projectified

What is Project Server Consulting?

One of the hardest questions I am asked is not one I get ‘on the job’. It is the one I get all the time from family, friends and people I meet at my kids basketball games: “So, what is it that you do for a living?”

For a long time I struggled with a short, accurate yet meaningful response. “I’m a project manager” is too general. “I deploy project management software” is accurate but is a little bit vague for most people.

What I have started saying is “I work with companies on the best ways to manage their projects and resources using Microsoft Project and Project Server.” If their face goes blank and they start looking for a way to escape I leave it at that. If they seem interested in knowing more I break into the more detailed version: “I learn how they decide which projects to do, how they manage them and how they use their people to work on them. Then I work with them on streamlining some of those processes and then on how to model those processes in the software.” By that time even people that love me are ready to talk about something else and I don’t blame them. What we do as Project Server consultants lacks the mass-appeal of a game developer but for our own purposes it is worth examining what it really IS that we DO.

In no particular order:

1. Listen to customers about what they do, how they manage their projects and resources.
2. Build a picture of what is really happening with their projects, resources and other work. How do projects flow through the organization and\or how does the organization flow through the projects.
3. Examine how they are currently using data from their existing processes and systems to make decisions about what projects to start, what projects to keep doing, what resources to use or not use, what projects are costing, when projects will finish.
4. Design reporting solutions, in some cases, from scratch to provide usable data to inform the decisions that need to be made
5. Be the project manager for the Project Server deployment
6. Manage customer expectations about what the system will and will not do
7. Understand and model how users will interact with the system and design appropriate security constructs
8. Train, train and then when you think you are finished training, train the people that did not think they needed training.
9. Workflow design. This one is new to 2010 but it plays into the work we have been doing for years to understand how projects moved through their lifecycles, but now we have some cool tools to automate\enforce the process.

So this list is OBVIOUSLY not complete. I’m hoping to generate some comments from the community to round it out a bit. What are your additions to this list of what it means to be a Project Management Software or Project Server consultant?

New Position!

I am happy to announce that I have accepted a position as a Senior EPM Solutions Architect with DeltaBahn, LLC. This is a Microsoft Project Partner that was created and is run by many of the people I was working when I was at Microsoft Consulting Services.

I VERY MUCH enjoyed my time with forProject Technology. They are a great team with some amazing new products coming out around earned value management and DCMA compliance work. If you have needs in those areas definitely give them a call. However, as much as I enjoyed working with forProject, I could not pass up the opportunity to go and work the the guys from my old Microsoft team.

Let me know if your company  needs help deploying Project Server or getting more out of your Project Server deployment. You can reach me at [email protected]

Groups and Categories

This is something I posted over on my Microsoft blog a while back but it comes up so often that I wanted to repost it over here.

Project Server security is something that is very flexible once you get used to how it works but it can be a bit confusing when you first look at it.

Here are the basics as I explain them to my customers:

The Group

Groups contain sets of users and they define the system level permissions that those users have the rights to perform. These include: Logging in, performing certain admin functions, create a new project, create a new resource, etc..

The Category

Categories provide access to projects, resources and views. The projects and resources that the category provides access to can be specifically called out by name or they can by dynamically included based on a set of rules within the category itself. For example a category can provide access to all projects where the user is the project owner or a status manager on a task, or all the projects where the Project Owner is ‘below’ the user in the RBS structure. I refer to this set of projects and resources as the “Scope” of the category.

Categories can be shared by many groups because of the dynamic way the scopes can be defined. The dynamic options for project and resource scope are dependent on the user and their relationship (via the RBS structure) to either the owner or team members on a project or to the resources themselves. I often, for simplicity, create a role based group and then a corresponding category. It sometimes means that there are technically more categories than is absolutely required but it does make the whole security model a bit easier to follow.

 

The Group\Category Permissions

This is the part that people often overlook.

A group and a category can be ‘linked’ or joined. When this happens there is a set of permissions that sit at that joint. This set of permissions defines what the members of that group can DO with the projects and resources within the “Scope” of the category.

If you open a Group and you see the list of Categories that are associated to group there is one of these grids for each category. If you select one of the Categories associated with the group the grid pertains to THAT pairing of group and category. If you select a different category the grid changes and is now pertaining only to THAT pairing. The same is true if you open a category and select the Groups that are associated with it. The grid pertains to the pairing. It can be edited in both places but it remains the same.

Circular Relationships in the PWA Schedule Web Part

I recently found that it is possible to create circular link relationships between tasks within the PWA Schedule Webpart. Project Pro checks for things like this as you are editing but the PWA webpart only calculates and checks for things such as circular logic when you hit the Calculate button. The part that makes it more difficult to deal with is that the error message that one gets when the Calculate action finds the circular logic does not contain the ID of the task(s) involved in the link the way that Pro does.

This means that if a user goes into the schedule webpart and makes many changes, including some circular logic they will not see the error message until they hit Calculate or Save, at which point the bad link is already in place and the error does not tell them which task it is.

The solution is to open the project into Pro which will immediately let you know about the bad logic and give you the task ID.

The error you see when you save or calculate is like the one below:

All Things Old, Become New Again…

As some of you may already know, I am no longer with Microsoft. So I will be blogging from here once again. I like TypePad better than the Telligent platform that Microsoft used anyway (so there!). :-)

 

I hope to continue sharing information about how best to configure and use Project Server. I’m still a Project Server nerd. I will just be nerding for someone else now. Who that someone else is, is not yet known so if anyone wants to rent me and me for a while give me a shout at [email protected] and we can talk it out. :-)

Deployment Practices: Required Fields

Few things are more frustrating then using a system and being presented with a field you MUST fill in to continue at a time when you don’t know which value is appropriate for that field. Project Server is no exception.

You can make any enterprise custom field in Project Server a required field. At the project level this means that a project cannot be saved until each of these fields contains a value. This is great if you know for sure that the project manager will always know which value to pick from the list at the time they first save their project. But if they don’t you have a couple of things that are going to happen and you need to be prepared for them and decide if they are your intended consequences.

1. The project manager will NOT save their project until they find the answer (remember that the answer COULD be several days away.) Do you really want the PM to NOT save the project because they don’t have the answer to this one field? Where will they start their planning in the mean time? Where will their data go?
2. The project manager will pick one of the values from the list just so they can save the project even if that value is not right. Remember that they may not remember to come back and fix it when they have the right information!
3. The project manager will curse you (the administrator) and pray to their God that you be injured in some way very soon.

Number 3 is going to happen for sure, count on it. What you have to decide is if you want number 1 or number 2 to be happening while your curse\injury takes place. The easy way to avoid all three is to either NOT make fields required unless you 100% sure that the project manager will know which value pertains to their project OR provide them a “Not Yet Known” value in the lookup table.

I tend to prefer the “NOT YET KNOWN” option. It allows your views and reports to show which projects have complete field profiles and which projects are in need of more complete data. Just make sure that the people you have creating reports and views know to allow for this value in their filters. This means that if you want to show all projects where a field equals “X”  or “Y” that it should also contain projects where it equals “Not Yet Known” because those projects MIGHT be "X” or “Y”, we just don’t know yet. :-)

 

Technorati Tags: Project Server,EPM

Deployment Practices: Why Resource Max Units Should Never Be 100%

Reason number one is that in all but the most extraordinary situations it is modeling a situation that is just not possible.

But first some background on what Max Units really is. Max Units defines the percentage of a resource’s full calendar working “period” that they can be assigned to work on tasks before Project sees them as being over-allocated.

Example:
A resource’s calendar says they come in at 8am and work until 5pm and take a 1 hour lunch. They do this Monday – Friday. That is an 8 hour work day\40 hour work week. So if the Max Units is 100% then if the resource is assigned to work 9 hours in one day they will be seen as over-allocated. Same for if they are assigned to work on 2, 1 hour tasks during the same hour. This goes down to the minute level too so if two 1 hour tasks overlap by 1 minute then for that 1 minute they are over-allocated.

This helps the PM create models of assignments and get an idea of how many hours each team member is being assigned to tasks and how that falls across time, other assignments, etc.

So now you might be seeing what is wrong with 100% Max Units. It says that if I work an 8 hour day, I am available to work 8 hours on tasks. On it’s face this sounds logical but dive a little deeper and it becomes obvious that this is just not possible. Nobody ever arrived at work at 8am, took a 1 hour lunch, and then left promptly at 5pm AND got 8 hours of work done on tasks. EVER.

OK wait, I take it back. It is possible that someone did this on your project:  IF your project schedule has tasks for things like: going to the bathroom, answering non-project related emails, going to a company meeting, being tapped on the shoulder by your cube-neighbor and being asked for “just a quick 5 mins. of help” (that turned into 30 mins), the list goes on and on. So if your project contains a task for every possible distraction from YOUR project and you expect your resources to track all of that then never mind. You can set your Max Units to 100%. (just count on a lot of churn on your team.)

But for most of us it is not possible to work 8 full hours on PROJECT WORK in an 8 hour day. Doing so means that you were present for more than 8 hours so that all the other things had time in your day along side your real work. The best way to help our models (because that what project schedules really are: models of what we want our project work to look like) be more accurate is to lower Max Units to something more like 85%. That would be the highest I would ever go on any project I was managing. I have seen it set as low as 75% at some sites but generally I see 80-85%.

What this means is that if you have a 1 day duration task and you assign a resource that has an 85% Max Units value, Project will calculate the Work for that task to be 6.8 hours. This means that you are modeling that on average this resource spends 1.2 hours of their 8  hour day doing something OTHER THAN working on your project. A Max Units value of 75% means that 2 hours is spent doing other things. Of course some will get more than 6.8 done in a day and some will get less done. It depends on the nature of their job, their relationship with other projects, other teams, etc. So the value you set will never be perfectly accurate but it WILL certainly be MORE accurate than 100% which is nearly always wrong. The point here is to make your model as accurate as you can.

 

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I’m hoping to start a small series of Deployment Practices posts here covering things I have found to be useful ideas, practices or methods for deploying Project Server. Please email me if you have suggestions or questions.

Technorati Tags: Project Server,Resource Management,EPM

WIP for Knowledge Work

I saw this post at Learning about Lean via Frank's Focused Performance blog and it speaks well about the issues we all face as consumers of data and information. But more importantly it made me think about WIP for the first time since I was doing process and project management work at Boeing in 1996-1997. I thought a lot about it then when I was dealing with manufacturing but not so much since then as I have been doing 'info work.'

The thing it made me to tonight was to think about not just my inbox (as Joe Ely mentions directly) but also about the partly finished "things" I have laying around and the creative price of not having all of them done. It made me think about the partly finished specs for Project Server addin's that I had to put aside for other more pressing commitments and it made me think about the half incubated ideas for papers and blog posts that I scrawled down when I was on a plane or in a meeting and an idea hit me but I had no time for finishing it out.

I think the real price is that as I go back over some notebooks and OneNote sections that hold these seeds I am struck by how complete I remember the thought being when I made the note and how incomplete I think they are NOW. I have lost something between then and now. I'm pretty sure I can get it back but how long am I going to have to think about each of these ideas to get back to where I was 2 months ago?

So what I took from Joe's post (even though it was not what he wrote about exactly) was that I need to do a better job of documenting what I know will become long term on-hold WIP so that when I get the chance to get back to it I will not have to spend hours rethinking it to get back on track with it.

You all have these on-hold projects sitting around in notebooks and in Word documents. How many of them are in a state where you could pick them up right now and start working on them without a lot of re-publishing and rethinking? Think about it.

Cool Sample PSI Apps and OLAP Info

Chris Boyd and Brian Smith do it again.

Check here for two cool sample applications, one for showing how to create, read and update custom fields via the PSI and another used for reading custom field data and then publishing projects, again via the PSI.

Check here for good info about OLAP cubes, Data Analysis (timeouts, plan guides and the tempdb)

Project and Project Server SP1 Are Here!

The haters should note the date please. :-)

This TechNet article covers the how to (Read it before you update):

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/c3b86049-7cba-4b9c-8335-e37fb6e7518a1033.mspx?mfr=true

Here is WSS SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4191A531-A2E9-45E4-B71E-5B0B17108BD2&displaylang=en

Here is Office Servers SP1 (which includes Project Server and Office SharePoint Server):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ad59175c-ad6a-4027-8c2f-db25322f791b&DisplayLang=en

Here is Project 2007 SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=CEC3E1E2-D802-4A03-BC78-05C48472559B&displayLang=en

Here is the Project Server MUI SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D322BA67-B199-4503-8AFF-6813B320D708&displaylang=en

Here is the Office Server MUI SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3A6C26FD-0BEB-40D5-8CBA-15164FAAB150&displaylang=en

And for Good Measure here is the Office 2007 SP1 download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9EC51594-992C-4165-A997-25DA01F388F5&displaylang=en