Train Your Project Managers!

As a person who has successfully deployed more than 200 Microsoft Office Project Server 2007/Microsoft Project Server 2010/Mcrosoft Server 2013 implementations, I'm often asked what the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) are for a successful roll out. My number 1 CSF is, without a doubt, Professional MS Project training. It is absolutely essential.

If you are not willing to invest in training, or think that Microsoft Project is just a spreadsheet, where you select the start and finish dates for each task, or that you create a plan at the beginning and it shouldn't 'move dates' when you update the plan, then don't even bother using the tool or implementing the server version. This isn't how it works. (Let's leave Manual Tasks out of this conversation for the time being.)

MS Project is a scheduling tool. It has a scheduling engine and can be quite intricate and complex to use. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never used the tool correctly.

I can't tell you the number of users and implementations where I have heard complaints about the 'tool' not working correctly, only to find that users either had never been properly trained i.e. at least 3 full days of hands-on, tool use or were trying to force the tool to perform in ways for which it was not intended.

In turn, while we can say management that isn't willing to invest in user training sets itself up for failure, we can also say project managers who refuse to use the tool correctly or practice good project management, are also just as if not more complicit.

Knowing how to use Project certainly doesn't make you a good PM. But if you aren't baselining a plan, meeting with your team and updating the plan at least weekly, producing status reports on a weekly basis, showing changes in scope, time and cost, then how can you blame a tool for your failure to manage the project? And please, don't tell me you don't need a plan because 'you just know' how the project is doing by your 'gut feeling' or 'experience.' In today's economy, I'm astonished that those answers still facilitate jobs.

Many times, I have asked users if they are doing any of the above, got a negative response, and then listened to them bemoan the tool and its shortcomings (which I am the first to admit it does have). However, if you have never used/or refuse to use some sort of a project plan or you are expecting the tool to do your job for you, then from that perspective, yes, I guess the tool falls short.

I started out just like most of you: Using the tool without any formal training. I struggled with it for 5 very long years. It can be aggravating and frustrating. Once you finally are part of an organization that is serious about project and portolio management and supports it through the funding of education and other resources for its PMs, they will invest in professional training, and a whole new world will open up for you.

So if you are trying to build a good business case to get Microsoft Project Training inside of your organization, click here for a great article from the Microsoft Project Users' Group (MPUG) about why professional Project training is necessary.

And while I'm at it, if you are implementing ANY enterprise project/portfolio tool, you'd better make sure to take a Server training course, not just a desktop course because there are major differences in planning, staffing, tracking and updating your plan.

For those of you that don't have a supportive management or simply do not have budget to allot to this, I encourage you to become a member of MPUG. There you will meet other MS Project users, which I have always said is the best resource for any Project user.

There are also many boards and groups out on the internet now that will assist you. But again, if your organization is not willing to invest in the training that is necessary, then they should not be surprised when that invested fails to yield its expected ROI.

For more suporting documentation or white papers on implementation CSFs, please contact me. I'm always happy to share our customer stories.

Meet Remaining Work - Your New Best Friend!

I have had a lot of customers ask me about Tasks and their behavior on Timesheets in Microsoft Project Server. So before you go and log that 'bug' report or help desk ticket, here is a general summary of behavior:

• You can begin any task early by adding it to your Timesheet - note: this assumes that your server is configured with certain permissions for timesheet users. Project Server does not prevent you from starting any task early.
• If a task extends beyond the planned 'End' date, the task will still appear on the Timesheet. Just because the planned or estimated completion date has passed does not mean that the task is completed. DATE does not determine task completion in project server when you are recording Actual Hours and Remaining Work.

What does make the Task complete then? How do I tell project that I have finished the task?

• If you have completed a Task, either before, on or passed the estimated completion date, you should update the Remaining Work column.

Meet the 'Remaining Work' column, your new best friend! If you are a Project Manager, you must update Rem Work in order to properly update the actual completeness of the task. This tells project whether the task has completed within the estimated work and duration i.e. we finished it early or we finished it late or we finished it late, but only used 6 out of the 8 hours. This is all dependent on the original estimates being baselined.

If you are a Resource and using the Timesheet, then your Administrators should have made the 'Rem Work' column available to you to update on your Timesheet. You can do this for each task and submit it to the Project Manager, along with your acutals.

Project Managers should consistently be asking their team 'how much work is left on that task? Are you done yet?' This is the only way to accurately project true effort on tasks and projects.

If your projects are not effort-driven, then you are doing duration-based planning. However, I will strongly argue against using that as a model for resource forecasting because it doesn't allow a full or precise picture of resource allocation and demand.

I hope that this helps clear up any ambiguity to tasks on the timesheet and how to update or show tasks completed early or tasks that will need additional time.

Oh, and one final thing: PMs - please remember that the 'Work' column is only a summary of the 'Actual Work' + 'Rem Work' columns.

WORK = ACTUAL WORK + REMAINING WORK

You should NEVER update the Work column if you are using Timesheet actuals in Project Server. You would be overwriting resource actuals, which compromises data integrity. The only column you should be updating is the 'Rem Work' column.

Project 2010 desktop bug found for Projects >4500 tasks

Leave it to one of our customers and their 'power' users to find one of the first bugs in Project 2010! Here's the scenario:

1. You create a Project Plan in Project 2010 with more than 4000 tasks

2. Each task on the project has at least 2 resource assignments

3. Each task is linked in a FS relationship

4. You try to change the duration of any task - in my case, I changed one task's duration from 3d to 4d.

Result: It takes more than 30 seconds to update the duration field.

Based upon these results, we forwarded the case to Microsoft who then did further testing and indeed confirmed there is a bug. Note that Project Server need not be a part of the scenario - this is purely a desktop issue. Here is what Microsoft found:

1. Change duration with calculation ON = ~ 33 seconds.
2. Change duration with calculation OFF = ~21 seconds.

3. One very interesting thing is that if the duration increases, the time to change was about 13 seconds whereas decreasing the duration was about 29 seconds.

Of course the next logical question is: What's the remedy?

Well, a hotfix of course! But because we are dealing with the scheduling engine, it may be a while. So during testing, Microsoft discovered that the new 'Heat' resource indicator - or 'man on fire' symbol, letting you know that you have overallocated resources on a task, is the culprit behind all of this.

Since we can't remove that one indicator, we need to hide the indicator column from any view within Project 2010. (The Indicators column is the column with the blue background and the white 'I') This will allow you to work with very large projects and still change the duration column without experiencing severe delays.

Let me know if you are experiencing this, and I'll post the hotfix info as soon as we have it!

SharePoint 2010 Developer Conference Papers Released

You can now download the presentations from the SharePoint 2010 Developer's Conference. Click here for the session file links.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010 CU Links

Here are the JUNE 2010 CU links for SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028568 - Description of the SharePoint Foundation 2010 hotfix package - June 29, 2010
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2075990 - Description of the Project Server 2010 hotfix package - June 29, 2010
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983497 - Description of the SharePoint Server 2010 hotfix package - June 29, 2010

SharePoint and Project Server 2010 First CUs released

The very first CUs for Project Server 2010 and SharPoint 2010 are ready for release this August! Join the TechNet Webcast here.

Microsoft a Leader in Gartner 2010 Magic Quadrant

As a person who has experience with many Enterprise Project Management (EPM) tools, I am always interested to read what Gartner has to say about the pros and cons of the leaders in its 'Magic Quadrant.' I'll leave it up to you to decide how much importance there is in these studies, but below is an excerpt from this year's summary on Microsoft's 2010 EPM tool:

Strengths

• The 2010 version of EPM is built on Microsoft SharePoint Server, providing support and inclusion of SharePoint's business collaboration capabilities, a common user interface, data integration, search functions, and reporting infrastructures.
• The 2010 version of EPM combines Microsoft's portfolio management capabilities and its centralized project management features (previously in two separate but integrated products) into a single, unified product with a common repository and data flow.
• The 2010 release of EPM adds support for managing projects and work requests during the demand collection, proposal, business case generation, and approval/rejection phases of a typical project life cycle.

Cautions

• Currently, Microsoft only offers a SaaS version of EPM through its network of certified EPM hosting partners.
• Microsoft EPM provides limited preconfigured reports and dashboards. Users will need to create and modify their own reports using Excel and Excel Services, the added Report Wizard, or the PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer. Alternatively, more-advanced reports can also be developed using SQL Reporting Services, which generally require a skilled IT resource.
• Microsoft EPM does not yet provide strong, out-of-the-box "budget versus actuals" reporting at the portfolio level, but customers can meet these requirements with custom fields, by extending Excel Services integration or with a number of existing add-on modules available from the Microsoft partner network. In addition, EPM provides integration and bridges to third-party financial management systems.

Read the full report here