Using Custom Fields and Graphical Indicators to Analyze the Quality of Your Schedule

Project managers are responsible for building and updating quality project schedules. When building these schedules, it’s important to ensure these schedules are free of potential scheduling errors that even experienced project managers make, such as the following:

Tasks that have not been baselined
Summary tasks with dependencies
Summary tasks with resource assignments
Tasks which need to be updated
Tasks without resource assignments
Milestone tasks with a duration greater than zero
Tasks that have negative Total Slack
Tasks that have an unfavorable variance and are on the project’s critical path

This article will introduce you to the creation of customizable graphical indicators that quickly and easily identify problems with your schedule such as those noted above. These techniques can be applied to standalone Microsoft Project, Project Online and Project Server.

Using a Graphical Indicator to Identify Tasks That Have Not Been Baselined

The following steps show you how to create a custom Flag field to identify all tasks in your project that have not yet been baselined.

Step 1: Open a project in Microsoft Project, right click in the heading of any column, and from the dropdown list, click Custom Fields.

Custom Fields in dropdown list. — Custom Fields in dropdown.

Step 2: In the Custom Fields dialog:

Select the Task button and from the adjacent dropdown list select Flag.
Use the Rename… button to name your Flag field “Tasks Not Yet Baselined”

Select "Tasks Not Yet Baselined (Flag1)" Field — Select “Tasks Not Yet Baselined (Flag1)” Field

In the Custom attributes section, click Formula…
Complete the Formula dialog as follows and click OK.

In the Custom Fields dialog, click Graphical Indicators…
Complete the Graphical Indicators field as follows and click OK.

Complete the Graphical Indicators field.

Repeat this process to apply this formula to Summary rows as well.
Click OK in the Custom Fields dialog.

Step 3: Add a new column in your project called “Tasks Not Yet Baselined”. All tasks that meet the criteria you established – [Baseline Start] = ProjDateValue(“NA”) – will have a red flag in the Tasks Not Yet Baselined column:

Interested in Learning More?

Author Ira Brown will dive deeper into this topic, Using Custom Fields and Graphical Indicators to Analyze the Quality of Your Schedule, as he describes how to effectively use custom fields and graphical indicators to ensure the quality of your project schedule during a live MPUG webinar on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at 12pm EDT.
Register now for this PMI® PDU eligible session.

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Managing Quality

Managing Schedules

Written by Ira Brown

Ira Brown is a leader in the field of project management and a recognized Microsoft Project expert, Project Widgets is well-known for offering add-on products for Microsoft Project and Project Online, as well as for creating custom solutions that meet their client's unique business requirements. This company continues to extend the scope and breadth of their offerings, thereby increasing the value they provide to customers, by creating Microsoft Project solutions that are tailored to an organization's unique needs. They even have several free, downloadable widgets available on their website that you can begin using right away.

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