Following on from some of the posts I have been doing about Project 2010, I noticed this spreadsheet from Microsoft this morning that provides a mapping between Project 2007 menu items and where they are in the new Project 2010 fluent interface. Whilst the new 2010 interface makes it easier to find stuff IMHO, for people that have been using Project 2007 heavily, it may take some getting used to and this spreadsheet will help.

With the Project 2010 client nearing launch, I thought it would be timely to remind everyone who is going to use this fantastic new release that the file format has changed. As such, schedules you create in Project 2010 need to be saved in a previous file version to share with people using Project 2007 and 2003. Luckily Project 2010 makes it really easy to save your schedules in a previous file format.

One of the great features of Project Server 2010 is Backwards Compatibility Mode (BCM). With BCM, users can connect to Project Server 2010 with both Project Professional 2007 and 2010 clients. This can be a great bonus for companies that have already standardised on the Project 2007 toolset but want the features of Project Server 2010 without a costly client upgrade and rollout. Typically BCM is turned on when you upgrade your existing Project Server 2007 environment to Project Server 2010.

Another question I was recently asked was whether it is possible to remove the progress line from a Gantt chart. Sometimes when you are working on commercial projects that are fixed price, the project manager may wish to track progress in the schedule, but not necessarily share this information with the client, as it may give away their position and profit. To remove the progress bar from your Gantt, choose Format > Bar Styles

In the final post of this series, I am going to cover off how to track your projects using Microsoft Project. Over the course of my career I am constantly amazed at the number of organisations that say they have a mature project management process, but don’t track their projects. Tracking of projects is extremely important, if you don’t track a project, how are you going to know… How much it’s cost to date?

In previous posts we have covered how to handle holidays, contingency and overallocations, in this post we will look at another common area where errors can creep in, estimation. When developing a project schedule, it is essential that the amount of effort required to complete the project is estimated diligently. When scheduling the project, the estimates will be used as the basis for determining the resource levels so it’s important they are correct.

Another potential area where errors can creep into project schedules impacting the delivery of a project is that of overallocation of resources. An overallocation is where a resource is assigned more work than they have capacity to complete it. For example, a resource works an eight hour day and is assigned two tasks, each of eight hours effort, both scheduled to occur on the same day as shown below.

Even the best crafted project plan can be derailed by something unexpected happening, like your main developer becoming sick or losing network connectivity for a day. Such unexpected events can disrupt your project schedule, making you miss your delivery dates which is never good. To try and mitigate this, it is possible to plan for the unexpected, making provisions in your schedule should something out of the blue happen. This is achieved by adding something called contingency.

When developing a project schedule, you can spend days making sure the schedule includes the correct tasks and realistic estimates, but ultimately if the schedule is unrealistic, then the project is going to be in trouble. If the project manager has resources working through weekends and public holidays, when in reality they don’t, there is no way the project will be completed by the expected end date. By communicating a delivery date that is too early and then missing that date can lead to bad perceptions of the team and project as a whole, ultimately the project is labelled as a failure.

For many years I have managed projects for professional services companies, where I was responsible for the development and execution of projects. More recently I have changed direction slightly, using my knowledge of project management in partnership with the Microsoft EPM suite to help customers deliver projects more effectively, but still keep an active interest in project management. So why am I telling you this? Well I want to start sharing some of the tips and tricks I have picked up along the way which will hopefully help you plan and execute your projects more effectively, all with a nice MS Project slant.