AdValue Add-On for Project Server | Advaiya
Project Planning is one of the most significant and crucial parts of Project Management. Planning depends on the Project Manager and project leads knowing how they drive the project. This often changes from project to project and team to team, so having a framework to enforce policies and best practice for the team to use becomes critical for the organizations. The accuracy of Project Planning mainly depends on: – How well the project goals are defined and understood by project team – How well the activities and techniques are defined to achieve these goals thus optimizing your resources, cost, and schedule These two factors vary by different types of projects which is explained in the graph below No doubt effective project management and execution is needed for all kinds of projects. A good project plan lowers the uncertainty and risk in all cases. Advaiya AdValue offers customized Project Plan templates specific to organizational standards. The Standard Project Plan Templates like Agile Development, Software Development are built-in which can be tailored to specific needs when delivering the AdValue solution. Along with Project Planning, Project status reporting is another time consuming weekly activity performed by the project manager and project lead the Advalue solution answers. AdValue minimizes the time spent writing a status report by providing automated weekly status reporting. The Weekly Status Report is embedded into the Project Workspace. Project Managers can generate the weekly status report whenever they want. The report summarizes the Risk, Issues, Milestones and Current Week Task Summary in an attractive report. Under Weekly Project Summary, A.K.A. Executive Brief, the Project Manager can enter the highlights of the week’s project activities, major decision, and explanation of the KPIS. The Report is created when the Project Manager clicks on the Create Report button at the bottom. When the report is created, and everything is to the Project Manager’s satisfaction, they use the Save & Copy button. This saves the report in Project Workspace document library for future reference and copies the report to the system clipboard to be pasted into Word or Outlook email to share with the project stakeholders. The features of AdValue are entirely customizable or fully operational out of the box. Advalue works across all industries and from small to large, and very large enterprises. Stay Tuned to my upcoming blogs on the many more features of Advalue!
Automation of Project Plan Backup
It’s often required that project manager /administrator in project server wants to track the changes done in the project plan or take the backup of a project plan for further reference. There can be a manual way to perform this action by Opening each project and saving the project plan from the project professional. In this blog, we are going to automate the process by creating a macro in VBA that will allow the administrator to take the backups of all the project without manually opening each project. A STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO GET THIS DONE IN MINUTES Get the List of Project in Excel using Odata Create a list of the projects for which you would like to export the MPP file. We will get the list of projects using Odata from project server in an Excel file and now follow these commands: • Create a new Excel file. • Go to Data Tab and in Get External Data Section, Select ‘From Odata Data Feed’ as shown below • In the pop up window, enter the Odata Url of get the project server /_api/ProjectData/Projects()?$Select=ProjectName • Click on Next • Another Pop window will appear, Enter the User Name and Password • Pop window will come to Select Projects Table • Click on Next, enter the name of data connection file. • Click on Finish. • Another POP window will come for Import Data as shown below, click on OK button • Now List of Projects from Project Server will be displayed as shown below. • To get the refresh list of project, go to Data Tab, Click on Refresh All. This will update the project list from project server. Take the Backup of the Project Plan • Open Microsoft Project File “Backup Project Plan. Mpp” and Login with the PWA account for which backup is required. • Copy the Project Names from Excel from Step 1 into to a mpp as shown below • If the Developer tab is not visible in Ribbon of Project Professional, go to File -> Options – > Customize Ribbon ? Check the Developer check box and Click OK • Go to Developer tab and click on Visual Studio Visual basic editor will open and there will in the Module1 as shown below and Now Run the module from the ribbon button as highlighted. This will open the project one by one and create the mpp file in the Exports folder set up in C drive as mentioned in above script. Conclusion: Using this approach project administrator can easily task the back of project plan. This mpp files can be used for reference in future.
4 Step Guide to a Successful Project Online/Server Adoption Strategy
Achieving a successful Project Online/Server deployment would require focusing on driving adoption and making sure everyone understands the benefits of working with the new solution. Driving adoption is about understanding the business challenges that will be addressed with the new solution and ensuring the benefits are embraced by your organization. There are four key steps to a successful adoption strategy: • Establish a vision and create business scenarios • Prioritize features and create adoption plan • Assign resources and deploy the adoption plan • Measure success and share results Establish a vision and create business scenarios Setting the business vision for your adoption is critical for success. The vision should list the targeted business objectives and serve as the guild post for your team as you progress through planning and deployment. The vision will also help with securing buy-in throughout the organization. When setting the vision, be sure to include and involve your stakeholders. This means you must understand who your stakeholders are, what are their business scenarios and own challenges. You may have to choose several individuals from multiple departments depending on the size of your organization. Don’t be afraid to identify more stakeholders than you think you will need. All these stakeholders can be maintained in the Stakeholder Register with relevant details. Setting the vision statement requires asking several questions during a vision workshop and then deriving the idea from the answers to these issues. Here are a few: 1. What are our current portfolio management and collaboration challenges? 2. Why are we making this organizational change now? 3. How does a change support our overarching vision and strategy? 4. How does a change in how we work, change the organization? 5. What does success look like? 6. How will a more open way of working help the organization? 7. How will a more open way of working help the employees? Again, you will want to run several workshops, inviting those stakeholders who will be driving and supporting the change, and ask several questions Create your set of business scenarios including the current challenges that affected stakeholders and departments. Prioritize features and create adoption plan Once you set the vision and business situations, you will need to determine the solution for each of the business scenario challenge is your next step. This may require describing the solution before identifying the solution. To do this, put the solution regarding the user, or user story: As a , I want to , so I can . From the list of user stories, you can identify the features within your solution. Also, determine the features which are hurdles or resistance to the adoption plan. Create a solution to the high-friction functions that reduce resistance either through automation or overpowering value. Prioritize your features based on the features complexity, impact and value to the organization. You can do this using a scoring (1-5 or H/M/L) system or regarding the stakeholder’s requirements (Need, Want, OK). While establishing your solution and prioritization, it is an excellent time also to identify the success criteria to measure the impact of your deployment. Establish success criteria using the SMART mnemonic (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely). Think about how you will collect both quantitative and qualitative data. To start and baseline your measure, find out what they are currently. Document your success criteria using OneNote with a section for your success criteria including the Description, Source, Metrics, and Goal. An essential ingredient for a successful adoption plan is to create a champion or Ninja program. The program will be filled with your peers who are passionate about Project Online and can evangelize to the organization to learn more about the solution. This will also take some of the stress off the core project team, discover new opportunities to innovate and provide feedback. Start with those who are enthusiastic who can commit a little time and effort and create an individual Yammer group. By providing them with a little extra training and support, they will be able to run their brown bag sessions. Establish a regular rhythm with your champions/ninjas to foster engagement to learn more about what is working and what is not. Don’t forget to provide them with recognition and praise. You can do this through badges they can use on their email signature line or special privileges. The adoption plan should also contain a mix of activities to maximize impact and approval. Activities include enterprise announcements or newsletters, engagement events, and training. Announcements and Newsletters are great for creating a buzz within the organization. Engagement events are a perfect place to create a party-like atmosphere where you can further motivate and encourage with contests, giveaways, and recognition. Training is essential to ensuring that employees know how to use Project Online/Server to get their work done. Assign resources and deploy the adoption plan It is time to put it all together and put your planning into action. Assign the key resources and begin to implement your adoption plan. Continue to bring awareness of roll out activities to the organization through posters, booklets, countdown/announcement emails, and tips and tricks email. Start these at least 4 to 8 weeks before launch and keep them short and sweet. Have a clear call to action links for more information. Don’t be afraid to address a commonly asked question or enable two-way communications using Yammer or Groups. Schedule the engagement events and community activities 4 weeks before launch. Invite champions/ninjas to small open sessions to show off their favorite feature and answer question. Conduct lunch and learn sessions on a regular rhythm and encourage attendance with incentives. Training and support will continue beyond launch. Help the users understand why the organization is using the new solution and show how they will benefit from Project Online/Server. Incorporate a learning center full of training guides, videos, tips, and tricks. Don’t forget the engage your champions/ninjas to help users learn the innovative benefits of Project Online/Server to getting work done. Measure success
What is the Critical Path?
Reposted from www.mpug.com If your goal is to make certain that projects are completed on time and within budget, then understanding the “critical path” is, well, critical. According to the Project Management Institute (PMI)®’s Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) 5.0, critical path is defined as the “sequence of activities that represents the longest path through a project, which determines the shortest possible duration.” It plays an important role in project scheduling and must be constantly monitored to ensure that the project progresses as per the schedule. The tasks that lie on the critical path are called “critical path tasks.” If any of the critical path tasks are delayed, the whole project is delayed. Want to Learn More about Critical Path? Learn more about the use of critical path in Microsoft Project from MPUG’s on-demand webinar, where Darrin Lange, director of operations and project management at Advaiya, presented on “Using Microsoft Project to determine where projects lie in relation to the critical path.” Watch the session on-demand. To determine a critical path task, enter your tasks into Microsoft Project and establish the duration and predecessors. You can add buffers to account for limited resources or to cover project uncertainties. In return, Project will show you the Early Start, Early Finish, Late Start, Late Finish, Free Slack and Total Slack. Figure 1 shows the critical tasks highlighted in yellow. In the Gantt Chart you can see the critical path task bars in orange. In this Figure we can see that the tasks 1, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 are critical path tasks. If any of these tasks are delayed, the whole project will be delayed. Tasks 2, 5, 9 and 10 aren’t on the critical path; delays within the total slack won’t cause the whole project to be late. Early Start, Early Finish, Late Start and Late Finish are determined by conducting a forward pass and backward pass through the precedence diagram or workflow diagram. This shows a breakdown of the tasks you need to accomplish in order to deliver the entirety of the project. Project shows the network diagram via a task view (Figure 2) and you can add columns to show the Early Start, Early Finish, Late Start and Late Finish (Figure 3). Knowing how much a task can be delayed with the use of settings can save the project schedule and budget. With the determination of critical path, we can also determine “float” or “slack.” Slack is the amount of time a task can be delayed without any delay in the successor activity or the project finish date. Critical path tasks can have zero or negative values for slack. Critical path tasks that have a negative value for slack are behind schedule. We refer to slack in two ways: “Free Slack” and “Total Slack.” Free slack is the time a task can be delayed without delaying its successor task. Total Slack is the time a task can be delayed without delaying the project finish date. Figure 4 shows Free Slack and Total Slack in Project. The tasks on the critical path have zero Free Slack and zero Total Slack. Task 2 has a Free Slack of zero days and a Total Slack of seven days. Task 2 will cause task 5, its successor, to delay after zero days but won’t delay the project finish for 142 days. As project managers, we need to know which tasks are critical path tasks for several reasons: Resource managers are going to ask the PM if a resource is working on a critical path task to understand how personnel issues will affect the project. Executive sponsors will ask the PM if a task is on the critical path to understand tactical and strategic options. Team members will need to be instructed as to whether a task is on the critical path to ensure adherence to the deadlines. Project management office (PMO) directors will ask the PM whether a task is on the critical path during task escalation. This general overview shows how understanding the critical path, and its key components: slack, float, early and late Start, and early and late finish, allow the PM to predict accurately what effect changes to tasks will have on the project. Knowledge of the critical path will also enable the PM to handle complicated projects better, give informed decisions to stakeholders and department heads, and ensure the likelihood of the project being successful. This article was first published in www.mpug.com
6 Essential Elements for Your Project Team Site
Reposted from www.mpug.com Project collaboration and communication are vital to the success of a project. We have all heard it said, but, what does it really mean? Proper subjects on emails? Setting up a thoughtful agenda for meetings? Creating a proper level of specificity in your work breakdown structure? Following PMI’s best practices when setting up a WBS? Conducting daily meetings with the team? Tracking all of the action items? Creating a Yammer group? The truth is that all of this could be the right amount of collaboration and communication. It depends on the team. To coalesce all of the tools, statistics, collaboration and communication into a single location, use a project team site, also known as a project portal. When making choices about setting up your project team site, you will also want to consider document management, issue and risk management, deliverable management, discussion boards, chat integration and project reports. Let’s explore how SharePoint and Project Server support project team sites and how you can modify and explore SharePoint Project team sites to suit the needs of your project and your project team. Document management: Starting with document management, you’ll more than likely have many artifacts for a project. The best place to store them is in a document library. Having one location that team members access documents and keep them updated ensures a single version of truth. With version history enabled, team members can always access previous versions without any confusion about which version is the latest. For virtual teams, another fantastic feature is document co-authoring. This allows multiple team members to work on a common document at the same time. Many people find this to be particularly helpful during brainstorming sessions in addition to other project meetings with your virtual teams. Issues and risks management: Project Online and Project Server, by default, are configured with issues and risks management. Project managers, in consultation with other stakeholders, can log all project-related issues and risks directly into their respective registries. In addition, project or enterprise specific attributes can be included in the registry. These attributes may include priority, impacts, owner, mitigation plans, etc. along with widget, page, layer or other associated information. The logged issues and risks can also be linked to other items such as tasks or deliverables. These lists can then be used during project meetings or risk/issue committee meetings and made accessible to all team members via a browser and login. Deliverables management: Enabling deliverables management within the portal can also greatly improve the collaboration and communication within the project. Deliverables created in Microsoft Project Professional are directly synced with the deliverables list of the project site. Stakeholders and sponsors can then quickly view and track the deliverable without opening the project plan. Discussion boards and newsfeeds: More important for virtual teams, these SharePoint web parts can be leveraged for active collaboration among team members. Team members or project managers can discuss any topic or track questions or concerns on the project forum, thereby allowing other team members to respond with their insights or answers. This keeps all the team members engaged while at the same time recording all of the communication that led to the topic’s final disposition for future reference. Chat: With a familiar look and feel, Yammer is actively being adopted by organizations to enable deeper collaboration and communication. By adding the Yammer web part to your Project team site or portal, you increase visibility to the project’s Yammer topics and discussions. Yammer can make your outside team members feel less dispersed and more engaged. Project reports: Having the ability to show reports directly on the project team site or portal will help to keep the project stakeholders and sponsors up to date with actual costs, variances from baseline, status of critical tasks, delayed tasks, etc. With Project Online and Project Server, you can create and configure project reports that drill down on project metrics and provide insights at a glance. Reports with graphs and charts can deliver insights to the stakeholders that will help them be more proactive and communicate more effectively. Once you have settled on a Project team site or portal to use, Project Online and Project Server allow you to save the team site as a template. If needed, you can even use different team site templates for each of your enterprise project types. With the success of a project lying squarely on your shoulders and with collaboration and communication being such a big part of that success, don’t dismiss the power of a well-planned project team site or portal. By using Project Online and Project Server along with SharePoint to create a fantastic team site, you’ll facilitate collaboration and communication and bring success to your projects. This article was first published in www.mpug.com
Task Path and Critical Path – Project Professional 2013
In the blog ‘Seven Project Professional features to keep your project plan up-to-date’, I talked about ‘Task Path and Critical Path’ in brief. Let’s dig it more. Using task path project 2013, you can quickly see all the predecessors of the selected tasks in the Project Plan. This feature helps when you have a complex project plan. To view the Task Path in Microsoft Project Professional 2013, in the ribbon click Format-> Task Path and click the dependency to be highlighted. Refer the image below: Once the ‘Task Path’ is selected, you can select any task in the Project Plan. The Gannt Chart displays the selected dependencies of that task, see in the below image: This is a new feature of Project Professional 2013 and it helps you to quickly check the dependency of a particular task in your Project Plan. Just before the ‘Task Path’ option, there are ‘Critical Tasks’ and ‘Late Tasks’ option which allow you to quickly see the late tasks and critical tasks in the Gannt Chart. Critical Tasks are those tasks which directly impact the ‘Project Finish’ date. Using this option, you can quickly see the critical tasks of your project and being a project manager, you may keep track of those specific task for project success. This way ‘Task Path and Critical Tasks’ features can potentially help Project Managers in knowing the risks associated with project schedule, identifying the late tasks, identifying the resource dependencies for completing a task, etc. Same can also be used when you need to communicate the importance of certain tasks completion to your team or management. Stay connected, another blog is in line, where I will discuss about ‘Resource Over allocation’. Happy project planning 🙂
How to import and export project schedule from spreadsheet to Project
MS Excel is one of the most favorite tools for non-MS Project users for creating and managing project schedule. There are several scenarios where the project consists of many modules and each module is being managed by different people. In such cases, the module manager can update the schedule for their modules. For this, the project manager can export the project plan of a particular module and send it to the module manager. Module holder can update the plan in Excel and send it back to the project manager. The project manager can then import it back to the project plan. Export the project plan to Excel- Open the project plan in Project Professional. Go to File -> Export -> Save Project as File -> Other File Type -> Microsoft Excel Workbook -> Save As. Save As wizard will open. Choose a suitable location and click Save. The Export wizard will open. Click Next. Choose Selected data in Export Wizard – Data. Select ‘New Map’ in the Export Wizard – Map (This is a one-time process. Later you can use the same map for all the future exports and imports). Select ‘Tasks’ and ‘Export includes header’, Click Next. Select ‘Task range’ as Export filter. Add Microsoft Project field name in the mapping. You can add only 255 fields in the mapping. If more than 255 fields are added then it will show an error like below: Choose only those fields which you want to get updated by the module owner. Save the map in End of Map Definition. Give a suitable name for the mapping. Click Finish. It will ask for the task range to export in Excel. Enter the task IDs range. It will save tasks within the mentioned range in Excel and save it to the specified location. You may now give this Excel to the module holder for updates. Here I have changed the task tile of the eighth task to ‘Send the mail to GM, to Read’. Import Excel in project plan (Update the project plan from Excel) Open project plan in Project Professional. Open File -> Open -> Browse the excel which has the updated module plan. It will open the import wizard. Click Next. Select Existing Map in the Import Wizard – Map Select the previously created map in Import Wizard – Map Selection Click Next. Select ‘Merge the data into the active project’ option. Click Next. Select Task and Include headersin the Import Wizard – Map Options. Import Wizard – Task mapping will open where it will show the mapped fields which were mapped in the saved map. Select ID and click on Set as Merge Key. Click Next. Click Finish. Now the updates which are done in Excel will reflect in the project plan. Conclusion– Using this feature of Project Professional, the module manager can update the project plan without having any Project Professional license and the project manager can also review the changes in Excel and update the actual plan accordingly.
Get the most out of MS Project Online with rich Power BI
“Our biggest issue is extracting value from our data to make informed decisions.” This is what we have heard from many project managers, and a similar issue you might have come across at some point of your project management lifecycle. Project managers, today, need better insights into their resources to make the best decision and to keep projects on track. However, it has been found that typically a program manager spends over 25% of their time on administrative tasks in Project Management, as stated by Forrester. This is because, with the growing data size, the complexity of managing data is also increasing at a fast rate. Data expansion from various sources – Big Data, Social Media or Enterprise data such as CRM, ERP, and Project data – further adds to data complexity. This data expansion coupled with data complexity challenges project managers and PMOs to create an up-to-date project report or portfolio report. To list a few, project managers are facing the following challenges with PPM (Project Portfolio Management) reporting: Project portfolio reports lack a holistic view. Project reports are static. Interactive visualization takes longer development time and needs specialized data query skills. Deploying and maintaining project reports cause administrative overhead. It’s time to take control of your data at every level! With interactive reports and dashboards, Power BI can be a boon to your project reporting, enabling operational value. With enhanced visibility and insight, Power BI allows making informed decisions at all management levels right from the executives, project managers, PMOs, to resource allocation managers. Let’s have a look at how you can achieve the most out of your Project Online with rich Power BI. See live project data with interactive dashboards – Want to see the important aspects of your project at a glance? You can create personalized dashboards to view and monitor each of your project metric such as project by department, cost and work burn down, project health KPIs and many more in the form of tiles. It gives you a consolidated view of both on-premises and cloud data in a single pane of glass. To get a more personalized experience, you can even move, delete, resize, link or rename the tiles on your dashboard. Search or query with intuitive natural language – One of the unique features of Power BI is Natural Query Language (NQL). This is basically – you type your project data questions into the QA box and Power BI gives you the real-time data in the form of charts and graphs. Take an example, “Project cost above $50k”. So, you see it’s just simple English language! This way it helps you to reduce the time and complexity involved in project data gathering. Package and share your work – Do you share project reports via email to your team on a regular basis? Instead, try creating your project reports in Power BI and publish them as a content pack to your team. Not only reports, you can also, package your dashboards, Excel workbooks, and datasets and share them with your colleagues. All the features of Power BI are leveraged in content packs, including interactive data exploration, visuals, Q&A, data integration, data refresh, and more. In addition, you can also share live reports and dashboards using Power BI on your mobile devices on the go. Get a multi-perspective view of your project reports – Today, organizations demand project reporting that supports deep data insights and creative visuals for a quick glance on the project status. With advanced reporting in Microsoft Power BI, you can fully leverage all your project management investments. Power BI reporting can be used with both Project Online and Project Online. You create diverse categories of reporting such as Portfolio report, project health report, yearly investment report, resource allocation report, and many more with your Project Online data. Interact with your project data to find business insights – With frequent updates, Power BI is continually adding new visuals on a regular basis, enabling to have a centric visualization tool for all stakeholders including executives, PMOs, and PMs. With Power BI visualization, your organization can leverage the power of Microsoft Project to automate business processes, capture data from various LOBs, and define the relevant mapping between LOB data and project entities through customizations. Interested to quick-start your business intelligence reports and dashboards, contact us now.
Fast track your productivity with AdValue
I recently moved into a new house. The house packers meticulously labeled each box and stacked them into the truck. The truck driver transported the boxes to the correct house and helpers unloaded all of the boxes into the correct rooms. My job: get them all unpacked. The boxes were labeled so I mostly knew what was in each box, but entering the room, it struck me just how many boxes there were. I needed a plan. How exactly should I do this? Unpack the first box I see? Prioritize the boxes and unpack the “highs” first? Find some friends to come over and help me? I’m not exactly lazy, but I really like the friend’s idea. When you purchase Project Online, you’ll run into similar problems. You know you should deploy Project Online throughout the organization quickly, but there are so many options under the PWA settings page, not to mention the vast configuration options for SharePoint. Enter Advaiya’s AdValue Pack – your new best friend. AdValue is a package you can install on top of your Project Online tenant that instantly helps you to get the most out of your deployment. Here are some of the many benefits: 1. Insightful Power BI dashboards customized for the Executive, Project Manager and Team Member 2. Customized project workspace for better project tracking and collaboration 3. Built-in workflow to standardize project management phases 4. Alignment with PMBoK tools to manage projects better 5. Quick and easy deployment to make you look like a superstar 6. Extensible solution that can later be customized to specific needs AdValue is quick to setup so you will realize the benefits before your next pay raise. The intuitive and comprehensive design means easier team adoption and increases productivity and satisfaction. The AdValue solution scales to your requirements and incredibly easy to maintain. Go with the friend option. Go with Advaiya’s AdValue Project Online solution