9
Start by implementing the process, not software. Are you all located in the same space? Go old school and use notecards and post-its. That is how we started our iterative dev team off, and it works quite nicely.
If you must use software...
How big is your team? Mingle from Thoughtworks is good, but expensive ($400 a user annually). It is free for <5 ...
8
You are describing the difference between "work" and "duration". Work is in hours, and is typically the target number of hours that will be burned doing direct work for that task. Duration is a period of time, typically in days, in which that task is to be done. Therefore, you can have a task in which you estimate 40 hours of work, but you are estimating ...
8
Set the task to fixed duration, manually set the work to the desired hours, and the tool will calculate the appropriate resource allocation.
Or, you can manually allocate hours on each loaded resource under that package in the task usage view. Either works.
6
Personal preference, but for me, I only group them by like kind (summary to summary, detail to detail).
Summary tasks are seen as separate work packages, ie: they summarize all of the tasks necessary to complete that particular part of the project. So if I link a Summary task to anything, it will be to another summary task (work package).
This also helps ...
5
This can happen when your summary tasks (or any children summary) tasks have resources assigned. It can also happen when a child task is external, e.g. located in an external project file.
So, check to make sure that none of your summary tasks have resources assigned, and none of the have predecessors or successors assigned. If your project file has ...
5
I second Trevor's answer but would remove 'personal preference.' The schedule logic rests at your leaf level of the decomposition. Everything that matters to you as a PM occurs at this level; at the summary levels, things become hidden and your critical path becomes clugy. If you mix your predecessor-successor logic between levels, you will, not may, lose ...
5
If you have deleted all the bars with the exception of the Baseline Bars, you should not be seeing dependency lines nor start and finish dates. When you attempt to print, have you removed the modifications you made?
If I follow your steps, I don't see anything except the baseline bars. My suggestion:
Make your modified view a new view.
Open the modified ...
4
If you want the resource to spend 40% of their 8 hour day on a task you need to set their % allocation to 40% not 100%. Setting it to 100% tells Project that you want them to spend 100% of their day on that task. The % allocation value tells Project how much of their work day they can spend on the task. This relates to the resource max allocation in that if ...
4
A popular package is OnTime but it is really scrum / agile oriented.
Other candidates are Trello, DevComplete, and good old Borland does nothing else these days.
One of my favorites is YouTrack which actually started out as a bug tracking system but is moving more towards a project management system. It is free for 9 users and 3000 issues with some other ...
4
There are two easy ways of doing this:
Go to the "Resource Usage" view. Go you get there differs slightly depending on which version of Project you are using, but look for a Views menu or on Project 2010, look at the leftmost button on the Task tab (by default) for your Views selection. This will give you the actual time allocated for each resource in the ...
4
Once you have established your schedule and you are satisfied with everything, you need to create a schedule baseline. The dates in the start and finish columns will populate the baseline start and finish and these will not change unless you re-baseline. The actual start and finish column should reflect reality. The start and finish columns should reflect ...
4
Insert the task Leveling Delay field into a table and read the unit abbreviation from there. Leveling Delay is always in elapsed days.
This will give you the answer in any language. German for elapsed days is fTage.
3
I wouldn't recommend linking summary tasks in MS Project for the following reasons:
it can make the logic difficult to follow, and make it hard to identify the Critical Path
it can cause logic errors which artifically extend the plan
it can lead to unnecessary bench time.
it can cause circular logic warnings
See http://www.stakeholdermap.com/ms-project/...
3
I prefer to create a main heading task with indented sub-task below it. Each sub task will have the individual time entries at 100% work completed. I use a date underscore initials method to identify who and when at a glance from the names. You could just enter the same task name over and over but filtering it later could become problematic.
Project Admin ...
3
Did you inherent this schedule or did you build it? Your parent is also showing actuals entered with 77% complete. This hammock account must have additional packages, some or all of which are at various stages of completion.
Ensure your view does not have a filter on it, eg, show only unfinished or unstarted tasks.
3
It depends on what level of detail is required in your MS level project.
Here is my suggestion:
Don't try to track sprint tasks in MS project. That is low level and is for the team to help coordinate their sprint commitments, so they should be kept someplace the team can continuously seem them and update them, like a standard sprint board if you are all ...
3
I agree with the previous comments and think that a kanban board could be a great solution for you. It is based on separating the board into the progress columns (the most simple approach - to do, doing and done) and then moving your tasks through these columns from creation to completion.
For this you could use either a physical board or a software ...
3
I'm not aware of a way to generate this report using the built-in reporting features (even with a custom report format). You say that you can run it on the client -- are you able to run VBA? If so, you could generate this using a custom VBA function.
3
The Resource View will have the Resources listed in a column. The Row headings can be the time span - days, or weeks or months. For each resource, the projects they are working on will be shown.
Wouldn't this, automatically available Resource View, suffice ?
3
You do not want to prevent this from happening! This is what the tool is supposed to do. It will readjust when you finish based on the progress you make or don't make.
Turn the example around. If you made less progress than you predicted, it would mean the end date should slip to the right. If you disallowed project from doing that, then you would ...
2
It seems one of visualization tools like task board or Kanban board would be a good solution. The basic idea is to gather important data about the project in one information radiator, possibly a physical one.
If your team is co-located or at least visits the same place (kitchen maybe?) it should be possible to go with physical board. If the team is ...
2
Microsoft Project Server works well with a broad range of project types like construction, software and what you have described is within the functionality of the tool.
You can fully configure security to allow administrative or executive level view of all projects while limiting access to other users. This is done using the RBS Resource Breakdown feature ...
2
Microsoft Project 2010 does have PERT charts. It is now called by its generic name "Network Diagram". You can select it from the "View" menu. I don't have MS Project 2013, but I suspect it will be available by the same name "Network Diagram". Checkout whether that is what you are looking for.
I am afraid the Pessimistic, Optimistic and Most Likely estimates ...
2
The only way to get a true sense of uncertainty in your schedule is to run a Monte Carlo simulation. Seeing a distribution that you created for each work package is meaningless. You need to run hundreds of simulated projects so that the infinite number of combinations of those distributions can play out.
As far as I can tell, there is no out of the box ...
2
If all you're changing are task durations (i.e. no different tasks, changed predecessors, successors, etc), you could use the DurationX columns (Duration1, Duration2, etc) to represent the other durations.
For example, in the screenshot below, I've set Duration1 to "Optimistic Duration" and configured the field to be 1/2 of the "Standard Duration" (...
2
If you want to create alternate schedules quickly, without a lot of setup, what I have done is to make a copy of the Project file, and change the base calendar in that copy. Thus if your pessimistic schedule has everything taking twice as long, reduce working hours to 4 each day in that version. I have done this to create a schedule showing the effect of ...
2
Hard coding your dates kills one the biggest reasons you are tracking your schedule--to monitor your finish variances. Hard coded dates are used as constraints in the schedule logic so that your finish variances read zero all the time, but your resource utilization increases to absorb schedule slips. Instead, the dates should be derived based on your ...
2
Something is not quite right here. A 10 day duration task with 20 hours of work will, by default, spread the 20 hours of work evenly across the 10 days - 2 hours for each day. If you completed 13 hours of work in the first week, Project should calculate 7 hours of remaining work and move the finish date earlier (to the left) instead of adding a day.
I ...
2
I am assuming you have done the following:
Set the % complete to 10%, and set the status date to the end of 5 days. You have then used the Update Project - Reschedule uncompleted work command to split the task and reschedule the remaining duration.
In both circumstances, the finish date of the task is equal, so there really is no increase in the task ...
2
Also F2 drops you into edit mode if the clicking twice doesn't work for you.
Previous releases had the Entry Bar enabled by default. You can display it in later releases through File, Options. However I had to turn off my edit bar due to some repeated profile corruption in Project.
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