One of the most frequently asked questions we get here at The PMO Professionals is “what is the best PMO tool?” The truth is that one size doesn’t fit all; just as PMO is used to describe a project, programme or portfolio office – the best PMO tool for each situation will depend on what…
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A PPM tool is software designed to be an enterprise-wide, strategic solution which facilitates more effective project portfolio management. It’s a multi-million turnover industry, full of hundreds of options ranging from free and instantly accessible to costing thousands and taking months to configure and implement. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is regarded as the go-to source of information…
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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 trace predecessors and successors in MS-Project using a clever little VBA macro.
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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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