
• ·         What is the capacity of each person?
• ·         Who is scheduled to their capacity, over-capacity or dramatically over-capacity?

We also focused on how to see all the resources assigned to one project and then seeing how one resource can see their information.  Our goal in this article is to see how Project Server 2010 allows us to see the information for a resource assigned to many different projects and to see all the resources from the perspective of a schedule or multiple schedules.

In Part One, we looked at our resource, Shelly Smith, for a time period where she was assigned to one schedule.  Now, we need to look at a time period where Shelly is assigned to many different schedules.  Since the picture view might be more easily understood, we will review that one first.  The black line represents Shelly’s capacity – at 40 hours a week.  The blue bar represents the amount of work assigned.  We can easily see that she is way over capacity! 

Now we can review which projects are causing these problems by reviewing the data view.  (We review this in image form at the end of this article.)  We can see that she is over capacity by between 24 and 104 hours for January.  Be able to review this information allows you to go to the various Resource Managers or Project Managers (or the resource) and discuss what the priorities are and what tasks can be moved to other resources or other time periods.  From this chart, we can determine that the Resource Managers for both the “Infrastructure Plan” and the “Residential Construction” schedules think they have 100% of Shelly’s time for the week of 1/9/12.

If one of the potential results of seeing a view like this is to determine if we can move work to other resources we need to be able to see those resources for the same time period.  We can look at each resource individually as we have done or we can see all the resources that we want to during this time period.  For this example, I have chosen to include two more resources, Ryan and Jessica.  I now have a new black line that represents the capacity of all three individuals and I can see the work assigned for the three of them combined.  Note that Shelly is now the yellow and that Ryan is green but Jessica is Blue and she is seriously UNDER capacity.  In one quick look we know who can get some of Shelly’s work.  And, we have also discovered that Ryan is over capacity.

These last few images were from the resource’s perspective but we can also view the work from the schedule perspective.  Earlier, while we were concentrating on Shelly, we looked at which projects were assigning her the most work.  But, we can view how many hours of work are being assigned to resources based on the perspective of projects.

In this chart we are still only looking at three resources but this time by project – that is why the black line representing capacity is still at 120 hours a week (40 hours each per week).  But on the right hand side the names of the projects are all color coded.  Just by reviewing the chart we can determine that the “Commercial Construction” project is taking the most time for the most weeks.

There is another really positive aspect to all of this – it is in real time.  If you are looking at this chart and a Project Manager changes the dates on a schedule and then published that schedule, as soon as you hit refresh the data changes!  Also, you can deselect projects or resources or change the date range and hit the “Apply” button and the graph changes to your new parameters.

These examples just touch on the amount of information that Project Server 2010 can provide.  There are numerous other views and reports and ways to get data that is meaningful to your specific situation.

This article, written by Collin Quiring, first appeared in Wellington Project Management newsletter on November 8, 2011.  (http://www.projectserver2010.co.uk/2011/11/08/resource-management-with-project-server-2010-part-12/)

There are many questions about resource management that probably keep you awake all night.  Ok, maybe you can sleep just fine, but perhaps there are questions that perplex you during the day.  There might be dozens of questions that you have but here is a small sample that you (or maybe management) might be wondering about.

• Who is working on what projects?
• What tasks are they doing on those projects?
• When are they doing those tasks?
• How many hours of work are assigned for those tasks?
• What is the capacity of each person?
• Who is scheduled to their capacity, over-capacity or dramatically over-capacity?

Of course, the way to get the answer to each of these is very simple.  All you have to do is walk around, talk to each person individually and ask them.  You can write their answers down (assuming they all tell you the correct information) and then combine your notes and it will be totally valid!  And, when management surprise you with a request for this information for a meeting they are having in a few hours you just have to walk around faster.

Or, maybe there is an easier way!  An easier method would be to click on a link and get a report that gives you the answer to one or more of those questions.  Just think of all the walking time that you will save!

Project Server 2010 can provide you this information quite easily.  To get this information doesn’t require meticulous hours spent entering every possible detail from the first day you start using Project Server.  At some point in the future you may want to add more detail, like skill sets, but it is easy to start gaining valuable information right away with Project Server 2010. (Even if you don’t use Project Server, it is possible to use Project Professional to get this information.  I won’t go into more detail here about how you can get this information without Project Server but it is covered in my new book “Mastering Resource Management Using Microsoft Project and Project Server 2010”.)

Let’s briefly look at the first three questions – ‘Who is working on what projects?’ ‘What tasks are they doing on those projects?’ and ‘When are they doing those tasks?’.  The easiest way to obtain this information is to assign a Resource to each task on your projects (when applicable) and provide a Start Date and Finish Date for those tasks.  This action will give us the ability to see in one combined report who is working on which tasks, on which projects, and when they are working on them.  You can see this information from the Resource’s perspective or by Project.  For example, this screenshot shows how this might look when viewing a single Project:

The view shows us that Shelly Smith is one of the Resources assigned tasks.  Now let’s look at the information from the perspective of Shelly Smith for this same time period as the screenshot above.  When we dive into the information for one single resource we will also get the information that answers the others questions posed at the beginning of this article.  How many hours are assigned?  What is the resources capacity?  And, who is over capacity?  For Shelly Smith, for the time period as shown in the screenshot above from the project perspective, we can see that she normally has a capacity of 40 hours a week.  And, based on her current assignments, she has work assigned to her of about 40 hours per week.  There are two exceptions in this data – the first and last weeks of this time period.  During the week of 11/1/2011 she is assigned 64 hours on the schedule called “Sample” and with a capacity of 32 hours, she is 32 hours OVER capacity.  The week of 12/26/2011 she is 36 hours over capacity.

Sometimes, pictures are worth a 1000 points of data in a grid.  Here is that same information represented in a graph.  The black line represents Shelly’s weekly capacity and the blue bars represent the amount of work assigned to her for that week.

You might be thinking that this is nice for ONE resource and ONE project but when you walk around and ask resources what they are assigned to now they have multiple assignments on multiple projects and it overlaps.  No problem!  Stay tuned for next month’s installment when we show how this information rolls together from multiple projects for multiple resources.

NOTE:  The information provided by these views depends upon some of the business decisions and corresponding setup of Project Server.  These examples are using the Standard Calendar and Fixed Duration tasks.  You can get more detailed information by using different calendars and different task types.  Even if you are using Fixed Duration for task assignments, you can still get a useful perspective of the amount of work being assigned to a Resource!   (For a deeper explanation of task types see http://pmpspecialists.com/WhitePapers/PMP_Specialists_Task_Types.pdf )

BY: Collin Quiring

I always wonder why a blog goes silent.  While it takes great discipline and scheduling to update a blog on a regular basis, there are plenty of folks that do it.  For a long time I was able to do it as well.  However, for a number of personal and professional reasons I have been all but “offline” for a few months now.  I have written a few entries in my head and have some notes about some as well but haven’t been posting anything.  I am hoping to start getting active again now.  This post will be more of a hodgepodge of “little things” of varying interest to you.

• First, Tanya Foster and I have been working on a book on how to use Microsoft Project Professional and Microsoft Project Server for Resource Management.  This is only concentrating on the Resource Management piece.  The book is currently in review and I will update everybody when it is closer to being published.

• One tidbit of knowledge that I have recently learned involves the Project Server 2010 “force check-in” background process.  I noticed that when a schedule was forced to check-in it sometimes took a few moments and other times it took significantly longer.  I didn’t understand the difference and just chalked it up to random “stuff” on the server, my connection or whatever.  However, Brian Smith recently explained to me that a force check-in isn’t just a “check-in” but it actually tries to process outstanding status updates as well.  It probably does other things as well and perhaps Brian will one day blog about that but this was a big “ah-ha” moment for me as I know that I was trying to check in some schedules that had outstanding updates – and that is what took them so long to check in when I was forcing it.  Now, as a general rule, you probably should not be force checking-in schedules very often, but that is a different story for another day.

• We are big believers around here in obtaining certifications – as individuals and as an organization (although Microsoft calls them Competencies for organizations).  We have blogged about it in the past ( http://pmpspecialists.com/Blog/2010/05/new-microsoft-competency-for-partners-%e2%80%93-why-should-the-customer-care/ and  http://pmpspecialists.com/Blog/2010/02/microsoft-project-certifications-%e2%80%93-how-do-they-create-the-test-3-of-3/ and  http://pmpspecialists.com/Blog/2010/10/pmi-membership-and-pmp-certification-%e2%80%93-by-the-numbers/ ).  The Microsoft Project 2010, Managing Projects certification exam has gone live.  The exam number is 70-178.  The “Microsoft Project Server 2010, Configuring”, exam 70-177 is expected to go live in June.

• More information about 70-178 can be found here:  http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-178&Locale=en-us

• More information about 70-177 can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-177&Locale=en-us

• This one is of interest to me:  Project Management Institute (PMI) is creating a new Agile Certification pilot program, beginning in May of 2011 (http://www.pmi.org/en/Agile/Agile-Certification-Eligibility-Requirements.aspx).  While I am not necessarily a big proponent of Agile I do understand that it is the “next big thing” and it may have a place in the Project Management world.  I did see at the last PMI Conference that there were lots of Agile presentations and I attended a couple of them.  One of the two that I went to was extremely confusing as I guess the presenters assumed that everybody in attendance was already familiar with Agile.  There are many folks that would debate that Agile is not really its own Project Management methodology and that Agile is actually a software development method (see http://blog.pmtechnix.com/does-agile-project-management-exist/ for a snippet of that debate).  We shall see where this certification and Agile goes in the future.

By:  Collin Quiring

Just a quick muse.

The saying “Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery” has been around a long time and I have been thinking about it the last few days quite a bit.  I am getting ready to do a massive SharePoint Server 2010 installation and a Project Server 2010 installation.  In so doing, I have been doing quite a bit of research lately to make sure that I have an understanding of how these tools are installed and the steps for setting them up and then maintaining them for the users.

In my research, I do some generic Google and Bing searches for SharePoint and Project to see what has been done by others already.  And, I keep running into tools that claim to be “as good as” Microsoft Project or Project Server.  But when I look at these tools that claim they are “as good as” Project or Project Server I have found that they mean that their tool does one thing and one thing only – and they think it is the same as Project.  I have found this to be quite disappointing.

One tool that claimed to be great at Resource Management had a very efficient interface and did one or two things really well but as soon as I tried to do something that I normally can do in Project, I found that “as good as” didn’t mean “as comprehensive as” the Project tool.  There are also add-on tools that are available for Project - some of those are great and some are useless, but at least they claim to be “add-on” and NOT a replacement that works “as good as” like these other tools claim to be. 

Project might not be perfect, but it amuses me about how many tools want to be “as good as” Project and are doing their best to imitate it.  In fact, some tools even give the same look and feel of Microsoft Project.  It just makes me think that Project must be doing some things right if so many other companies want to imitate it!

By:  Collin Quiring

If you view our website, you know that we specialize in Microsoft Project Server.  You also can see that we are PMP (Project Management Professionals) certified.  As PMP certified individuals, we are demonstrating that we understand that there is a body of knowledge that exists to assist an individual with Project Management.  This is tool agnostic; but having the right tool that integrates well with the principles and body of knowledge of Project Management can make implementing and using those principles much easier.

There are other valid Project Management (PM) tools on the market today.  In fact, the number of PM tools numbers into the 100’s with some very specialized, some home grown that are now being sold and some are variants on more common products.   And, some companies use Excel or pen and paper for the PM needs.  So, why do we concentrate on Microsoft Project Server?

We understand that there are many tools and we have some experience in a number of them, but, we realized that we needed to be specialists in one tool, and able to use others; rather than trying to claim that we are experts in all tools.  This might be a good reason for us, but why would an organization want this tool?

Of course, if you go to Microsoft’s website, you can find all sorts of lists of why this is the best choice but I am going to give a few high level reasons here that seem to recur as I talk to clients.

 “One Source of Truth, Part One” – by this I mean that you can have one centralized location for all your project information and it is accessible by the browser.  All the schedule information is in one place.  This means that EVERYBODY (who has been given security permission) from a single task person to the CEO can see the same information, in real time.

“One Source of Truth, Part Two” – all the documentation, issues, risks and other pertinent data can be associated with a Proposal, Project or Portfolio in one place.  No more email chains with attachments that are being modified by different people at different times for various reasons – the most recent version of the document is in one place.

Resource Management – the ability to understand who is available (or not) and when they are available is becoming more and more important and this tool delivers.  Depending on the amount of setup detail that an organization wants to provide is directly related to the amount of benefit that they receive.  From a company’s perspective, the ability to understand their resources can be an invaluable area of information.

Integration – for a Microsoft dominated IT department, the ability to integrate Project Server with other tools is relatively easy.  And, if you use Portfolio Server as well then it is all designed together.  And, since Project Server uses SQL, there is often already a database server running that can be used for Project Server.  If you are using Microsoft Dynamics, there are connections between Project Server and the Dynamics products that allow for information to flow between systems.  And, there are connectors to non-Microsoft products that have been built as well.

There are numerous other reasons, but these are some of the ones that seem to keep popping up about why a company should use Microsoft Project Server.

By: Collin Quiring

(Compared to SaaS and Direct Purchase)

Open Source software is often an option viewed by a company as a cost effective method to purchase and use software.  While the initial dollar savings of obtaining the software seems significant enough to justify going with open source, there are other costs in the ongoing usage of the software.  Initially, purchasing open source software is less expensive than the licensing fees and purchase price of proprietary software.  And, with both types of software there will be implementation, configuration and setup fees to either the software vendor or a knowledgeable third party.  Both types also require training of personnel and ongoing administration costs.

After the expenses associated with the preliminary installation and configuration come the ongoing costs and fees.  With open source, a company will either have to have developers on staff to maintain and modify the code to their needs or will have to hire consultants.  One of the issues with hiring consultants is that the available pool of consultants is usually fairly limited.  Also, over time, as hardware or other software that the company uses are updated, the open source software will have to be customized as well.  With proprietary software, new versions will be released on a schedule that will use more recent technology.

Another cost of using any software is the ability to hire key people that already know the software.  Just as with the consultant pool, hiring experienced personnel can be difficult since the resource pool of qualified individuals is smaller.  With proprietary software the pool is larger and there is usually a certification process as well that can help verify a person’s ability before hiring.

While this is by no means an exhaustive list of costs, a major area of ongoing costs is in collaboration – both within the organization and with customers and vendors.  If you create/send/receive a certain type of document and it can’t be read by somebody else, then it can affect the bottom line.  People don’t want to spend time trying to determine what program they may have that can read the document that was sent to them.  Here is a great example of using an open source software solution and the hidden costs:  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/dec08/12-03SpeedyHireQA.mspx

But, what about those companies that want the ability to use proprietary software but want to spend the last amount possible?  That is where Software as a Service (SaaS) comes in.  This makes the initial costs drop to the configuration fees only.  Ongoing costs are reduced since the burden on an internal Information Technology group goes away as the company providing the service bears the burden.  Hiring key personnel to maintain the software is no longer an issue either.  The ongoing fees are a known amount since they are contracted so maintenance can become a budgeted amount.