In a previous post, I cautioned against starting your PPM tool journey by contacting vendors and looking at the various tools on offer; that it’s the equivalent of deciding on a solution before you’ve fully understood what the problem is that you’re trying to solve. 6 questions to consider first… 1. What are the business problems…
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Picture this scenario: Your company has been running various projects and programmes for a while now, with varying degrees of success regarding delivery. Those that do go well often don’t embed as well as you’d hoped, and those that don’t – if only you could have had better visibility of when things started to go…
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Part of a series on customising Microsoft® Project® to make working with project schedules more useful. This post describes how to set up time-boxed “look-ahead” views in Microsoft® Project® (schedule extracts showing upcoming tasks), by customising filters to use an OR operator between criteria.
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Part of a series on customising Microsoft® Project® to make working with project schedules more useful. This post describes how to set up custom Gantt chart views to present schedule extracts based on the Live project schedule data, filtered and formatted to suit particular stakeholder audiences. So why would you want to use this approach, how do you do it,…
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Part of a series on customising Microsoft® Project® to make working with project schedules more useful. This post describes how to generate universally-readable ‘soft’ PDF Gantt charts to circulate to stakeholders, with dynamically generated labels that provide them with useful information about the view, and provide you with useful information about how you might re-create the view. So why would…
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Part of a series on customising Microsoft® Project® to make working with project schedules more useful. So you’ve created a useful programme schedule, and you are now working on keeping it on the right track. You’ve set up fields to calculate RAG status, but what if you want diagnose schedule management problems without having to study the baseline…
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Part of a series on customising Microsoft® Project® to make working with project schedules more useful. So you’ve created a useful programme schedule, and you are now working on keeping it on the right track, reviewing the plan regularly with the Programme Manager and Project Managers. You will probably review the programme schedule regularly – focussing on on items with…
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Part of a series on customising Microsoft® Project® to make working with project schedules more useful. So, you’ve inherited a set of project schedules that you need to combine into a useful programme schedule. How do you set up a framework to enable you to quickly find and diagnose schedule setup problems, without having to deduce and apply complex combinations…
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Top tips drawn from experience To create an project or programme information hub, you could do a lot worse than setting up a SharePoint team site as suggested by Dux Raymond Sy’s definitive book on the subject. If SharePoint is already used in your organisation, it’s virtually a no-brainer. SharePoint document libraries represent a great…
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Top tips drawn from experience To create an project or programme information hub, you could do a lot worse than setting up a SharePoint team site as suggested by Dux Raymond Sy‘s definitive book on the subject. If SharePoint is already used in your organisation, it’s virtually a no-brainer. Project management “RAID” registers are prioritised…
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