EPM, Microsoft Project and You

BY:  Collin Quiring

This blog entry is about the conference itself and not really about Microsoft Project as I have decided to talk about them separately – even though the conference is all about the tool.

On the first day of the Conference the keynote was given by Ludo Hauduc, General Manager of the Project Business Unit.  This was an interesting keynote and he gave a quick history of Project Management and then of Microsoft Project.  Some of the facts that were interesting to me were:

·         Project has 20 million users

·         There are 10,000 Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Customer Organizations

·         There are 6,400 Microsoft Certified Project 2007 Professionals

·         There are 35,000 members of MPUG (Microsoft Project User Group)

·         There are over 1,000 partners helping Microsoft with Project

Also as part of the keynote session were some “guest speakers” from a couple customers and partners about their usage of Project and Project Server. 

Also, some customer and partner awards were distributed.  I bet that over time, the customer and partner awards segment becomes more and more popular and that the competition starts heating up.

For the rest of the day there were numerous sessions of varying intensity on business and tool topics.  I will talk more about what I attended and learned in upcoming Project blogs.  In addition to the educational sessions was a great new feature of the conference – Hands on Labs.  These were self-paced labs with a number of pre-selected topics.  I think that this was a great aspect of the conference this year!  This allowed for some “how to” and some education on how the tool worked.

In the evening, EPM Live hosted an event at Corona Ranch.  This was a great break after a day of sitting in classrooms.  There was a short rodeo event as well which ended up involving some Project Managers running around the arena chasing a calf.  One of them tackled the calf much to the crowd’s delight.

By: Tanya Foster

Lately I’ve been working in both Project 2003 and Project 2007 and it has really dawned on me that some of the new features in Project 2007 are really great, so I thought I would list them here. 

1.       Multilevel Undo

Okay… this might sound silly, but the multilevel undo feature is awesome!  I know that it took several years for them to get this programmed, but wow is it worth it for the end user!   In Project 2003 you only had one undo.  That is so limiting when you are working with lots of tasks and dates.  You make several changes and then realize that something isn’t right, but you can only undo the last change that you made and it’s not the one causing the problem.  So you have to close the project without saving changes, just so you can go back and start all over again!  Very frustrating sometimes, but with Project 2007, you no longer have that problem. 

2.       Change Highlighting

How many times have you made a change in Project 2003 and had to hit the undo button just to see if it changed any other tasks?  C’mon… you know what I’m talking about!  It’s happened to all of us at some point or another.  You just keep hitting the undo and redo buttons until you can finally see how it’s impacting your overall schedule.  Well, in Project 2007 you don’t have to keep hitting undo and redo, because there is a change highlighting feature!  Anytime you make a change to your schedule, the cells that are impacted are highlighted.  So if you make a change to task 4 and that change impacts tasks 5, 6 & 7 in any way, tasks 5,6, & 7 will be highlighted!  To me, this feature alone is worth upgrading to Project 2007!

3.       Task Drivers

Just one click of the task drivers button, and you will have at your fingertips a list of tasks that affect the start date of the specific task that you have selected.  This feature has saved me countless hours of staring at the Gantt chart trying to figure out what’s causing my task date to be wacky.  I love, love, love this feature!

4.       Programs (or Master Projects)

Project 2003 supported Master Projects, but the functionality was very limited compared to Project 2007.  You can create a Master Project, insert all of the sub projects and manage them all in this one Master Project.  Any changes that you make to a subproject will automatically take effect in the individual schedule.  You don’t have to make the changes in both places!  You can link tasks between projects, change task names, update durations, and it’s all visible within this one Master Project.  And now you can see Master Projects within a single Project Center view where before!  Very handy feature indeed.

5.       Team Resources

So you have a team of people who are going to be working on several particular tasks in your schedule.  Maybe these resources all have the same skill set and you don’t know who’s going to be doing which specific task.  You can assign these resources to a team, assign the team to the tasks, and they can go and assign themselves to the task.  I think this is a great feature that will get a lot of use in Project 2007.

Well… There are my Top 5 Reasons.  Once I got started, I realized that maybe I should have done my top 10 because there are just so many great new features in Project 2007!  Maybe I’ll do another blog on this topic and list Another 5 Reasons Why I Like Microsoft Project 2007 over 2003… Stay tuned to find out!

By: Collin Quiring

Microsoft Project Server isn’t the most complex software or server that Microsoft produces.  However, it does require SQL 2000 or SQL 2005, Project Server 2003 or Project Server 2007.  Depending on how you set up the server(s) that manage your installation also require customizing the systems and your ability to reach Project Server over Internet Explorer (or other browser).  Then, there are backups that must be performed daily and the patches to the operating system that regularly come out.  This requires somebody to maintain the hardware and software and be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Plus, there are the costs to license the software.  And, in some cases, the department that wants the tool isn’t the IT department, so they have no inherent ability to implement this themselves.

So, what is the solution?  Software as a Service, or SaaS, is one great solution.  None of the technical requirements are reduced – but the risk to the company is transferred to the provider.  The provider of SaaS is the one that has to have somebody available at all times for Project Server.  They have to be able to maintain the server for you.

Microsoft has even jumped into this arena with their Software Plus Services idea.  This is really just SaaS with a different title.  While many companies are jumping into SaaS in many areas of their business, not very many are using it for Microsoft Project.  There was recently a cover story in ComputerWorld about companies that are successfully using SaaS.  (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=325805)

For many small companies the expenses and resource requirements are too much.  For other companies, the maintenance and effort for Microsoft Project Server and SQL Server aren’t high enough on the priority list to be given the attention that they deserve.  In both these cases, SaaS provides a great opportunity to allow the business operations of the company to continue working without the worries of Information Technology.

Microsoft Project Server works great in the SaaS model and we have implemented for organizations of all sizes.  If you are looking at Microsoft Project Server and aren’t sure about how/when/where to install it or maintain it, I would recommend looking at SaaS.

In the case of Microsoft Project 2007, Task Drivers are defined as the factors that affect the Start Date of a particular task.  In Project Professional, on the Menu Bar, under Project, is the option to display Task Drivers.  When a task is selected and Task Drivers are displayed, information about what is affecting that task’s start date is shown.  For clarification purposes, the name of the task and the start date are displayed in the top section of the Task Driver’s pane.

In the lower section of the pane the information is subdivided by different headings with the pertinent information.  If a certain driver doesn’t exist for a task, it isn’t displayed.  For example, if you didn’t apply leveling to your task, then the Leveling Delay driver will not be displayed.

The potential drivers and causes for why they might appear are:

Driver                                                                   Cause                                                   

Actual Start and Assignments                     Actual data was entered

Leveling Delay                                             Resource leveling was done

Constraint Type/Date                                  A constraint is set

Summary Task                                              A constraint is set on a task’s summary task

Predecessor Tasks                                       Linked tasks

Subtasks                                                       A summary task will list the subtasks

Calendar                                                       If a calendar is affecting the task (may display                                                                      the Resource name because of their calendar

Examples:

A simple example of this is explained here.  For the task selected, task id 6 “Secure Core Resources” we see the task information in the top part of the pane.  In the bottom part of the pane, we see the predecessor task and that the calendar for the resource “Ann” is affecting the start date.

In this example, task id 9 has a predecessor but the real driver on the start date is that a “Start no earlier Constraint” has been set and the calendar being used for the resource is affecting it.