The calendars and start date provide the base on which to build your programme of work. Without that your schedule may be feeding you incorrect data and will no doubt prompt some questions from stakeholders.  For some projects not having the calendars calculating correctly can have a major impact on planned completion dates.  Beware however of overworking the calendars.  Sometimes near enough is good enough!  Is it critical to the schedule that we know that at 6.30am a task needs to start? Or that our working day is 7.5 hours rather than 8?  Sometimes the answer to this question is “Yes” and Microsoft Project can provide us with very detailed days and weeks both for the project, individual activities and resources.  In future posts I will delve into the calendars in depth, but before you commence developing your schedule you need to decide.  Read our Blog post on this (Microsoft Project Calendars – How Accurately Do Working Times Have To Be Set?) for a better picture of this. Remember that the length of the day in your calendars will impact your estimated durations if you change your calendars in the future.  If you forget to put in a holiday day this is easily remedied. If you do need to add in a holiday day don’t worry about its chronological order just put it at the end of the list of exceptions.  The next time you open up the calendar it will be in its chronological spot.

So here is the first part of this puzzle to get right.  You need to set up your working day in Options.  I think of this as the backbone of the Gantt chart.  We can lay different base calendars over this backbone which I will discuss in future posts.  When you go to the File tab, choose Options and then Schedule.  You will be presented with the window below and this is where you set up your start and end times.  Microsoft Project does not then calculate the hours per day and week you need to enter these taking into consideration the lunch break.  Don’t worry about morning and afternoon tea; nobody gets into that much detail.  If you want to set this calendar for all your new projects make sure you choose “All New Projects” in the Calendar Options box. Finally, choose OK and that’s Step number 1.

Next week I will talk about the base calendars.  Until then – happy scheduling.

Sue Buck is a Director of ProjectTMA Pty. Ltd. As well as being a senior Microsoft Project training consultant she works with clients to help them develop and report on their schedules and incorporate Microsoft Project into their project management methodology. For more information call 1300 363 822 or email her at sue.buck@projecttma.com.au

The post The Great Microsoft Project Calendar Mysteries Unravelled appeared first on ProjectTma.

Slack, however, is the opposite. Where a task has slack, there’s a degree of allowable slippage before the task becomes critical and begins to affect the end date of the project.

Why is slack so important?

Also known as float or buffer, slack is particularly important when assessing an in-progress project. Where we’re looking at tasks being performed we need to know a couple of things. Firstly, if a task is close to overrunning its projected finish date, what impact is that going to have on other resources? Secondly, is that task overrun going to impact the critical path?

To determine this, we need tools to find out what slack exists within the schedule.

How to quantify slack

Have a look at the image below:

We first tick the Critical Tasks box to display the critical path, circled in black.  This shows us the critical path (shown in red), as well as the areas of slack, indicated by the green arrows.

This show us that Task X and Task Z both have available slack.

Next, we need to quantify how much slack exists in these areas.

One of the best ways to show slack is to use the Schedule table.

To do this:

• Point to the empty cell above row header 1 (circled in black) and right click

A fly-out menu appears with a list of available tables

• Select Schedule (circled in green)

The Schedule table appears, as shown below.

As you can see, the Free Slack and Total Slack columns appear, highlighted with green arrows.

Free Slack indicates how many working days this task can blow out before it impacts the task it’s driving.

Total Slack indicates how many days of slack this task can blow out before it impacts on the projects end milestone.

So, in the example above we see that Task X can blow out by 2 days before it impacts on the task its driving (Task Y) and can blow out by 6 days before it impacts the project’s end date.

By using the Schedule table you’ll get an excellent insight into how each non-critical task might be about to affect the start of other tasks or the project’s end date, should that task blow out.

Paul Silverman is a Director of ProjectTMA Pty. Ltd. As well as being a senior Microsoft Project training consultant he works with clients to help them incorporate Microsoft Project into their project management methodology. For more information call 1300 363 822 or email: paul.silverman@projecttma.com.au.

The post Determining Slack within your Microsoft Project Schedule appeared first on ProjectTma.

In the above illustration, task 1 is an automatically scheduled task, while tasks 2 and 3 are manually scheduled.

We described how manually scheduled tasks aren’t meant to be used when you’re constructing a schedule that you want to baseline and track. While it’s possible to link manually scheduled tasks together in the same way you would with automatically scheduled tasks, when your schedule changes manually scheduled tasks don’t react correctly.

Here’s an example:

In the image below we’ve linked 3 manually scheduled tasks. In this state they represent the same program that would have appeared if we would have used automatically scheduled tasks.

So far, there’s no problem.

Here’s what happens if we change the duration of Task 1 from 4 days to 8 days:

With the duration of Task 1 increased, the end date of Task 1 has been pushed out to 20/4/16. However, have a look at Task 2. Its start date hasn’t changed. If this were an actual project we would want the start date of Task 2 to be pushed out to 21/4/16.

The result here is that we have a Gantt chart that can’t be used as a forward-looking management tool.

So where would manually scheduled tasks be useful?

“Mock-up” Schedules

The first use for manually scheduled tasks is to create rough “mock-up” schedules. This is where a client might ask you to “provide a picture” of what a future project should look like so they can get an approximate idea of how it should play out.

In this scenario, we’re not going to baseline and track this project. We’re also not going to create a lot of detail or break it down into all the tasks. It’s an overview only, equivalent to a summary-bar report.

You can consider this a drawing of a future project, but only as a rough sketch. If the project was approved to go ahead, you’d then create a correctly structured Gantt chart using automatically scheduled bars, and it is this one that would be baselined and tracked.

Illustration bars

Have a look at the schedule below:

In this simplistic example we’re involved in some construction at a school. Two of the tasks are to demolish the old canteen (task 2) which will take 8 working days and rebuild the new canteen (task 4), which should take 15 working days. The combined total of these 2 tasks is planned to be 23 working days.

While the canteen is being demolished and rebuilt, there will be no lunch facilities for the students. It would be favourable, therefore, for this process to coincide with school holidays, which run from 17^th September to 2^nd October.

We’ve added a manually scheduled bar School holiday period (Task 3) to give us a visual guideline as to when the holidays fall in relation to the work on the canteen.

We’ll build the new canteen regardless of when the holidays are, but if we can get tasks 2 and 4 to coincide with the school holidays as much as possible, we’ll be able to pay less for temporary lunch facilities and we’ll inconvenience the students the least possible amount.

Note that this manual task isn’t linked to any other bar – its function is cosmetic only, and helps us visualise real tasks’ timeframes in relation to the holidays.

For more Microsoft Project tips check out our full blog.

Paul Silverman is a Director of ProjectTMA Pty. Ltd. As well as being a senior Microsoft Project training consultant he works with clients to help them incorporate Microsoft Project into their project management methodology. For more information call 1300 363 822 or email: paul.silverman@projecttma.com.au.

The post Where Manually Scheduled Tasks can be Useful appeared first on ProjectTma.

A big change to Microsoft Project occurred in the 2010 version with the introduction of manually scheduled tasks. Prior to this, all tasks entered into Project were what we’d now refer to as automatically scheduled tasks.

They look different when used, and they have a completely different application.

Here’s what they look like:

The first task is an automatically scheduled task. The first indicator that it’s an auto task is the icon in the Task Mode column, circled below in green. Also, you’ll notice the Gantt bar is blue with straight edges.

The second and third tasks are manually scheduled. They appear differently in a few ways. Firstly, the icon in the Task Mode column is a tack (circled in red) and secondly, the bars appear differently to auto scheduled tasks.

Task 2 in the image below has only had its duration entered. You’ll notice that the Start and Finish date fields are blank, and the Gantt bar has faded left and right edges.

In Task 3 the Start and Finish dates were entered. Project calculated the duration as 5 days, and put capped ends to the left and right edges of the Gantt bar.

What’s the practical difference between Manually Scheduled and Automatically Scheduled tasks?

You can sum up the difference between manually scheduled and automatically scheduled tasks like this: manually scheduled tasks should be regarded as drawing objects, whereas automatically scheduled tasks are to be used when you’re constructing a schedule that’s going to be used as a self-calculating management tool.

A simpler way to explain it is like this: if you’ve used manually scheduled tasks to create a Project schedule, it’s the same as if you’d created the schedule in Microsoft Excel. You’ll be able to link tasks together, but when you change durations or dates, manually scheduled bars won’t move.

Changing MS Project’s default setting to Auto Scheduled

For reasons that no-one’s really sure about, Project 2010, 2013 and 2016 come shipped with manual scheduling set as the default.

We recommend that the first thing Project users should do is to set the default to automatically scheduled. This will mean that all tasks created in a Project file will appear as auto scheduled rather than manual.

Here’s how to do it. I’ve used Project 2013 in the example below.

• Select File from the main menu
• Select Options from the menu on the left hand side
• After the Project Options dialog box appears as shown below, select Schedule from the left hand side (circled in blue).
• On the Scheduling options for this project drop-down box, select All New Projects and on the New tasks created drop-down box, select Auto scheduled (both circled in green)
• Select OK to complete the changes

When you create your next blank Microsoft Project file, you’ll see confirmation in the bottom left-hand corner of your Project screen that new tasks will be created in Auto scheduled mode.

What if I’ve already created manually scheduled tasks?

In the image below, all tasks have been created as manually scheduled.

If you’ve already created projects where you’ve entered tasks as manually scheduled, they’re easy to change using the steps below.

• Select the Task tab on the ribbon (circled in blue)
• Select all tasks by selecting the Task Name column header (circled in green)
• Select the Auto Schedule icon (circled in red)

All tasks will now be automatically scheduled.

Watch out for our upcoming blog on how manually scheduled tasks can be used correctly within your projects.

The post Manually Scheduled vs Automatically Scheduled Tasks appeared first on ProjectTma.

Occasionally, we’ll do this from a cold start – one where we’re starting fresh, as there’s no existing Microsoft Project file to work with.

Most commonly, though, we’re taking a client’s existing file and building it into a well-structured schedule that’ll work correctly as a forward-looking management tool. Where this is so, the first thing we need to know is if there are any problems with the clients’ files that need to be fixed.

Here’s what to look for to check if your Microsoft Project file is in good shape. Once you know what to look for it’ll take you less than a minute.

1)  Too many constraints, for all the wrong reasons

In the illustration above, we can see a large number of constraints have been placed against tasks. They’re circled in red within the Indicator column. Every project is different, but you should expect to see only a few constraints within a file – perhaps as few as 1 per 20 tasks.

Where you see this many it means 1 of 2 things; firstly, it could mean that the user wasn’t quite sure how to link their tasks correctly and tried to make their tasks line up by changing the dates in the Start or Finish columns. That won’t have the effect they were after and will only cause their tasks to be “locked” into place.

Secondly, the user may have tried to track their actuals by changing the dates in the Start or Finish columns, and that’s not the correct method of tracking progress.

2)  Non-working dates not specified

Public holidays and other non-working days haven’t been entered into the Project calendar shown above. Because of this, Project thinks that tasks can be conducted on Good Friday, Christmas Day and other gazetted holidays. The nett result of this is that Project will presume tasks can be performed on these days, giving an unrealistically optimistic schedule. Don’t forget to load in those non-working days!

3)  Missing predecessors and successors

Here are 2 rules that are necessary to ensure that your Microsoft Project plan will work correctly as a forward looking management tool rather than just a drawing of a plan.

Firstly, all tasks and milestones, except for those at the beginning of the project and driven by the project start date, should have predecessors.

Secondly, all tasks and milestones, except for the final project milestone, should be a predecessor to another task or milestone.

In the illustration below you can see that tasks 2, 3 and 4 (Task B, Task C and Task D) have missing link lines.

Here are the specific issues with each of these tasks:

Task B doesn’t drive any other task. It’s a hanging task, and this means that if this task blows out it will not automatically affect the start date of Task C.

Task C has no predecessor, and its start date is driven by a constraint date that has been manually entered, circled in red at left. It is also a hanging task as it doesn’t drive any other task.

Task D has no predecessor and, like Task C, its start date is driven by a constraint date that has been manually entered, circled in red at left.

Our problem with this is that should any durations or actuals change, they will not affect the start dates of Task C, Task D or the end milestone.

4)  Actuals underway, but no baseline present

The image above shows the Tracking Gantt view with actuals recorded against tasks. The problem is that no baseline has been set for the project.

Why is a baseline necessary? Without a baseline you’re not able to tell where you are versus where you should be for any task, whether unstarted, started or complete. In other words, you won’t easily be able to say “Task X is complete, but it finished 9 working days later than the original plan said it should have” or “Task Y is still 9 weeks away but at this rate it’s going to start 14 working days late”.

In other words, you can see progress without a baseline but you won’t be able to quantify slippage. And that’s key to the successful management of your project.

Paul Silverman is a Director of ProjectTMA Pty. Ltd. As well as being a senior Microsoft Project training consultant he works with clients to help them incorporate Microsoft Project into their project management methodology. For more information call 1300 363 822 or email him at paul.silverman@projecttma.com.au.

The post Our 30 second Microsoft Project health check appeared first on ProjectTma.

Taking a group of people away from their usual work to attend a training course is expensive – it’s not just the cost of the training itself, but also the cost of having participants away from the work they’d otherwise be doing. And everyone’s busy these days.

With Microsoft Project training, it’s an even greater issue. As the old-model central project office declines and we see the rise of the ad-hoc project manager, everyone in the project management sphere is doing more work than before on a greater number of projects, and usually with no more resources.

So, you’ll want your time spent in MS Project training to directly impact on your productivity in a positive way. Here are some guidelines to follow:

Come to the course with a real-life project in mind

Rather than attend with an intention to gain a generic overview of the software, come with a project in mind in which you’re involved. It might be in the planning phase, or it might already be in progress. The more real-life project scenarios you can tie to the training course, the more likely you’ll be able to apply the training back at your desk. A generic training scenario, where participants learn some generalised skills and then attempt to apply them back at their workspace will be less likely to work with Microsoft Project.

Make sure self-taught Microsoft Project users in your organisation attend

We’ve written in previous blogs that Microsoft Project can be considered less intuitive than other software applications. Whereas a person can learn the principles of, say, Microsoft Excel, and then continue to self-educate, our experience is that the self-taught Microsoft Project user will have many more knowledge gaps than the average self-taught Microsoft Excel user. Make sure they attend – we can guarantee they’ll walk away from the course glad they came.

Keep the group size as small as practical

It’s not uncommon to see Excel training courses with 10 to 15 participants. With Microsoft Project we believe that the smaller the group, the more questions participants will be able to ask. These questions will often tie back to their actual projects. A Microsoft Project class of 3 to 8 participants will see productivity soar after the course. Remember, the smaller the number, the less theoretical the course will be.

Make sure users have brushed up on their basic computer skills before attending

Often this won’t be an issue, as many attendees will already be very competent computer users. Where attendees are less familiar with PCs and the use of a mouse, course productivity and post-course application of the software will be low. A hypothetical example of where this may happen would be in a situation where a team of site managers, with no real PC experience, have been sent to a Microsoft Project course in order to learn how to move their manual project management to a computer-based methodology. Increase their computer skills before attending the course and they’ll triple the value they’ll get from the course.

Paul Silverman is a Director of ProjectTMA Pty. Ltd. As well as being a senior Microsoft Project training consultant he works with clients to help them incorporate Microsoft Project into their project management methodology. For more information call 1300 363 822 or email him at paul.silverman@projecttma.com.au.

The post Preparing for a Microsoft Project Course Pays Off! appeared first on ProjectTma.

The calendars in Microsoft Project are set up by default to show an 8 hour day, starting at 8:00am and finishing at 5:00pm, with a break of 1 hour between 12:00pm and 1:00pm. Our company has a 38 hour week, with each working day being 7.6 hours per day, which works out to 7 hours and 36 minutes per day. What’s the best way to modify the calendars in Microsoft Project to reflect this? By the way, our calendar has already been updated with all relevant public holidays such as Christmas Day, Boxing Day and so on.

The warning bells start ringing when I hear questions like this, as in most cases it means that Microsoft Project users are in the process of making an easy job unnecessarily difficult. A couple of questions will sort out if any of this detailed calendar work is needed.

The first question we ask is “what’s the shortest duration of your average task?” Aside from milestones, which have a duration of 0, we find that the average Microsoft Project user will have minimum durations of 1 day, or possibly half a day. Sometimes we see minimum task durations of 2 hours, but on balance, tasks that have been assigned a duration this short may be underestimated.

That’s a problem within itself, and we’ll talk about that in a separate post.

If you’ve correctly estimated your shortest task durations to be either half a day or 1 day, the reality is that you’re probably only interested in Microsoft Project indicating on which day you are scheduled to perform a task, or whether it’s to start in the morning or afternoon. It’s unlikely that you’d ever want Project to tell you that your task is scheduled to start at exactly 2:43pm, for example. In most cases, that’s not useful information.

When you’re discussing slippage (how late a task started/finished versus where it was projected to start/finish), you’re more likely to say “we should have started on Monday 23rd March, but we wound up starting on Thursday 26th March because Fred accidentally destroyed the forklift”. You’re less likely to say “we should have started at 2:25pm on Monday but would up starting at 3:45 on Thursday”.

There’s an exception to this, which brings up the second question: “are you tracking the work performed during tasks.”

Some clients do. Many software developers, to use one example, want to keep detailed track of how much work was scheduled and how much work was performed. They might bill their clients in increments of 10 minutes, so that sort of detail is reasonable. But it’s also unusual. I’d estimate that less than 5% of our clients have any interest in scheduling or recording actual work.

So, to make a long story short, if you’re not interested in that level of detail, we recommend that you leave your calendars at the default 8 hours. In terms of your ability to schedule effectively, it won’t make any difference. Of course, remember to put your non-working days in as exceptions.

The post Microsoft Project calendars – How accurately do working times have to be set? appeared first on ProjectTma.

We know hundreds of our clients who successfully taught themselves Microsoft Excel. We did as well, by the way. We’re betting that you probably did, too.

It’s the same with Microsoft Word. Reasonably easy to learn, to the point where you can put together a half-decent report or well-formatted letter. As a matter fact, if you think about any Word document, you can create a professional-looking document without using the most appropriate set of formatting tools, even though it may not be the best way to do it. Or (and I’m sure many of us have done this) you can fudge it to the point where it looks OK.

As long as it looks OK by the time you print it, it’ll often do.

Microsoft Project doesn’t work that way, and most people we know who try to learn Project by themselves really struggle with the software.

Here’s why. Microsoft Project is a relational database package. It’s more like Microsoft Access or MYOB, the accounting package. Project comprises several tables, containing tasks, resources and calendars. They all need to work together. Use them incorrectly and you’ll wind up with a jumble of data.

That’s different to Excel and Word. With both these packages, you can use only those aspects of the software that you need in order to get the job done, and ignore the rest.

Taking Word as an example, if you were to put together a poorly constructed document which looked acceptable on the screen, as long as it holds together long enough for you to hit the print button, you’re fine.

Project’s different. We call a well-constructed Gantt chart a living document. It’s got to be put together correctly from the start, but once that’s done you’ll be able to expand it, modify it, drag meaningful reports from it and use it the way it was meant to be used – as a forward-looking management tool.

Use it incorrectly, and you’ll be creating nothing more than a static picture of your project. It’ll be no different to using Excel. As a matter of fact, that what most self-taught Project users wind up doing – moving back to Excel to organise their projects, by putting their tasks in column A, dates across row 1, and colouring in the cells to represent tasks.

There’s an additional problem that entry-level Microsoft Project users have to overcome that Excel users probably won’t – in most environments there are usually a large percentage of people using Excel in a fundamentally correct way; they’re creating formulas that calculate correctly. So their colleagues have good models and templates to look at and learn from. That’s invaluable.

With Microsoft Project, however, we’ve encountered environments where there really isn’t anyone using the software correctly to build Gantt charts. And that means that there is a huge base of people trying to use Microsoft Project who’ve never seen a Gantt chart structured correctly enough to be used as a forward-looking management tool.

And as a novice Microsoft Project user can’t see what a good Gantt chart looks like, it’ll be a lot harder to learn to put one together.

Need a copy of a well-structured Microsoft Project Gantt chart as a reference point? We’re happy to help. Send us an email and we’ll be happy to send one across to you. There’s nothing like a good example to help you on the way.

Check out our other posts for information on how to tell if you’re using Project correctly, and how you can make your Gantt charts even better.

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