Advisicon Blog

On January 27th, 2010, Advisicon’s President Tim Runcie was the host of a Microsoft worldwide Enterprise Project Management (EPM) webcast titled Microsoft Office Project 2010 – Enhanced Project Management. Tim showcased the abilities of Project 2010 as it relates to managing, controlling, and progressing dynamic project schedules.

In Tim’s webcast, he covers a number of significant updates and improvements which streamline the project management processes in Microsoft Project 2010 including:

• New Enhanced Interface
• User Controlled Scheduling
• Ease of Use, Large or Small (Existing features Supercharged)
• Time Saving Functions
• Task & Resource Modeling

In additiont to detailing how Project 2010 allows users to work with these processes with ease and simplicity, Advisicon sponsored the Webcast to count for 1 PDU from the Project Management Institute.  Please contact us for details on how to claim your PDU after watching the webcast! Additional information related to the Microsoft Project technology, including the pending release of Microsoft Project/Server 2010.

Click here to view the Webcast.

Web Link:  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032432978&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Kevin Williamson, MCTS, PMP

Many project managers forget to include project planning in their Project schedules: reviewing and authorizing tasks and activities, project monitoring and reporting, reminding resources to update tasks and submit their updates, team meetings. These are involved in delivering successful projects, and are often the points that need the most attention from a project manager, so they should be included in your Project schedules.

One time PM tasks: Some tasks are specific to a particular stage of the project and occur only one-time, such as writing the project initiation request or developing the project budget. For these, create either a task in the sequence where you will perform it, like any other task.

Stage-specific Recurring Tasks: Some project management tasks are specific to a stage or an activity in a project. E.g., Monitoring and controlling project performance. Insert a Recurring Task at the bottom of the activity (just before the milestone for that activity). Project will automagically populate the date range of the recurring task based on date range of the activity. If it does not, you can adjust the date range manually.

Project-long Recurring Tasks: Many project management tasks are routine and recur throughout the duration of the project or from one point in the project to the end of a particular stage, such as project team meetings. Insert a Recurring Task at the project level (Outline Level 1) at the bottom of the Project Schedule, which will set it to coincide with the project start date and finish on the project finish date (for tasks that will occur throughout the project lifecycle) or at the date of end of the project stage at which this recurring task will end. Inserting a Recurring Task at the bottom of your schedule helps prevent inadvertently linking it with false dependencies and lengthening your schedule in unexpected ways.

Announcing the release of the Microsoft Project 2010 Beta Demo Image

As Doug McCutcheon and Christophe Fiessinger of Microsoft mentioned, the Project 2010 Demo image just got released today, it’s all based on the Public Beta (B2).

To download the Microsoft Project 2010 EPM Solution demo image, installation instructions and associated presenter’s script, send an email to Proj2010@microsoft.com.

Q: What are the system requirements to run the EPM Solution demo?

Hyper-V image with Windows Server 2008 as the base operating system and recommended 8GB of RAM (4GB minimum).

Also recommended is a Solid State Drive for optimal performance, see Christophe’s earlier blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisfie/archive/2009/08/13/the-ultimate-demo-machine-get-ready-to-demo-project-and-sharepoint-server-2010.aspx).

Demo image contains (SharePoint Server Enterprise 2010, Project Server 2010, Office 2010, Project Professional 2010 etc…):

• PPM Governance: Separate governance workflows for both major and minor projects
  
• Demand Management:
  
  • Major Project business case includes general information, strategic impact, resource plan, cost and benefit templates and risk assessment survey
    
  • Minor project includes general information and schedule PDP
    
  • Includes custom workspaces for both Major and Minor projects
    
• Portfolio Selection & Analytics
  
  • Business Driver Library
    
  • Saved Business Driver Prioritizations
    
  • Saved Portfolio Analysis to run both Cost Constraint and Resource Constraint Analysis
    
• Detailed Planning: During the detailed planning stages the project manager
  
  • Finalizes the project schedule
    
  • Finds and assigns named resources
    
  • Completes a secondary cost assessment
    
  • Baselines the plan
    
• Manage:
  
  • Team Member: Team member receives and updates tasks and completes timesheet
    
  • Project Manager: Receives and approves task and timesheet updates
    
  • BI: Demo includes Corporate, Departmental and Project Level reports
    

To download the Microsoft Project 2010 EPM Solution demo image, installation instructions and associated presenter’s script by sending an email to the Proj2010@microsoft.com.

You will find more information at Advisicon.com and http://twitter.com/Advisicon.

Advisicon is Microsoft Project 2010 ready!

Regards,

Tim Cermak