Training, Consulting and PMO Augmentation | We Prevent Crunch and Project Crashes!

September 7, 2011
by soni
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Understanding Fixed Unit, Fixed Work and Fixed Duration tasks

Before going through let us understand what is Unit, Duration and work in MS Project and how they are related.

Unit : Refers to “Resource”. Measured as “% Allocation”

Work: Refers to amount of “Work” to be completed. Measured as “Hrs”

Duration: Refers to time required to complete work. Measured as “Days” (Man days etc)

All above are related to each other with formula:

Duration x Units = Work

Any task created in MS Project defaults to “Fixed Units”. MS Project supports following types of tasks creation:

Fixed Unit: A task in which the assigned units [or resources] is a fixed value and any changes to the amount of work or the task’s duration do not affect the task’s units. Impact of change in Work, Duration or unit of work in a Fixed Unit task can be illustrated as follow:

Fixed Unit

Fixed Duration: A task in which the duration is a fixed value and any changes to the work or the assigned units [that is, resources] don’t affect the task’s duration. Impact of change in Work, Duration or unit of work in a Fixed Duration task can be illustrated as follow:

Fixed Duration

Fixed Work: A task in which the amount of work is a fixed value and any changes to the task’s duration or the number of assigned units [or resources] do not affect the task’s work. Impact of change in Work, Duration or unit of work in a Fixed Work task can be illustrated as follow:

Fixed Work

Thus using this simple calculation and understanding impact of changes in different types of tasks, one can easily predict changes MS Project is going to make on given tasks.

That’s all

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August 29, 2011
by soni
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Understanding Overtime Cost with MS Project

If you’re managing projects, you must have come across Overtime Cost to represent cost of workers working beyond 5hrs of scheduled day.

For non-project professionals, the best way will be to direct enter “Overtime Work” in Entry table of Gantt chart view.

But on adding “Overtimework” field to Gantt Chart view MS Project do not allows end user to enter value to this field, thereby end users may feel not so good about MS Project.

As professionals, we need to understand when and where to define “Overtime Work” for a resource. In this article, we will cover up the steps involved to enter “Overtime Work” for resources.

In order to define Overtime costs for project, create a new resource with overtime cost information as follow:

Resource with Overtime Cost

In Entry Table(Standard Table for Gantt Chart View), add Cost, Actual Cost and Overtime Cost fields as follow:

Gantt Chart View Overtime work is ineditable

Now go to “Resource Usage” view and add “Overtime Work” field to the view.

While in “Resource Usage” view add the “Overtime Work” value

Resource Usage

Now as the project execution happens the overtime work entered in Resource Usage view reflect the “Overtime Cost” field in Entry table as follow:

Entry table showing Overtime Cost

a summary milestone report may be the best way to share information that shows the status of key deliverables. Yet, out of the box Microsoft Project views are limiting and don’t provide the visual summary level views that give an executive the quick overview of project or program health he or she needs for making quick and accurate business decisions. In this article I explain how to configure a view within Project that provides an executive rollup of a program showing the projects in the program with milestone status. Figure 1 shows the view that will be created through these configurations…

That’s all

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August 4, 2011
by admin
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Progress lines — What does this mean to your project?

One can add progress lines to the Gantt view using Tools -> Tracking -> Progress Lines… option. What is the relevance of such progress line and what do they reveal about current project. This is common query which participants raise wrt Progress lines.

Progress Line – what are they:

To update Current Progress MS Project support “Progress Lines” that connects work in-progress. Peaks towards left represent work behind schedule and right peaks work ahead of schedule.

One can display multiple progress lines for multiple dates in your project. Using Repeated display option one can also display progress lines relative to your actual plan or to a saved baseline plan.

There’s no facility in PWA 2007 or PWA 2010 to display progress lines.

Viewing Current Progress:

Using MS Project one can create Progress line with following steps:

1. Choose Tools, Tracking – Progress lines to open the Progress Lines Dialog box.
2. Select the Always Display Current Progress line checkbox.
3. Click At Project Status Date or At Current Date to indicate where you want the project lines to appear.
4. Click OK to close the dialog box and apply the project lines.

That’s all

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June 21, 2011
by soni
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Understanding Impact of Lead and Lags on Float time in Project Schedule

In MS Project “Lead Time” represents the overlap between Predecessor and Successor tasks wherein the Successor can start much early to finish of predecessor tasks. E.g. For a party the menu can be decided before Party starts. In such case there exists a lead time between “Menu Selection” and “Party Time” and can be represented in MS Project as follow:

In order to create a “Lead Time” between dependent tasks in MS Project, on must enter “Negative Values” in “Lag time” field.

Steps to Follow in MS Project to create a “Lead time”:

Select successor task in Project Schedule
Press “Shift + F2” from keyboard
MS Project Displays “Task Information” dialog
Go to “Predecessors” tab and enter “-3d” under “Lag” column.

Creating a “Lead time” with above steps creates a “Negative Float” for project schedule, making the Successor activity to start before predecessor activity completes, without delaying project schedule.

“Lag Time” represents the delay between finish of predecessor and start of successor tasks. E.g. In construction industry once the foundation is laid one needs to wait for water curing of it before any further construction can take place. In MS Project “Lag Time” is represented as follow:

In order to create a “Lag Time” between dependent tasks in MS Project, on must enter “Positive Values” in “Lag time” field.

Steps to Follow in MS Project to create a “Lag time”:

Select successor task in Project Schedule
Press “Shift + F2” from keyboard
MS Project Displays “Task Information” dialog
Go to “Predecessors” tab and enter “+3d” under “Lag” column.

Creating a “Lag time” with above steps creates a “Free Float” for subsequent tasks allowing it to delay its start on completion of Predecessor tasks.

Generally Project managers are on look out for “Free Floats” and “Negative Float” across project schedule to Fast track or Crash tasks.

That’s all

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June 21, 2011
by soni
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Correct way to rename a field in MS Project

As title goes renaming a field in MS Project is as easy as double click the field name and type the required title. That’s all!!

But if we see our filters, views, tables, groups where above text30 field is used, the changes done with above method do not reflect uniformly across the project.

rename field

So what’s wrong with above approach.

If we analyze above further, renaming a field with above method is local to that table where you have changed the field name. All other places it remains unchanged.

In order to make the changes across the project, Microsoft project exposes “Customize Fields” text box, which allows such changes uniform across.

Here are the steps to do above changes:

From Tools menu, click “Customize” and select “Fields” sub menu option
MS Project displays “Custom Field” dialog.
In this dialog, select the field you want to rename and click on “Rename” button
MS Project displays “Rename Field” pop-up dialog.
Enter the new desired name of field and click ok.

Now with above steps, any changes to rename a field are reflected across the project.

That’s all

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June 3, 2011
by soni
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Getting current project status quickly….

Will it be nice to get a quick turnaround and get the basic questions on Where my project stands?

Yes, Most PM can find such answers covering current estimated Start date, Finish date, Baseline details as well as Variances quickly under Project Statistics.

Steps to follow:

a. For opened project, click on “Project” menu option and select “Project Information”

b. From coming up dialog click on “Statistics” dialog.

MS Project displays quick status for project .

Project Statistics

Isn’t it nice?

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June 2, 2011
by soni
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Removing all constrained tasks in a Project plan

Whenever a new task is created with user defined Start date or it is scheduled with “Must Start on” or other constraints, it impacts scheduling and resolving resource overallocation issues while tracking projects during execution phase.

If we change the project Start date to new values, such constraints are not moved as per new start date of project causing another set of scheduling issues in realtime projects where projects need re-scheduling.

Due to this reason it is always advisable to let MS Project configure constraints (if any) to all tasks as soon as relationship is idenfied for all scheduled tasks.

Easiest solution to remove such constraints from tasks will be to create a new filter which lists all tasks having any of standard constraints applied. And once the filter is applied, the next task will be to manually re-schedule the task to “As Soon As Possible”.

MS Project has better solution wherein all such contraints can be removed automatically with simple steps as follow:

Steps to follow:

From Table entry select all tasks
Press “CTRL+H” to invoke find and replace dialog
Enter following criteria in “find and replace” dialog

Search criteria for all Project Tasks

On Cliking “Replace All” button, all constrained tasks are gone!

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June 1, 2011
by admin
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Automating color reporting of MS Project tasks

Adding color code to various tasks is most priliminary task a Project Manager has to report in his day to day reporting to team and senior management. Think of scenario where project manager needs to update this for tasks running through hundreds of lines.

MS Project has in build indicators to automate color coding of MS Project tasks based on criterias identified.

In this exercise I will show how to automatically update Status that show red/yellow/green graphics and indicate real time “% Complete” of task progress.

Assumptions:

Based on “% Complete” status Project manager wants to automatically update the status of tasks as red/orange / yellow/ green as per following criteria:

Static decision tree for Progress capture

Decision table

Steps to Follow:

Identify conditions that can be used to define status. For this we can customize an available Text30 field in MS Project to contain formula as:

IIf([% Complete]<=”20%”,”Not Likely”,IIf([% Complete]>”20%” And [% Complete]<=”50%”,”Likely”,IIf([% Complete]>”50%” And [% Complete]<=”80%”,”More Likely”,”Most Likely”)))

Once the Status conditions are identified, the next step in automating color coding of task status will be to customized “Text30″ field to display “Graphical Indicators” under “Values to display” section as follow:

Approved color code

Once Text30 is customized for color code, the same can be inserted in custom table view to display overall progress of status based on “% Complete” status of various tasks.

Progress Status

That’s all.

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