The baseline — whether it be about the schedule, the budget or the scope — is essential in projects. Without it you have no way to measure the performance of your work. But there may be a few things you don’t know about baselines in Microsoft Project. In this article I share five facets of…

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Strategic category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: Many, many times we see that project timing and project resourcing are managed in MS Project, while project finances are kept in Excel. Using the financial governance capabilities in MS…

Often, we see that project timing and project resourcing are managed in Microsoft Project, while project finances are kept in Microsoft Excel. Using the financial governance capabilities in Project is often an unexploited area. If you think about it, this is a waste. Assuming you add rates to resources in Project, that gets you halfway;…

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Strategic category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: There are several scheduling approaches for projects: Agile, Critical Path, Resource-Critical Path, Critical Chain, Earned Value and Earned Work. In his article published in the MPUG-newsletter,  Eric proposed a framework with…

  At one organization where I worked, the CIO had seen something on the value of earned value. They brought me in to teach a two-day Microsoft Project class to their engineers without mentioning that this was now part of their goals. Every engineer on that team within a few months of the class was…

Barbara from Denver, CO asks: I want to used earned value calculations to help manage my projects. However, when I look at the BCWS and BCWP fields, the data doesn’t seem to be calculated. What’s going on? Answer: Earned value can be a very helpful indicator of the health of your project. It’s the equalizer…

Preparing for your Microsoft certification in Project, exam 70-632? Here, finally, is the last column about Microsoft Project options. (Actually, the Options dialog box has a few more tabs including Interface, Save, Edit, and Spelling, which you can explore at your leisure as they aren’t essential to passing the certification test.) Calculation options control how…