SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

In my post Practice makes Perfect Part 3 – Views I explained how you can make your own  view. In that post I promised to also show how you can make your own groups and filters. While I expect a lot of people find this easy or just use the default groups and filters it is still useful for beginners.

I will also take the time to go trough the default filters and groups and might be useful on a daily basis.

And again I will be using the preview version of Project Professional 2013 for this post. This is not the final product and changes may still occur. If you are curios about the new version of Microsoft Project go here and try it out for yourself.

So where can I find groups and filters?

There are actually two ways to use groups and filters in your project. When you are in you project select the view tab.

The other ways is in your Gantt Chart and go to Task Name and expand it (Dropdown). As you can see in the image below you are able to select Group By and Filters.

What groups and filters are there?

There are a lot of built in groups and filters. These are very useful to any Project Manager. Some good groups include: Auto scheduled v. Manually scheduled, Status, Milestones and Complete and Incomplete task. These groups are great way to get the information out of your project plan fast.

Some good filters include: Completed tasks, Critical, Incomplete tasks, Late tasks and Milestones. Like groups this is a great way to filter all the data in your project plan.

Using groups and filters is a timesaver when you are working with big project plans and you have to get to the data you want quickly.

How can I make my own Group?

Go to the view tab and select the groups. Expand it and select “New Group By”.

In the next screen you be able to make your group. In the image below I made a easy selection. I will group by milestone to see all the tasks that are milestones. In the order I selected descending to force tasks that are milestones to appear on top. I also have changed the cell background to light blue. Here you also have the ability to show the summary task where the milestones resides just to give you more information. As you can see you also have the ability to group the data by more then one field.

Grouping this way will give you this result.

As you can see this is a really easy way to group your data really quickly. Making this group took me about 1 minute. And if you are a Project Manager that 1 minute will properly save you 15 minutes if you would have to look for all the milestones in a big project plan. Next how to filter.

How can I make my own Filter?

Making your own filter on the same way you made a group. Go to the view tab and select the filter. Expand it and select “New filter” For this exercise I made a quick filter that filters on my own custom field Progress and show the tasks that equals the value Yellow. This basically filters my project plan on tasks that have a yellow smiley.

The image below show the outcome of the filter.

Using Groups and Filters is really easy and can save you a lot of time when working with big project plans. Both the group and filter have been made in about 1 minute.

I hope this post demonstrates how to make groups and filters and how easy it is. When working with big project plans and especially custom fields where you don’t have a filter or group for it is a must to know how to do this so you can access your data fast.

This is it for me. In the next post of Practice makes Perfect will be talking about Costs and Budgets in your project plan.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/practice-makes-perfect-part-7-groups-and-filters/

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)

I rarely use team planner in my day to day activities what is a shame as it cool be valuable tool for anyone that regularly works with resources. In this post I will try to explain team planner and how you can use it. I will for instance show how resource leveling works and of course all the other options that are available.

Again I will be using Project Professional 2013 for this post. This is still in the preview version and it is not the final product. If you are curious about Project Professional 2013 you can go here and try it out for yourself.

Team planner what is it?

The new feature team planner was added in Project Professional 2010. This feature lets you plan your tasks for resources in a kind of roster. It is also great to spot over allocations and resolving these over allocations. As you can see in the image below you can see that Molly Dempsey is over allocated because she has to do two tasks at once.

Team planner here allows you to move your tasks to solve this over allocation. In this case above you have two options. 1. Reschedule your task or 2. Assign the task to someone else, and this is easy, you can just drag and drop the task.

Within team planner you have also the ability to use resource leveling. Resource leveling does exactly how it sounds. It will automatically solve (reschedule tasks) the over allocations you have your project. While this sounds cool I should also warn you that I might not always does what you want to do. Treat carefully when using this feature. As you can see in the image below I leveled the resource Molly Dempsey. Microsoft Project will automatically solve the over allocation by placing one task behind the other. This solved the over allocation. However some tasks that have dependencies have been delayed. Like I said be carefully as this will not always do what you want it to do. This is mostly because of dependencies and constraints of a task you didn’t think about.

Always carefully inspect what Microsoft Project has done to your project. A good way to do this is set a baseline before you level. It is a great way to keep track of the changes made in your project. If you don’t know how to make a baseline and use it here is a early post I have made about baselines. Practice makes Perfect Part 2 – Baseline

You have four options when using resource leveling. Level resource will level the selected resource. Level All will level all of your resources in your project. Luckily you have the option to use Clear Leveling if you don’t like what leveling did to your project. Then you also have the ability to play around with the Leveling Options. I am not going to highlight these options here as they are pretty straight forward. Just look at them and play around with some settings.

There are some more things you can do with team planner like adding a note to a resource, great for reminding you what you did with a particular resources. You see check the information of the resource and you can even create a new resource in the team planner view.

The last thing I want to talk about is the details view. I recommend you turn this on all the time. This will give you all the information on the selected resource like what the resource is working ect. This information can be really useful when rescheduling tasks.

I hope this will give you a bit more insight in what you are able to do with the team planner feature and how you can use it when you want to handle over allocations in your project plan.

Up next in the Practice makes Perfect series – Groups and Filters.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/practice-makes-perfect-part-6-team-planner/

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)

With the Project Preview that started in July I had the time to test out Project Online. For people that do not know what Project Online is, it is basically Project Server 2013 in the cloud.

Previously made a post about the Project Professional Timeline and how you can use it. That post you can find here and this post is a little addition as Project Online has the Timeline in Project Web Access. I personally really like this addition to Project Web Access as it gives you a nice graphical presentation of your project. However there is a little more in Project Online.

Project Online is still in the preview version this is not the final product so changes can still be made.

So what is it?

Next to the normal functionality of the timeline what is now available in Project Web Access you have the added ability to add projects to the timeline. This enables you to make a graphical presentation of all your projects over time or just a subset of your projects whatever you prefer. So you are basically able to make your own Project Calendar pretty neat right?

So how does it work?

The timeline view in Project Web Access work the same as it does in Project Professional. Go to your project and select the task you want to add to the timeline.

Click add to timeline and you are done. From here you have the options to give them any color you want, make callout tasks and so on.

How can I do this for Projects?

When you are in project center you can select a project and in your projects menu you can select add project. If you want you can even add tasks to that view from a selected project.

When your done adding your projects to the timeline you can create something like this.

Pretty cool I would say. With just a few mouse clicks you can make a graphical presentation of your entire portfolio. If you click on a specific project in the timeline you can even open de project directly from the there.

Microsoft really tried to make Project Web Access as good as it can get. All these little features really make it easy for a project manager to do most of his work just from his browser.

via SpeakingSilent » Robin Kruithof http://speakingsilent.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/project-online-the-timeline-in-project-web-access/

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)