Jeremy Cottino

This article will describe all the necessary information required to understand how to manage master projects and subprojects within Project Server. Note that the approach is similar with project Online.

For the illustration, I will use a team of 4 persons:

And I will use the delegation feature to illustrate what other users will see when using the tool.

Create a new master project

As part of your projects’ management, you will most probably have to manage risks and issues.

The goal of this article is to show how risks and issues (but also documents or deliverables) can be managed within Project Server 2013 (or Project Online) and linked with Projects, Tasks or any other assets.

Before we start, let see how the Project Management Institute (PMI) defines issue and risk:

Issue: A point or matter in question or in dispute, or a point or matter that is not settled and is under discussion or over which there are opposing views or disagreements.

Risk: An uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on one or more project objectives.

Project Management Institute. (2013). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK® guide) – Fifth Edition.

In fewer words, risks might occur and we need to manage this eventuality, where issues are events that are already happening and we need to manage consequences.

My project

Let me tell you this story of a project manager; he spent time with his team to compile their project planning, then proudly print it on A0 page, and pin it on the wall behind his desk. This is for me one of the most common mistakes a beginner does on project management. Why? Because the time you print the schedule and pin it on the wall, the schedule is not anymore up to date. You planning is alive, people will make work and progression on some tasks, others tasks might be delayed… It is important to track the work done in order to answer the question “how are we progressing compared to original plan?”.

A snapshot of the original plan should be saved in order to allow later comparison. This is what we call the Baseline.

Once your original planning is done, you can save your first baseline, by clicking on Project > Set Baseline > Set Baseline.

Resource engagements, which is one of the new feature available in Project Online, is the way Project Managers and Resource Managers agree on resource allocations (for more information about new features of Project in 2016, please check my previous blog article: What’s new in Project 2016).

The resource engagement feature substitutes the resource plan feature you might know from the previous version of Project Online or Project Server. Projects’ resource plans will be migrated to resource engagements. It’s important to note that only published resource plans will be migrated, so before you start, publish all your resource plans.

In order to use resource engagement, the feature needs to be activated. When you connect to your Project Online tenant, you see this message (only admins see it):

During the Microsoft Ignite Conference Keynote Address in May 2015, the Office 2016 Public Preview for Consumers and Enterprise customers was announced. The final release is broadly available since the end of September 2015. So what about Project? Here was the official announcement from Microsoft:

Project 2016 is […] available online as part of Office 365. The new service side features […], are being rolled out into Project Pro for Office365 and Project Online right now. The new […] features will be available to on-premises customers in the spring of 2016 when Project Server 2016 is released.

Let’s see those new features in details:

Friday October 23^rd, I had the chance to be speaker at the first Project Virtual Conference http://projectvirtualconference.com/.

As introduced by the conference team: “Project Virtual Conference 2015 is the first-ever online conference that is dedicated to Microsoft Project, Project Server and Project Online, that will run for a continuous 24 hours”.

The Project Virtual Conference 2015 in numbers is 1400+ registered attendees, from 76 different countries, and 61 sessions (the list of sessions is below).

My session was: Successful business value realization with Lean Startup and Project Online. The idea was to merge Portfolio Analysis with Lean Startup principles.

Here is the session abstract

To develop their business and products, Coltham Metalhead, a beer brewing start-up, has put in place the Lean Startup Method in order to support their fast growing business. They have combine this practice with a Portfolio Management Methodology, based on the Standard for Portfolio Management from the Project Management Institute. Their Project lifecycle starts with demand management and project ideation through their innovation hub, then the portfolio management process helps the decision making process to select the right projects to run and finally project management techniques help ensure projects are successfully delivered. In this presentation, the focus will be on the Portfolio management principles, and how Coltham Metalhead, hence yourself, can apply Project Management Institute’s standards on Portfolio management and lean start-up philosophy within project Online. By creating what if scenarios (based on risks, costs¦), they ensure they are “doing the right work”.

Have fun watching the recorded

Within Microsoft Project Server, a resource plan is a forecasting tool for estimation, used at the early stages of project initiation. It’s a way to estimate resource capacity where projects are in different state, in other words, it helps you to define high level resource needs for each project or initiative.

Because you can use it during early stages of projects, there might not be any task or WBS defined yet, some projects might be just proposed and not handed over to Project Manager.

More often, resource plan utilize resources that are generic just to get some idea of capacity. Using named resources might also help resource managers to understand their team’s availability and capacity.

Let see how it works:

What a great pleasure for me to be awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional on Project! I am really grateful for the recognition. April 1^st 2015, will stay a strange April fool’s day for me. When I receive the email from the MVP programme, I did not say anything to any colleagues even to my wife until I receive another email asking me for my shirt size…

I hope to live up to these great names who made me love Microsoft Project: Vincent, Guillaume, Dale, Ben, Cindy, Ellen, Andrew, Prasanna, Gary, Paul, Sam, Bill…

Thank you guys for welcoming me on your family J

Learn more about the MVP Programme

http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/overview.aspx

Following the definition found in Wikipedia, "the Program (or Project) Evaluation and Review Technique is a method to analyze the involved tasks in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project."

For those who passed or are preparing for the PMP exam, you should know the famous formula to calculate the expected duration of a task. This is also known as the "three point estimate".

Calculation of the expected time (TE): the best estimate of the time required to accomplish a task, accounting for the fact that things don't always proceed as normal (the implication being that the expected time is the average time the task would require if the task were repeated on a number of occasions over an extended period of time). The formula is:

TE = (O + 4M + P) ÷ 6

As part of the Initiating phase of a project, a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) should be delivered. I usually prepare a high level planning using Microsoft Project. It’s not really a WBS, but more a milestone and hammock tasks Gantt chart.

I always wanted to present it as a real WBS diagram but never found a good and simple tool to create it. Here is now the solution; the WBS Modeler add-in for Visio 2010 that allows generating the WBS based on a project plan, or the other way, generates a project plan based on a WBS. This add-in has been released end of 2011 by Microsoft (initially developed by David J Parker, Microsoft MVP for Visio).

First, the system requirements:

Windows XP Service Pack 3 or later with Visio Professional 2010; not that there is also a version for 2007 available), Project 2003 SP 1 or later AND Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0.

You can download the add-in from this page. The installation is very simple; it’s a series of “next” buttons.

I recently have to deliver a series of workshops and trainings for one of my client about doing Project and Portfolio Management using Microsoft Project Server 2010. I will blog later on some interesting part of this area but in the meantime I wanted to share with you a list of useful resources on Microsoft Project Server 2010 I found while creating my presentation and training materials.

Two year ago, I was involved in a project for a luxury company, and previous project manager used Scrum to manage it and the deliveries. After a quick introduction of this methodology, we used his tools (mainly Excel) to implement Scrum.

Today I would like to reuse Scrum in another project, but I wanted to see if it’s possible to use Microsoft Project instead of Excel to manage Scrum artifacts as Product backlog, Sprint Backlog and Burn down chart.

Note that this article will not explain the methodology; you can check this article in Wikipedia or watch this interesting video by Hamid Shojaee for a quick course on Scrum.

Without having Microsoft Project Server, here is a way to manage shared resources through various projects. By using this method, the program manager or unit manager can check team member allocation and plan projects.

The first thing is to create the resource pool. To create a resource pool:

This is my simple project file

Then the idea is to paste this cell as a link on the Project Management task start date. Right click on the cell and click Paste Special.

Repeat this for the End Date.

If we now open the Task Inspector for this task, we see that there is a Finish No Earlier Than constraint type.

Let’s modify another task, for example let’s put 5 days for task 1’s duration.

 Note that the Project Management task has been extended until the new project end date.

Create a task list in SharePoint