In a recent training with executives of a Fortune 500 company, I noticed -- to my astonishment -- that several executives couldn't interpret Tracking Gantt charts correctly. They had just invested $400,000 in purchasing and installing Microsoft Project Server. Now was the time that a select group of time-pressured, well-educated, and highly-paid people would try making sense of charts that their new project management information system produced straight out of the box. Unfortunately, several of them failed the test, which is the reason I've written this article...

No matter what features Microsoft introduces into its latest release of Microsoft Project, it will forever fail to address some basic needs for project managers as they approach the tool. Here are six practical suggestions when using any version of Microsoft Project...

Ron from Cleveland, OH asks: Is it a good practice or bad to link summary tasks?
Answer: In general I don't believe that it's a best practice to link summary tasks within a work breakdown structure (WBS). Here are some of the reasons:...

If you're managing complex programs or large projects, a summary milestone report may be the best way to share information that shows the status of key deliverables. 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...

Using generic resources during the project planning process is a good practice most of the time. The use of generic resources enables a project to be planned and built prior to your knowing the specific individuals that will eventually be assigned to the work. But what happens when your real project team is finally known?...

Want to begin or enhance a career in project management or complement your Microsoft Project certification? Earning the Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP) certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI) could be the direction to head...

In addition to creating schedule logic the way people ordinarily perform their business activities, it's important from a scheduling logic perspective to also include at least one Finish-To-Start successor to each detail level task in a Microsoft Project schedule model. To illustrate this, I'm going to use a wildly exaggerated example...

Recently, Chris Capossela, senior VP in the Microsoft Business Division responsible for marketing the company's productivity products, including Microsoft Project, spoke at length with MPUG via email. In the following interview, he explains why he considers Project 2010 -- the next release of the project management system -- the most important in a decade, lays out how it fits with other Microsoft offerings on the horizon, provides peeks into internal projects at Microsoft where Project 2010 is already keeping work on track, and shares what he sees on the landscape for project managers in the coming new year...

Ammar of South Africa asks: Using Microsoft Project 2007, can I view and display interim plans in a Gantt chart view. Also, how can I display interim plan data on other views?
Answer: Great question! This is a feature that isn't widely used but can be very helpful. Let me start by explaining what an interim plan is and how it could help you manage projects...

Creating a custom toolbar in Microsoft Project is a great way to put all of your most frequently-used functions in one spot. As an example, Figure 1 shows a toolbar with functions that a project manager may use if he or she is updating a project plan using percent complete in a Project Server environment...