Collaborating with your project team online

     You can take advantage of all the Internet has to offer by using Project features
to collaborate with others. In fact, Project 2007 begins to step into the
world of Enterprise Project Management (EPM), where easily sharing ideas,
information, and documents across your enterprise becomes possible.
For example, Project allows you to request updates on a task’s progress from
team members via e-mail. You can post documents and ask for team input.
You can even publish your project on the Web.
The Professional version of Project includes Project Server and Project Web
Access, which enhance workgroup collaboration. You can take advantage of
an online project center and resource center with areas for discussions,
progress tracking, document exchange, and more.
Part V of this book, “Working with Enterprise Projects,” looks at how to take
advantage of the enterprise-wide features of Project Server and Project Web
Access.

From To-Do List to Hard Drive

      If you’re reading from start to finish in this chapter, you’re probably shaking
your head and saying, “Boy, handwritten to-do lists look pretty good right
now. Beats creating hundreds of tasks, assigning them durations, establishing
dependencies among them, creating resources, entering resource calendar
and rate information, assigning resources and costs to tasks, entering activity
performed on tasks . . .” and so on.
Well, you’re right and wrong about that. You do have to enter a lot of information
into Project to get the benefit of its features. But you can also get a lot
out of Project.
Getting up to speed with Project
Take a moment to look at some of the wonderful things Project can do for
you. This list describes why you (or your company) bought it and why you’re
investing your time to read this book.
With Project, you enjoy the following benefits:
1-  Project automatically calculates costs and timing for you based on your
input. You can quickly recalculate what-if scenarios to solve resource
conflicts, get your costs within budget, or meet your final deadline.
2- Project offers views and reports that, with the click of a button, make a
wealth of information available to you and those you report to. No more
manually building a report on total-costs-to-date to meet a last-minute
request from your boss. If she wants to know total-costs-to-date, you can
just print your Tracking Gantt view with the Tracking table displayed.
See Chapter 16 for information about reporting.
3- You can use built-in templates to get a head start on your project. Project
templates are prebuilt plans for a typical business project, such as commercial
construction, an engineering project, a new product rollout,software development, or an office move. See “Starting with templates”
later in this chapter for more about this time-saving feature.
You likely do similar types of projects all the time. After you create one
project, you use it as a template for future projects.
4- You can create resources for your project according to information you
already created in your Outlook Address Book. You can even create one
set of company resources and give access to every project manager in
the company (see Chapters 18 and 19 for how to set up centralized
enterprise resources).
5- A number of tools in Project employ complex algorithms (that you couldn’t
even begin to figure out) to do such tasks as level resource assignments to
solve resource conflicts, filter tasks by various criteria, model what-if scenarios,
and calculate in dollars the value of work performed to date.

Understanding the dreaded triple constraint

You’ve seen the signs at the copy store or the auto repair place: You can have
it fast, cheap, or right; pick two. That, my friend, is the triple constraint of
project management in a nutshell.
In a project, you have timing, resources (which are essentially costs), and
quality of the product or service produced at the end of the project. Microsoft
Project helps you manage the resources and timing of your project. The quality
of your project is often affected directly by how well you manage them. If
you add time, costs increase because resources are working longer hours at a
certain wage. If you take away resources, you save money, but this can affect
quality — and so on.
Coming to a logical balance of time, money, and quality is at the core of what
a good project manager does throughout the life of a project.
Applying tried-and-true methodologies
Microsoft Project incorporates some scheduling and tracking tools that are
the result of many years of developing project management methods. A few
of these are worth noting:

1-  The Gantt Chart (shown in Gantt Chart view of Figure 1-7), which is
the main view of Project, shows you a spreadsheet with columns of
data along with a graphical representation of the tasks in the project
arranged along a horizontal timeline. By using the data in the columns
(such as task name, start date, finish date, and resources assigned to
tasks), you can understand the parameters of each task and see its
timing in the graphical area. Being able to view all this information on
one page helps you understand what’s happening in your project in
terms of time and costs.
2-  The Network Diagram (also called a logic diagram), shown in Figure
1-8, is essentially the Microsoft version of a PERT chart. PERT (Program
Evaluation and Review Technique) was developed during the construction
of the Polaris submarine in the 1950s. This mostly graphical representation
of the tasks in your project reflects the flow of work in your
project rather than the literal timing of tasks. This view helps you to see
how one task flows into another and to get a sense of where you are —
not so much in time, but rather in terms of the work you have to
accomplish.
3-  Risk management is a central part of project management because,
frankly, projects are chock-full of risk. You run the risk that your
resources won’t perform, that materials will arrive late, that your customer
will change all the parameters of the project halfway through —
well, you get the picture.
Risk management is the art of anticipating risks, ranking them from most
to least likely, and determining strategies to prevent the most likely ones
from occurring. Project helps you with risk management by allowing you
to try out what-if scenarios: You can change the start date or length of
a task or phase of tasks (for example) and see just what that change
does to your schedule, such as the delays, cost overruns, and resource
conflicts that might occur in such a scenario, down to the last hour and
penny. Having this kind of information at your fingertips makes risk management
easier and (almost) painless.
4-  Resource management consists of using resources wisely. A good project
manager finds the right resource for the job, assigns that person a
reasonable workload, stays alert for shifts in the schedule that cause
that resource to be overbooked, and during the life of the project makes
adjustments that keep all resources most productive. In Project, tools
are available, such as a resource graph (traditionally called a histogram)
and the resource usage chart (shown in Figure 1-9), which reflects
resource workload.

The Role of the Project Manager

Although understanding the role (let alone the usefulness) of some managers
isn’t always easy, it’s always easy to spot the value of a project manager. This
person creates the master plan for a project and tries to ensure that it gets
implemented successfully. Along the way, this key person uses skills and
methods that have evolved over time, always seeking to manage how things
get done and generally keeping schedules on track.

What exactly does a project manager do?

A project manager isn’t always the highest authority in a project; often that
role belongs to whomever manages the project manager, up to and including
members of senior management. Rather, the project manager is the person
on the front lines who makes sure that the parts of the project come together
and assumes hands-on responsibility for successes as well as failures.
In project management parlance, the person who champions (and has the
ultimate responsibility for) a project is the project sponsor.

A project manager manages these essential pieces of a project: 

1- The project plan or schedule: This is what you create with Microsoft

Project. It includes the estimated steps and associated timing and costs
involved in reaching the project goal. 

2- Resources: Managing resources involves resolving resource conflicts

and building consensus as well as assigning resources and tracking their
activities on the project. This part of the job also involves managing
nonhuman resources, such as materials and equipment.
3-  Communication with the project team, management, and customers:
Communicating the project’s status to everyone who has a legitimate
stake in its success (stakeholders) is a key responsibility.

Although a project manager might work for a project sponsor, the project
often also has a customer for whom the end product is produced. That customer
can be outside the project manager’s own company, or within.

Spreading the news

I’m one of those people who need instant gratification. One of the first things I ask about learning to use any new software product is, “What’s in it for me?” Until now, I’ve told you about the type of information you have to put into Project: information about tasks, task dependencies, and resources. But isn’t it about time you got something back from Project? Of course it is.

You finally reached one of the big payoffs for entering all that information: reporting. After you enter your information, Project offers a wealth of report- ing options to help you view your project and communicate your  progress to your project team, clients, and management

You can generate predesigned reports based on information in your schedule or simply print any of the views you can display in Project. Project 2007 offers a set of Basic Reports and Visual Reports. (You must have the Microsoft .NET Framework installed in order to use Visual Reports, which is free and down- loadable from www.microsoft.com/downloads.) Figures 1-5 and 1-6 show
you just two of the reporting options available in Project.

Planning to keep things on track

Projects aren’t frozen in amber like some organizational mosquito: They go through more changes than a politician’s platform in a campaign year. That’s where Project’s capability to make changes to your project data comes in handy.

After you build all your tasks, give them durations and dependencies, and assign all your resources and costs, you set a baseline. A baseline is a snap- shot of your project at the moment you feel your plan is final and you’re ready to proceed with the project. After you set a baseline, you record some
activity on your tasks. Then you can compare that actual activity with your baseline because Project saves both sets of data in your schedule.

Tracking activity in your project involves recording the actual timing of tasks and recording the time that your resources have spent on those tasks, as well as entering any actual costs that accrue. You can then display Project views that show you how far off you are at any time (compared with your baseline) in terms of the actual timing of tasks and cost of your project.

Whether you have good news or bad, you can use reports to show your boss how things are going compared with how you thought they would go. Then, after you peel your boss off the ceiling, you can use many more Project tools to make adjustments to get everything back on track.

Angham Yanayer

Lining up your resources

 

When people first use Project, some get a bit confused about resources.

Resources aren’t just people: A resource can be a piece of equipment you

rent, a meeting room that you have to pay an hourly fee to use, or a box of

nails or a software program you have to buy.

Project allows for three kinds of resources: work resources, material

resources, and cost resources. A work resource is charged by how many

hours or days the resource (often human) works on a task. A material

resource, such as sewing supplies or steel, is charged by a per-use cost or by

a unit of measurement (such as square yards or linear feet or tons). A cost

resource has a set cost, such as a conference fee of $250; this cost doesn’t

vary by how much time you spend at the conference or how many people

attend.

Some resources, such as people, perform their work according to a working

calendar. If a person works an 8-hour day and you assign him to a task that

takes 24 hours to complete, that person has to put in three workdays to

complete the task. In comparison, someone with a 12-hour workday takes

only two days to complete the same task. In addition, you can set working

and nonworking days for your human resources, which accommodates varia-

tions such as 4-day weeks or shift work.

You can set different rates for resources, such as a standard hourly rate and an

overtime rate. Project applies the appropriate rate based on each resource’s cal-endar and work assigned. For more about resources and costs,

Here’s one other important thing you should know about resources: They

tend to have conflicts. No, I’m not talking about conference room brawls

(although that happens). These conflicts have to do with assigned resources

that become overallocated for their available work time. For example, if you

assign one poor soul to three 8-hour tasks that must all happen on the same

day — and in the same eight hours — Project has features that do everything

but jump up on your desk and turn on an alarm to warn you of the conflict.

(Luckily, Project also provides tools that help you resolve those conflicts.)