Gantt charts are very popular with project managers and senior managers. They are primarily used to create and communicate project schedules but they can also be used for preparing status reports and giving presentations. They can be combined with project milestones to create richer status reports and presentations. Gantt charts can be easily prepared in…

Gantt chart is the default view in MS Project. Since the inception of MS Project (MSP), Microsoft engineers have used Gantt chart as the default, although I have often wondered why they didn’t choose some other view. I think Network diagram may have been a better choice, as it is a much better tool for…

Much has been written about Critical Path, Slack, Constraints, and the various forms of Duration and Dependencies. But, have you looked for Negative Slack? This is generally defined as the amount of time required to complete a task or project beyond its scheduled finish date. Think of it as the minimum amount of time to…

In the field of project management, we talk quite a bit about productivity. One easy way to track the time left until a project’s completion is with Timescale. Timescale displayed in Gantt Chart (Bar Chart) has two tiers – the starting date of the week on the top, and the week day label on the…

Background Information Many years ago, it was my privilege to work for seven months with a group of schedulers at a large company in New Orleans. At the time, the schedulers were using the new Microsoft tool named Project Central, which became the forerunner to Project Server and Project Online. In their Microsoft Project schedules,…

Oh, the misery! If you’ve ever used Fixed Duration tasks in your enterprise projects running in Microsoft Project Online or Project Server and your organization uses the Timesheet page in Project Web App (PWA) to track actual task progress, then no doubt you have experienced heartache and disappointment. Those Fixed Duration tasks don’t behave the…

“Storytelling” is something marketing experts have been talking about for years, as a better way to communicate brands, products and what sets businesses apart. It’s now a recognized, tried and true approach, and one that has taken a foothold due to its effectiveness. Our customer experiences online are, in large part, shaped by “stories” that…

…Well, in plan communications and Gantt charts, it does. Size, when used as an attribute to denote meaning in data visualization, will likely force our brain to look at the largest items first. In her book, Storytelling with Data, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic tells us, “Relative size denotes relative importance.” Size is just one of the…

Nine. Well, so says Scott Berinato, in his book Good Charts. He bases this number on a conversation he had with Tamara Munzner, a data visualization expert and professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. Here’s an example Gantt chart with more than eight colors. Munzner is quoted (in the footnotes) as…

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…