[Community]

hanks ginger… i knew you could do that, but it takes a few clicks to activate the cell…  i gues i was just searching for the way i’ve navigated in msp for the last 15+ years…   😉

Laura

[Community]

You edit right inside the cell in 2010.  You can place your cursur over the cell and click to edit.

 

Ginger

[Community]

Simon,
Thanks for the insight. I will look out for training opportunities from companies that “get it”.
– John –

[Community]

We have an opportunity to implement our first centralized Project and Portfolio Management System in my organization.

Today we use a simple workflow in Lotus Notes to capture demand (new project requests), our 2 official PM’s (I am one of them) track projects in MS Project Professional 2007 local installs, our project leads and tech leads (impromptu PM’s) track their projects in e-mails, excel, the air, and our yearly project portfolio review is done manually, each year in excel – much room to improve, don’t you think?

That said, we have Sharepoint 2007 presence, and are working on getting a SharePoint 2010 instance set up as a pilot….

We are considering the onsite 2010 SharePoint route, but are open to other solutions (like hosted EPM).

With your help (MPUG members around the world), I would love to assemble a list products / options / tools which I could explore in this new year for my organization.  Can you help?

Thanks! – Matteo, PMP, CSM

[Community]

Performance tests are the only way to truly measure knowledge.  I’ve worked in the certification industry and believe there is a losing struggle between the certification exam business and the training business.  It is ironic that to make an exam requires extensive psychometric effort (both time and money) yet as soon as the exams are published, ‘training’ material and courses appear that obviate all that exam development effort.

Andy Johnson

[Community]

I don’t believe I have any .com add-ons. I do have Risk+. Do you really think that is the problem? Not being an IT person, I do not know if something else crept in and where to find it. Can you please advise?

[Community]

I was afraid of that. Thanks. That’s probably why I couldn’t find it in any references.

[Community]

Two thoughts on your second question…. Because your PM line item is the longest path, it fits the definition of a critical path. What I’ve done in the past is to make that duration 1 day less than the true critical path, thereby removing it from the CP calculation. Additionally, what I do to report Top 3 Critical Paths is to perform a “Driving Path Analysis” using a driving path macro by Project Widgets (http://www.projectwidgets.com/products/DrivingPathWidget.cfm) to define my Primary Critical Path, then take that primary end-deliverable and perform a “Sensitivity Analysis” comprised of temporarily setting its deadline to 1 or 2 months earlier than finish date; thereby causing effected tasks to go-critical; Then I perform a “Total Slack analysis”, looking for “families” of tasks with the lowest TS (highest negative TS) and flag them as CP2, etc. Hope this helps!

[Community]

In all levels of MS Project the Network Diagram is configurable. Since you are looking for tracking information look at the Tracking formated box style. Right click in the Network Diagram and select Box styles. In the template area you will find one for Tracking.

Keep in mind the high level project center is at the project level and not the task level so you will not be able to get the task milestone report in the Project Center. However, if you add the column called Milestone to the tables in the project details views, you can then filter for milestone reports.

Ellen Lehnert, MVP, PMP

[Community]

I would like to see 2 features added.

1. While using Portfolio/program schedule to generate high level executive milestone view, I should be able to drag and drop milestones from all sub-projects. Currently, timeline view can only have milestones from one project at a time. Nice to have: Once the timeline view is added to a powerpoint as an inserted object, the inserted milestones should show the real time date from the local/server schedule, assume I have read access to those schedules on the server.

2. The relationship diagram(View->More views->Relationship Diagram) should be configurable. Meaning I should be able to change what I would like to list in from the task attribute in the relationship box. Currently the it shows the current tasks and its precedecessor task name. I dont see a way to display completion status(%completed or %work completed) of the precedecessor tasks.

[Community]

You can create multiple timeline views. The UI is a bit weird and not as intuitive as you might like but you can create the timeline, copy it, and then add or remove tasks from the copy.

[Community]

Yes, thank you! That is what I was looking for.

Another question: is there a feature in timeline to expand/collapse views? For example, there are different types of tasks I am creating (lets say confidential/non-confidential). Is there a way to expand or collapse if I didn’t want to see all the tasks? I know you can select in the Gantt chart what you want added to the timeline but I wanted something more user friendly. If this is not possible, I think I will stick to the roll-up.

[Community]

I believe what you’re asking about relates to “Roll-up” to Summary Tasks. If true, you can perform this the same way in 2010 as in 2007. Milestones will overlay within that summary task… One series for each set (Summary and related milestones). Leave your Timeline feature for other future opportunities.

[Community]

You have picked up an inconsistency in the way MS Project calculates Earned Value compared to the rest of the world, basically you can never be early.

Suggestion – dont use the inbuilt fields and calculate everything yourself using custom fields, you can then trust them. EV is easy, take a Cost field (eg Cost 1), rename it “Calc EV” then use the formula = Baseline Cost * % Complete / 100. Summaries should calculate using “Sum”. You can then calculate CPI and SPI similarly using number fields and trust the content.

1st published in my white paper “Simple Earned Value” on http://www.coreconsulting.com.au under the innovations, white papers section.

Have fun, hope that helps

[Community]

My recommendation is to get certifications. Preparing for the tests makes you learn more than you job is likely to ask for. I obtained a Microsoft Project MCTS for 2007 and PMIs Scheduling Professional. They are very diverse in content requirements and both very applied for my work with Project Managers. MCTS is knowledge directly in the MSP program and PMI SP is project management oriented.

[Author]

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