Tag: Baselines

The 80-20 for Microsoft Project

During the two weeks I was taking care of little Wendy I also started reading The Four Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss. And apart from being an excellent guide to rapid fat-loss and perfecting sleep, there is one real interesting concept that got stuck in my mind: The Pareto or 80-20 principle. Tim is a great source for finding the 20% that produces 80% of the desired results. Now, let’s find out that 20% for Microsoft Project use!

Continue reading The 80-20 for Microsoft Project

Building a scope creep view

Dominic Moss commented on the about baselines post with a nice suggestion. He talks about creating a view that shows a bar that gives the difference between actual finish dates and the proposed finish date captured in baseline(n). I told him that I would consider building this view and posting it on my blog. Today is that day Dominic, and I hope you like what I have done with your suggestion. Let’s build this:

Scope Creep View Finished
Continue reading Building a scope creep view

Multiple Baselines – Guest post

Hello readers, welcome to a very special blog post. I have talked about doing guest posts earlier and here is the very first. I would like to introduce you to Bonnie Biafore, a best-selling author of more than 25 books, who recently completely redesigned her website. I got to know Bonnie through LinkedIn forums and decided it would be a good idea to get together on the Project Conference to explore the options of working together. We decided to create a blog post about baselines, to closely link to earlier posts I did on the subject. We even have a special offer for the readers at the end of the post, so stick around. Without further ado, here is the post on Multiple Baselines.

Continue reading Multiple Baselines – Guest post

Not using the baseline functionality (flaw 5)

Hi there,

This is my last post in my series about incorrect way’s to use Microsoft Project stand alone version. In it I have discussed some of the common flaws people run into when using the Project application. This post will be about the baseline functionality, it is often forgotten or ignored by project managers. I will be talking about why you should want to have a baseline in your project. Again this is a very theoretical subject and you should always check with your company if there are any policies regarding baselining a project. Continue reading Not using the baseline functionality (flaw 5)

Five incorrect way’s to use Microsoft Project stand alone version

Hi there,

As a consultant you come across a lot of different projects/companies/people. I’ve been doing this for 5+ years and there are some flaws that keep popping up, regardless of the company, project or person.

In this post I would like to announce 5 of these flaws, the next couple of blogs will be dedicated to explaining and subsequently solving the situation.

Here we go:

Flaw 1: Date related planning

Flaw 2: Capacity as activity

Flaw 3:Lack of structure (Work Breakdown Structure)

Flaw 4: To much detail in the schedule

Flaw 5: No way back! Not using the baseline functionality

Edit: 12 November 2013

I got some really great responses on the flaws mentioned above. And some people have suggested new flaws. I will post about these flaws as well and ad the links to this post to give you a complete overview.

Flaw 6: using predecessors in summary tasks

Flaw 7: What’s your status? Forgetting to set a status date

If you are done reading all the articles above here are two suggestions for more:

  • The TPC newsletter: a periodic newsletter with information about PPM and Project (management).
  • The TPC OneDrive: a place with valuable project content such as whitepapers and reports.