Resource Graph showing overallocation for the resource Carp1.

 This graph gives you a good overview of the workload over time per resource. The picture above shows that the Carp1-resource is over allocated to 150% and this is a situation that you need to solve. You can either reschedule tasks or add more resources to the tasks.

Now you know that the Resource Carp1 is over allocated during a certain duration but you do not know which tasks that are causing the over allocation. For this purpose you can use the Resource Usage-view. 

Resource usage-view

Resource usage-view showing overallocation of two resources (red text).

This view is very useful to use when analysing why certain resources are overallocated. In this case it is the Carp1 ande Carp2-resources that are overallocated. In larger project with many resources and that has a long duration it is recommend to print this view in a color-printer and tejp the pages together. You will in this way have an excellent overview of the resource-allocation over time.

When balancing the workload you can either do that in the Gantt chart or directly in the Resource usage-view. It is easier to do it in the Gantt chart because it provides you with more valuable information about duration, dependencies, etc… You are although able to do it in the Resource usage view as well by editing the workload per task per week. Click the cell for a certain task and day and change the work.

You are able to update the work in the Resource Usage view.

You can see that the tasks Install Roof and Lay tiles has been edited for resource Carp2. Please note the symbol to the left of the name that indicates that the task has been updated and that the resource Carp2 is no longer overallocated on Tuesday the 12th of March 2007. This change will impact the duration of the tasks Install Roof and Lay Tiles and you need to analyse the Gantt chart to secure any dependencies. If you can’t change the duration of the task you need to add more resources to these tasks.

Split view between Resources Graph and Resources usage

You can also split the window to display two views. You do this by;

1. Choose Window->Split

2. Choose View-> Resource Graph.

This will provide more information in the same screen.

Split view for Carp1 which still is partly overallocated.

Microsoft Project 2007 also gives you the opportunity to do a automatic leveling of the resources but I strongly recommend you to not use the feature because it gives you a false feeling of having solved the problem and you do not have total control of what MS Project has done. Do the resource balancing manually and you will still be in controll.

Good luck!

 //Johan Beijar

Good Luck!

A convenient way of updating the actual progress in Microsoft Project 2007 is to use the Tracking Toolbar. You find the Tracking Toolbar by clicking View->Toolbars->Tracking.

Tracking Toolbar

1. Project Statistics. Microsoft Project 2007 gives you statistics about the progress in the project. MSP will provide you information about about Start, Finish, Duration, Work and Cost.

Project Statistics

2. Update as Schedule. With this option you update the selected tasks to progress exactly according to the schedule.

3. Reschedule Work. This feature reschedule the selected tasks to start/continue at the current date.

4. Add Progress Line. The cursor changes into to a selection tool that lets you choose the date for the progress line.

Progress line.

5-9. 0% to 100% complete. Select the task(s) that you would like to update and choose the 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% progress for the task(s). You can from the start of the project decide to only report progress in 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% per task. If you do so this feature is convenient for you.

10. Update tasks. Opens up the Update Tasks Dialog box. Here you update Actual and Current Start and Finish and you are also able to update % complete, Actual duration and Remaining duration.

11. Set reminder. This feature lets you set a reminder to be sent via Microsoft Outlook. You can set the timer in Hours, Days, Weeks or Months before the start or the finish of the task.

12. Collaborate toolbar. By choosing this option you will se the Collaborate Toolbar and this is very useful if you are working with Project Server, Web access and enterprise project management. Without Project Server and Web Access installed and configured you have no use of this option.

Good Luck!

//Johan Beijar

Remember that this information is essential for you as a Project Manager and you should always be aware if you are on track or running late in the project. Not knowing the current status of the project will force you into take incorrect decisions and in the long run also hurt your project management career.

You update the actual progress of a task by;

1. Open the Gantt Chart.

2. Choose Window->Split.

3. Click on the bottom pane.

4. Choose View->More Views…->Task Detail Form

5. Choose the task in the Gantt Chart that you would like to update by clicking it.

6. Choose Actual in the Dates-section.

7. Edit either start or Finish-date.

8. Confirm by clicking OK.

Update Actual Start or Finish date for the task Install Roof.

Good Luck!

//Johan Beijar

1. Level of detail. You need to decide on which level of details you should report on. If you decide to report on a very detailed level you risk of spending valuable time on just reporting. If you, on the other hand, define a too high reporting level you will loose the accuracy of the progress-reporting. Which level You should choose depends on a number of things, such as complexity, size of the project, requirements from stakeholders and experience in the team. A general rule of thumb is to report on the second lowest level in the WBS but this is up to You as Project Manager to decide.

2. Understanding WHY. You need to get the team to understand WHY it is so important that all report progress and also estimate time to completion for the tasks. One of the “secrets” is to get the team to understand by them selves that all resources in the project will have better work-environment if the project is under controll. It usually takes time before all the project understands this and also accepts the fact that they need to report progress. All projects have different and specific reasons but it all comes down to that You as a Project Manager needs to stay in controll.  

3. Quality of input. You will most likely use the progress-report in different reports to stakeholders and also internal the project and it is therefor very important that the reported progress is as correct as possible. Dependent on what you decide regarding the level of details and how well the team understand why reporting is important you will have better or…not so good correctness in the progress-reports.

4. Define the process. As stated in previous tutorials it is important that you always have updated information in Microsoft Project which enables you to take correct decisions. One of the main challenges (in my oppinion) with Microsoft Project 2007 is to have a smooth process of updating Actual Progress for each task. As the Project Manager you need to get reports from the resources in your project about their actual progress and estimated time to completion for each of their tasks. The question is how and who that should update the task-information in Microsoft Project 2007? In small projects it is feasable to let all resources have access to the MS Project-file and update their tasks but in mid-size and larger projects this is not a good way. This is where Microsoft Project 2007 Server and Web Access do a major difference but what do you do if you only have the stand a lone version of MS Project? Then you need to be careful when defining the level of detail that you should report on and you could also set up a excel-sheet that the resources report detail progress into and you transfer the information into MS Project on a mid level of details. There are no great solutions to this (except MS Project 2007 server and web-access) and you need to find the solutions that fits your project.

Learn from the Past and plan for the Future!

It is of course important to track how much resources you have spend so far but it is even more important for you as the project manager to always know how much you have left of the project, both in times of time and money. Project managers should manage the project and not estimate time to completion for the resources, this should be done by the resources them self. Estimate Time to Completion (ETC) is one the most powerful techniques that you as Project Manager has, if you do it correct you will have a comprehensive picture of if you will meet the deadlines of not. At the same time as the resources reports the actual progress they should also report the ETC for the specific tasks, the ETC can than be aggregated for the total project and you will then have solid and valid information to report to the team and to the stake holders.

To be able to measure progress and plan for the future you need to at least record three basic types of information:

• How much that have been completed of the task, either in percentage complete or in actual work per task (on the level of detail that you decide).
• Actual start of the task. (on which date did the execution of the task start.)
• Estimate time to completion, prefarable in remaining work. How much work remains of the task.

If you record these three values you will be able to report the amount of work that you have spend per task or summary task and also how much remains per task and summary task. This information is very important for you as Project Manager and you will be able to stay in controll if you use the values mentioned above.

Good Luck!

//Johan Beijar

This is a Free Tutorial about Microsoft Project 2007 and you find more free tutorials here written by Johan Beijar. More tutorials about Microsoft Project 2007 are frequently added. These tutorials will not guarantee that you will run a successful project or be a great manager but it will increase you possibilities of understanding and work more efficiant with the project management software. 

First of all:

You manage the project! Say after me: “I, the Project Manager, manage and control the project.”

It is essantial to understand that you as a project manager are responsible and accountable for the success of the project(s) that you manage. To assist you in this task you have a number of different tools such as resources, budgets, plans, contracts and maybe a project management software like Microsoft Project 2007 (MS Project 2007). The tool is here to assist you and if you think that this tool will solve all the challenges that you have as a project manager you need go back to square one and re-think. This tool will assist you in the decision making process, nothing else. Softwares like MS Project 2007 and similiar are often called “Project Management Software” but I would like to call them “Project Administration Software” because they will not Manage the project for you but it will support you when it comes to administrative tasks in the project.

I’ve heared project managers that says: “We will use MS Project so we will be fine.” When I hear such things a smile for my self, take a deep breath and start to explain that using MS Project 2007 will not solve anything if you not know the basics of the tool and how to use it efficiant in a project.

But on the other hand…

MS Project 2007 can be a wonderful assistant to have in the project if you utilize it in the correct way.

Correctly used will MS Project 2007 Standard Edition support you with the following;

• Task administration. You are able to plan and administrate all the tasks you have in the project. You can via views look upon the tasks from different angles that provide information in different ways.
• Resource administration. You have extensive possibilities to administrate the resources in the project, both human and material resources.
• Reporting. The tool have useful reports that you easily can produce.
• Budgeting. Use Microsoft Project to define the budget for the project and also follow up against the budget.
• Follow up of progress. Does the project follow the plan? Define the baseline and you can measure the progress against it.

This is actually MS Project 2007 in a nutshell but there are of course many details in each area and vast amout of functionallities to explore in the tool. 

The majority of the users will be fine with the Standard edition of MS Project 2007 but larger companies should consider to use the Proffesional edition that will give you additional features such possibilities to work with MS Project Server and Office Project Web Access.

Read more about when you should use what in Microsoft Project 2007.

Good Luck!
//Johan Beijar

As you most likely know you can divide the lifecycle of a project into 4 phases; 1. Initialization. 2. Start-up. 3. Execution and 4. Close down.

Relative usage of Microsoft Project during project lifetime. 

The main tasks in MS Project 2007 (or any other project management software) in each phase are described below.

Phase 1: Initialization is when you get the need permissions to start the preparations for the project and initial preparations are done. A pre-study might even be conducted in this phase. Microsoft Project 2007 or any other proejct management software is not used much in this phase.  

Phase 2: Start-up is very important phase in which you to 65-70% decide if you will have a successful project or if the project will fail. In this phase you lay the foundation for the project and decide the scope (in a WBS), resources, budget, time-plan, identify external/internal stakeholders, identify assumptions, do your risk-plan, start staffing the project and you also start using the project management software in this phase. I have seen too many project managers that are (they think) ready to start executing the project but they have not done their homework accordingly and they run into problems after a while and many projects fails due bad planning and that they started too early.

Connected to the project management software there are a number of activities that you should do in this phase;

• Create the project and the basic timeplan in MS Project 2007. Start by creating wour work breakdown structure, this is a first very important step towards a successful project. When this is done you enter the indentified tasks in MS Project 2007 in the same structure as in the WBS.
• Estimate the duration of the tasks. Take the time to have the resources that will perform the tasks to do the estimations together with you as the manager/project manager.
• Define deadlines. In some project you need to be ready by a certain date and you need to define and insert these these constraints in Microsoft Project 2007.
• Define relationships between tasks and link them. After you have done your WBS, I recommend you to do a network-diagram of all the key deliverables, as well as the WBS you should first do this on a brownpaper with yellow stickers. When you have done your network-diagram on the wall you can easily update the relationships between the tasks in Microsoft Project 2007. 
• Define resources. First of all you need to define the resources that you have in the project. You do this in the resource-sheet. When the resources are defined in Microsoft Project 2007 you are able to assign the resources to the tasks that you already have entered.
• Define the cost for resources. When all the resources are defined you can also define the cost per resource per hour/day/month.
• Tuning. It is now time to finetune the plan. You do this by removing scope (tasks), adding resources or proloning the timeplan to meet the milestones. Remember that adding or removing resources, time or scope have consequencies that you need to handle.

You should at this stage in the project have a MS Project plan that reflects the true picture of your project. Remember that the project evolves over time and you need to keep the information in the project management software (MS Project 2007) updated according to the reality. You will otherwise make decisions based on incorrect information.

Phase 3: Execution of the project. This is the phase in which you utilize all the preparations that you made in the previous phase. As the name says this phase is about executing and not planning, I recommend you to not start any kind of project until the correct preparations for that specific project are completed.

Also here there are a number of more phase-specific activities that you should do;

• Baseline. It is important that you save your baseline because this it what you will measure your progress against during the project. Please note that you never are fully able to report progress unless you have saved your baseline.
• Actual progress. You should on a regular basis update the actual progress of the tasks in the project.
• Resource-conflicts. In larger projects you often have resource-conflicts but with correct information in MS Project you are able in early stage to identify and solve and resource-issues.
• Compare baseline with actual progress. You should compare the saved baseline with the actual progress in your project to monitor progress and possible deviations from the plan. If you do this on a regular basis you should be able to act pro-actively and solve any issues before they turn into problems or possible show-stoppers. In the same way that you are able to view variances between planned and actual progress you are also able to monitor the variance between planned and actual cost.
• Reports. You a vast amount of data in the database in MS Project 2007 and you have also a number of pre-defined reports to choose from. Both visual and textual. You can export the information to MS Excel or Visio for further processing to the data.
• Updating & Tuning. Projects are all about change and there will be changes in time, scope or resources. If you have a true picture of the project in MS Project 2007 you are able to tune the project when needed or answer to challenges from the management of cutting the time or the resources in the project. Remember that Your decisions based on the information you have the project management software is not better than the quality of the stored information. The information in MS Project 2007 must reflect the reality.

The main usage of a proejct management software like MS Project 2007 in the execution-phase is provide the project manager with the correct information whenever needed.

Phase 4: Closing of the project. After, a hopefully, successful project you enter the fourth and last phase in the project which is to close the project in a proper way. You can utilise the information in MS Project in a number of different way for this.

• Review duration. If you have captured the progress of the tasks during the lifetime of the project you are in good position to review the planned vrs the actual duration of the tasks. The outcome of such a exercise is valuable input for the the final report of the project. 
• Template. You are able to save the project as a template in MS Project to use in future similiar projects.
• Lessons learned and best practice. Extract the data from MS Project 2007 as lessons learned and provide best practice information to other project managers.
• Final Report. Use MS Project 2007 to support you in your work to write the final report of the project.

Even though MS Project 2007 is a great project management tool it is important to remember that You manage the project and the tool will only support you with with the information that You feed into it.

Good Luck!

//Johan Beijar

This is a Free Tutorial about Microsoft Project 2007 and you find more free tutorials here written by Johan Beijar. More tutorials about Microsoft Project 2007 are frequently added. These tutorials will not guarantee that you will run a successful project or be a great manager but it will increase you possibilities of understanding and work more efficiant with the project management software. As a part of the initial planning you should assing the resources to the tasks that you have defined in you work breakdown structure. This is a fairly easy and straight forward process in Microsoft Project 2007 for you as a Project Manager. You do this by; 

1. Open the Gantt Chart-view by clicking View -> Gantt Chart or by clicking the Gantt Chart on the View Bar.

2. Select the task that you would like to assign resources to and click the assign resource-button or press Alt+F10.

3. Select the resource that you would like to assign to the task and enter the percentage that you would like to assign the resource to the task. 100% is fulltime assigned to the task.

4. Repeat step 2 and 3 if you would like to assign more resoureces to the task.(If you forgot to add the appropriate resource(s) in the Resource-sheet you can just add the name of the resource in the firrst available row.)

As the Project Manager you need to know what to, who should do what, when it should be done, why it should be done, the cost for it and a variaty of other important things. To be able to get control and stay in control you need a Baseline in your project to measure your progress against. If you not do the baseline you have nothing to measure against and in that case no possibility to have total control of your project. And as a manager you need to stay in control.  The baseline is nothing else than a frozen picture of your project at a certain point time. In Microsoft Project 2007 you are able to have up to 11 different baselines in a project. I although recommend you have a few baselines as possible. You should only re-baseline when you have major changes in your project such as; delays, overrun of budget or loss of key resources. The right place in time to do the first baseline is when the initial planning is done and the budget is approved.

This is a Free Tutorial about Microsoft Project 2007 and you find more free tutorials here written by Johan Beijar. More tutorials about Microsoft Project 2007 are frequently added. These tutorials will not guarantee that you will run a successful project or be a great manager but it will increase you possibilities of understanding and work more efficiant with the project management software.

Views are one the most important features in Microsoft Project 2007 for you as Project Manager. It is in the views that you get all the needed data to make decisions but remember that the information in the views are not better than the information that you enter into MS Project. To base your decisions on correct data is crucial for the success of the project but also for Your success as a project manager.

This is a Free Tutorial about Microsoft Project 2007 and you find more free tutorials here written by Johan Beijar. More tutorials about Microsoft Project 2007 are frequently added. These tutorials will not guarantee that you will run a successful project or be a great manager but it will increase you possibilities of understanding and work more efficiant with the project management software.  

In a project you often have recurring tasks,  for an example project meetings or reports that you have on weekly or bi-weekly basis.  One option is that you create one task for each such meeting or report but you could also create one recurring task, which I recommend you to do. To create a recurring task in Microsoft Project 2007;