Over the past few months I have found myself using the new Timeline feature of Project 2010 more and more to communicate project schedule information to audiences that may not be comfortable reading Gantt charts. By default, the timeline will show a ‘Today’ indicator that highlights the current date as can be seen below. Whilst this is fine in most cases, there have been a few times where I didn’t want the today indicator to be visible in the timeline, but I couldn’t work out how to hide it.

I am really excited to announce I will be speaking at Tech Ed Australia, presenting an interactive session entitled ‘Leveraging SharePoint 2010 for Project Management’ in the AvePoint Interactive Theatre. The session outline may sound familiar, but I have made some changes and pimped out a few of the demo’s.. Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organizations undertakes is delivered effectively. To accomplish this, it is essential that there is clear communication and effective tools to facilitate your project management process.

Today whilst looking around the Project site I noticed some new videos covering a number of new features of Project 2010. I was so impressed with them, I thought I would post them here so you can watch them too. The video’s cover off the following topics: User Controlled Scheduling Team Planner SharePoint Synchronisation. As well as the excellent instruction the presenter provides, there are also a number of step-by-step walkthroughs which take you through each of the features in more detail.

Since the release of Project 2010, a few people have been asking in the forums on how to restrict or configure functionality of Project administratively. The Office 2010 Group Policy Administrative templates outline the various settings of Office that can be configured via Group Policy so organisations can centrally ‘configure’ aspects of Office 2010 for their users. Given some of the new features in Project 2010 such as manually scheduled and inactive tasks could be quite confusing until a user has had a chance to undergo training, this is a valuable tool in ensuring some of those new features can be turned off until the user has been trained to use them.

This morning, I presented with William Cornwill a session at the Australian SharePoint Conference entitled ‘SharePoint 2010 and Managing Projects – A Match made in heaven’. The idea behind the session was to give people an idea of how SharePoint 2010 can be leveraged to assist in managing your next project using some of the out of box features. The slide deck is available here for your viewing pleasure 🙂

Recently a user asked on the forums about how to customise the date format of Project 2010 as it was not reflecting his localised regional settings by default. Project comes with a large set of predefined date formats that can be used throughout the application and will do its best to match one of these to the settings you have in your locale, but it can’t match all of them.

This past Thursday I was lucky enough to attend and present at the Australian and New Zealand Office 2010 Community Launch. The launch which was the brainchild of a colleague of mine, Chris O’Connor, was a simultaneous launch across New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Perth bringing the various community groups in those states together. Melbourne had a fantastic turnout, with 120+ people registering and about 100 turning up on the night.

Project 2010 introduces a new visual indicator that shows when a resource is over-allocated within the Gantt chart view. This is a great feature that ensures resource over-allocations are front and centre when people view the schedule, instead of being buried away on a resource tab. However there are times when you may want to suppress these indicators without hiding the whole indicators column, which may contain other important information.

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.

A couple of people have asked me in the last few days about where the ‘Copy Picture’ icon that used to be front and centre in the Project 2007 had gone in 2010? I know it’s been posted before on other sites and in the newsgroups, but I thought I would repost it again. To find it, choose the Task tab and then click on the downward arrow next to Copy.

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.

Just a reminder, it’s not too late to register.. The Melbourne chapter of MPUG will be holding it’s next bi-monthly session on the 27th April 2010 at the Microsoft offices in Freshwater Place. This month there will be two presentations: Martin Vaughan, a Director and Senior PMO Consultant with Core Consulting Group will present the first half of this session covering Project, Program and Portfolio resource management. Starting with the basics of the schedule model, this presentation will consider potential and practical tips relating to modelling resource needs on individual projects through to full EPM environments.

In the previous two posts, we covered off how to extract the workflow data from the Project Server Reporting database, and the basics of how to extend the Backstage view. In this post I will cover off how to merge the two together, and to discuss some of the limitations and problems I ran into. For the proof of concept I wanted the backstage view to render dynamic information about the project workflow in the backstage, checking out MSDN and Technet I found some fantastic resources to assist, including Customizing the Office 2010 Backstage View for Developers and it’s associated code .

In this second post covering my proof of concept to expose workflow status information in the Project backstage I will cover off some of the basics on how to extend the backstage. Like all of the Office 2010 clients, Project’s backstage can be customised by defining the various interface elements and their associated behaviours using an XML schema that has been published by Microsoft and is available for download here.

In the first of three posts covering my proof of concept to show the workflow status in the Project backstage, I will be covering off how to access the workflow data itself from within the Project Server. Now as this was a proof of concept, I decided to go with the simple approach of getting the information directly from the Reporting database instead of calling the Project Server PSI. There were a couple of reasons for this, firstly simplicity, accessing the data in the Reporting database via SQL and VBA is much simpler in my opinion than calling the PSI.

One of the significant changes in the Office 2010 client was the introduction of the backstage view. The way it has brought common commands front and centre and combined relevant supporting information has quickly become one of those features I can’t live without and certainly something I notice immediately when I use any 2007 Office client. In Project 2010, this is particularly noticeable, with a number of the Enterprise features that were previously buried away in the jungle of menu’s prominent on the backstage, including items such as Project Publish, Organising the Enterprise Global and accepting Status updates from your team, which is a massive improvement in usability and functionality.

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

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at the upcoming Australian SharePoint Conference in June on ‘Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010’. This is a 200 level presentation in the business track and kicks off straight after the keynote! The abstract is… Managing Projects in SharePoint 2010, a match made in heaven – 200 Level _Today it is more important than ever to ensure every project your organisations undertakes is delivered effectively.

A couple of weeks ago I had the need to logon to my Project Server instance through the project client as another user. Usually I would check the ‘Enter User Credentials’ option on the login screen and enter the credentials to login with. However, in the Project 2010 client the ‘Enter User Credentials’ check box is missing. After a quick poke around the forums and reading a footnote on this article, it seems it still is possible to logon as someone else, but it’s a little less obvious.

One of the new features introduced in Project 2010 is manual scheduling. Prior to 2010, all project tasks were automatically scheduled, meaning that as soon as you put it in the schedule, MS Project would try and schedule it for you. Whilst most people get used to this behaviour, others prefer more control over the schedule, hence why manual scheduling was introduced. This feature allows the user to enter tasks where they want in the WBS and not have to provide meaningful duration or work data for the task to be scheduled.

During a recent presentation, a member of the audience asked if it was possible to have more than one timeline per Project 2010 schedule. Each timeline would be customised to show different levels of information for a different audience, such as the executives, or more details for a steering committee or team members. At the time the general consensus was that it wasn’t possible on the client, but you could achieve the same result if you created a number of server based timelines using the excellent post by Andrew Lavinsky and Visio Services.

This week I was lucky enough to attend the Project Server 2010 Ignite training in Sydney. The training was delivered by Christophe Fiessenger and Jan Kalis and covered all aspects of the upcoming Project 2010 release. The quality of the training was great, providing insights into all the features of the 2010 products, highlighting changes and where there are opportunities for partners to innovate on the platform. Jan and Christophe presented a heap of sessions covering each of the new feature areas, both with slide and demonstration based content.

One of the most obvious features of the Project 2010 client is the introduction of the ribbon. The ribbon first appeared in Office 2007 and made it into most of the client application except Project. The idea behind the ribbon is that it surfaced commands and features that had previously been nested away under several menu options. In Project 2010, the ribbon has finally made it into the product. It consists of four main tabs (Task, Resource, Project and View) and a couple of contextual tabs that are shown depending on what tab you select.

In a departure from the usual content on this blog, I thought I would try something a bit different, a screen cast. To start of, I have picked one of my favourite features of Project 2010, Sync to SharePoint, a fantastic little feature that allows you project schedule to be synchronised directly with a SharePoint Foundation team site list. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/8944252] This screen cast is very much a toe in the water , so if you like them, please let me know and I will do some more.

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.

I will be presenting along with my colleague Darren Deason at the February 2010 MPUG Melbourne Chapter Meeting. The topic of the meeting is Are you ready for Project 2010 and will take a tour of the new enhanced features of the Microsoft Project 2010 product line-up, including: · Project Timeline and Resource Planner · Integrated Portfolio Management · User Delegation · Enterprise Project Templates · Improved Timesheets · And many more exciting new features …

The Project Team wrote a while back about the Sync to SharePoint feature of Project 2010. This past week, the beta of Project 2010 has been released to TAP and MSDN / Technet and I have had a chance to play around with it. Since hearing Microsoft’s positioning of the Sync to SharePoint feature, I have been keen to try it out and see how useful it really will be. So here are 9 things you may not know about this awesome feature:

Update****: It appears that this feature isn’t new, but rather something that was in the previous version of Project but buried deep on a right click toolbar menu. So instead of a new feature, this is the perfect example of an old feature that has been surfaced due to the introduction of the ribbon. As a project manager at a consulting company one of the jobs that I frequently had was running bids for new pieces of work.

All too often when you are working on a project, the schedule can evolve from what you originally thought the schedule would be when you built it, to what the reality is. For example, in the schedule below there are three tasks, it turns out that Task 2 is no longer required. In Project 2007 there are two options to remove the task… Leave the task on the plan and set the remaining work to 0