SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

Not so long ago I was talking to a friend of mine who said that while he likes indicators in his project plan he just doesn’t have the time to figure out how to make them. So hé why not blog about it because he is probably not the only one that works with project on a day to day basis and want to get something more out of his plan.

To start of you need to know about the limitations. In standard Project Professional you are only able to make two types of indicators. One for Tasks and one for Resources. If you happen to work for a company that has Project Server you are also able to make indicators for Projects. This feature is mostly used to make nice dashboards.

In this post I am going to focus on what you can do in Project Professional without a connection to Project Server. Ill discuss and make a indicator for a Task.

Ill be using Project Professional 2013 for this exercise. Like always this is still the preview version so changes may still occurred. (My gut says that their won’t be but hé I still need to point it out.)

Let’s start shall we.

So how do I make a indicator?

When you started up Project Professional go to Project and select Custom Fields.

When you click on Custom Field you will be presented by the screen below.

In the top you can see which field you are making something for. Default setting is Task but you can also make one for resources. For this exercise I will be using the field Text1.

For the indicator I renamed the field Text1 to Progress. When you rename the field Text1 it will be displayed like this Text1 (Progress). In essence this will mean that for Project the field Text1 is still there but will display a different name.

As you can see I can do multiple things with this field like a lookup field or just a text field. But for now I am going to stick to making a Indicator. For this indicator I need formula and I am going to use this one:

IIf([Baseline Finish]=ProjDateValue(“NA”);”No Baseline”;IIf([Finish]<=[Baseline Finish]+5;”Green”;IIf([Finish]<=[Baseline Finish]+10;”Yellow”;”Red”)))

The above formula basically does the following: When no Baseline is set it will display “No Baseline”, if a baseline is set and the finish date of the task and the finish date of the baseline is on time with a slack of 5 days it will display the text green. If the task finish date is later then 5 days with a slack to 10 days it will display the text yellow. If it is later then 10 days it will display the text Red.

The reason behind this formula is that I don’t want to have a yellow or red smiley if I am one day late on my task. Because that is not a good representation of the project.

To make indicators I am going to map the text output to a Indicator. No Baseline equals a question mark. Green equals a green smiley. Yellow equals a Yellow smiley and Red equals a Red smiley.

The next thing you need to do is add the new field to your view. In Practice makes Perfect Part 3 – Views I showed how to do this.

However in this post I will just add the column to the default view. To add the field to the view you need to insert a new column. Be aware that you need to add the column Text1 instead of whatever name you gave to your field. When done it will look something like this.

As you can see I didn’t set a baseline yet for this project plan. Let’s change that shall we.

As you can see, after I changed my baseline and modified some days all indicator come out nicely.

This is just one indicator but depending on your needs you can make a few more. If you also seen Practice makes Perfect Part 3 – Views and know how to build a view you can actually make a dashboard with multiple indicators. This you could use to show management for example.

So it is easy to create indicators?

The hardest part of making a indicator is deciding what you want to see. After you decided what do see you have to make the formula. For more then one Project Manager this will be difficult. My advice is to ask around your own department or IT department that knows something about scripting or programming (it is really easy for them).

You can also look onto the internet their is a lot information about formula’s and how to create them.

I hope this post gives a little insight on how to create a indicators for your project. It can be really useful like said for a dashboard or to give a overall indications on your project.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/practice-makes-perfect-part-4-indicators/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

This is a bit more technical post then you are used to. But I find it important to do some of these from time to time.

One of my clients had a problem about editing a list in the datasheet view in a Project Workspace. I also seen this issue coming up on the MSDN forums. A good opportunity for me to make a small post how to correct this.

In SharePoint 2010 or in this case the Project Server 2010 Project Workspace it is possible to edit a list in the datasheet view.

Now my client really wanted to edit the column “Comments” however this was for some reason not possible. The datasheet view didn’t let you edit the column and looked like it was only read-only. Here is what I did to fix this problem.

Go to the list you want to be able to edit in the datasheet view. Go to List Settings.

Go to the columns you want to change and edit it.

As you can see in the picture below it has been set to enriched text.

The only thing you need to do is set it to Plain text.

Now go back to the list and go to the datasheet view. Now go to the column you want to edit. As you can see you are now able to enter text. Just a quick fix if you ever run into this problem.

This is it for me for now up to the next post Practice makes Perfect Part 4 – Indicators.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/sharepoint-listproject-workspace-list-datasheet-view-edit-problem/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)

This post in the Practice makes Perfect series is about views. The reason behind it is that I myself when starting to use Project for my Project plans always used the default view of Project to edit and view my Project Plan. I sometimes switched to the Tracking Gantt or resource sheet but that is about it.

Great view isn’t it!

Only when I became a Project Consultant and had to know a lot more of Project that I realized I was missing out on something really easy but with so many benefits.

For this post I am again using the Project Professional 2013 preview version. This is not the finally product so things might change.

Default view

While the default view of Project Professional gives you access to create a project plan quickly it lacks in certain areas when it comes to update your plan or being more specific to the data you need/want to see.

To change this you can do two things:

• Add/remove new columns.
• Or make a new view.

Why would I make a new view if I just can add/remove columns?

This is a good question. Add/removing a column might be easy but it can also create a lot of columns you don’t actually need all the time. Working with views gives you the ability to quickly switch between data you want to view. Instead of adding and removing columns every time.

So what kind of views can a make?

For instance like shown in this post you can make a view what make it easy for every Project Manager to update their plan with % Complete, Work, Remaining Work. Other example might be a view with your RAG (Red, Amber and Green) indicators (RAG indicators will be covered in a different post), Resource information displaying names, work and actual work. I could go on but it all depends on what you as Project Manager want to see. As shown in this post making a view depending on the depth will only take you between 5 > 30 minutes.

So how do I make a view?

The first thing you need to know that a view is built up from 3 components. Were two are optional (Filter and a Group) and one is not (Table).

We are going to start making this view by making a table. In Project Professional go to View > Tables and select More Tables in the dropdown menu.

Here you can choose to create a new table.

For the purpose of this post I am going to create a view that makes it easy to update the status of a project.

In the image below I made a table with fields like % Complete, Remaining Work, Work and Start and Finish as an example.

You properly will be playing around with the alignment of the data and the width of the columns but when you are done you can press ok and you are done.

Now the next thing we can do is define a filter or group this is optional and this post I am not going to make use of them (Filters and groups will be discussed in a new post).

Now that I have my table I want to start using it in my own view. In Project Professional go to View > Other Views highlighted in the picture below.

Select New to create your view.

Give your new view a name and a screen you want to use. There are a lot of options here and I would go through them all to see what you find useful. If I only want to see data a good screen to take is the Task Sheet. This will leave out the Gantt Chart and basically only show you the columns.

To make a view you are required to always choose a filter or a group. If you do not want a filter or a group you will need to select No Group for the Group and All Tasks for the filter. These are the default options if you don’t want a group or filter interfering with your view. When done you can see your new view in the views bar. The images below are the results.

This view is created in about 5 – 10 minutes. Some more complicated views might take longer but this gives you a fast way to make a view, to view the data you want. In this instance updating % Complete and Remaining Work.

As always you have to experiment with making views but I can promise you that it is definitely worth it. This creates standardization on how you view your data in your project plan. Views themselves can even be used as a report for your management. The great thing about views is that once you make them you can use them for every project.

Making views makes your life as a Project Manager much much much easier. Don’t take my word for it start playing around with it yourself.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/practice-makes-perfect-part-3-views/

I am Robin Kruithof. I am working at CXS in the Netherlands as a Microsoft Project Consultant. My passion lies in Project Management and everything in the Project Management domain. This article has been cross posted from speakingsilent.wordpress.com/ (original article)