More Insights to a Better Project Schedule

Here’s a list of additional tips and insights from my experience that can help you build a better schedule with Project.

• Managing timeline expectations— Often, people avoid using Project to communicate during the project definition or project planning stage, because Project incorporates the calendar aspect and when stakeholders see real calendar dates even in preliminary, high-level schedules, their expectations can be influenced. A simple way to manage these expectations is to change the timescale labels that Project displays. As we mentioned before, the timescale can be modified by right-clicking directly on the displayed timescale in the Gantt Bar view or by selecting the Format, Timescale menu option. After the Timescale dialog is displayed, you will want to change the Label format used. Simply select an option that does not use an actual calendar date, such as “Week 1, Week 2...Week N”.

  Tip

  If you use any other calendar for the main project calendar besides the Standard calendar, be sure you also update Gantt chart timescale format to use this calendar by going to Format, Timescale, Non-working time tab and select your non-standard calendar as the one to use.

  
  

• Assigning resources to summary tasks— If you are using Project to estimate, schedule, or manage resource work hours, be wary of assigning resources to summary tasks. In Project, the resource assignment to a summary task is separate from the resource assignments to the detail tasks belonging to the summary task. In many cases, the resource is assigned to the summary task either for display purposes or before the detail tasks were added. I am not saying that you cannot assign resources to a summary task, there are times it is very appropriate. I am saying be sure you understand how this works and review any resource assignment that has the same resource assigned at both the summary and detail level.

• Displaying assigned resources— If you have a task that happens to have a few resources assigned, or you have resources with long names or you are assigning resources at less than 100% availability, it can be very challenging to fully display the assigned resources along with the task, especially if you are using the Gantt Bar view. Here are a few suggestions to better manage this display situation:

  • Use a Custom text field, such as Resource Notes, to display what you want for the resource names

  • Use the Resource Initials instead of the default Resources field/column

  • Assign the list of resources to a “group,” then assign the group resource to the task

  • Further decompose the task, so you can assign each resource to his/her own task

  • If the task cannot be broken down, consider duplicating the task, then assign a different resource to each instance of the task

  Tip

  Consider setting up a Custom text field as “Resource Notes” to control the display of resource information without impacting resource work assignments.

  
  

• Capture impact of issues and delays— Rather than simply updating the start date for a given task when a new baseline needs to be set, capture the reason for the schedule impact (event, issue, delay, change request) as a new task in your schedule. This way, the source of the impact has visibility and you do not forget why the schedule change was made (see Figure 23.13).

  Figure 23.13. Example of “showing impact.”

  [View full size image]
  

• Once progress is recorded, it changes— Remember, once progress is recorded against a task, it does not automatically calculate planned dates. I often see people get frustrated because they assign resources to a task and the planned finish dates do not change. In most cases, the task already has a percentage complete amount recorded against it.

• Saving baseline dates— Until you get comfortable with how Project manages baselines, you can always save your own copy of your baseline dates and duration by using custom fields.

• If whacked, do over— If all else fails and you cannot get the values of a resource assignment to make sense to you (dates, hours, resource allocation), simply enter a new task and rebuild the resource assignment. After the assignment is rebuilt, you can delete the one that was giving you fits. This technique seems to work 99.9% of the time.

  Tip

  If defining a new work process that will be repeated, nail down the process first before you propagate the detail. It will save you a lot of re-do or editing.