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Managing Your Project Schedule

During Project Execution

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• How to use your project schedule to help you manage your project

• What you should be doing on a regular basis to maintain your project schedule

• How to handle routine scenarios you will face during project execution

• Refresher on EVM• How to prepare your

project schedule for status reporting

Presentation Objectives

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• Assumptions

• Have The Right Tools

• Baselining the Project Schedule

• 1-1 Team Schedule Reviews

• Applying Project Updates (actual work)

• Adding/Removing Tasks

• Adding/Removing/Replacing Team Members

• Fast Tracking Your Schedule

• Crashing Your Schedule

• Schedule Audits

• EVM Refresher

• Preparing for Status Reports

Agenda

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Assumptions

• This class assumes you are working on a Firm Fixed Price engagement

• Assumes that you already know how to build a project schedule

• Assumes you have a completed project schedule, resource and rates loaded (leveled), effort loaded and baselined

• Assumes you are working with MSP 2010 – in a standalone environment

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Before We Get Started

• Use Microsoft Project 2010

• If the Project Schedule is client facing, then don’t include resource rates

• If your Project Schedule will include client tasks and activities, keep them separate from your firm’s tasks and activities

• Earned value in MSP is based on $ calculated, so if you are not including rates, you can’t use the built in earned value tools

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Have the Right Tools

• Microsoft Project is a VERY complex software app.

• You should have an MSP “Bible” by your side as you are managing your projects

• Recommend:– Microsoft Office Project

2010 Step by Step. ISBN: 13: 978-0735626959

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Budget – Know How Much You Have

• Your budget is the cost figure (summation of each resources estimated hours x rate) or

• The Projected revenue less the margin

• This figure is your Budget at Completion (BAC)

If you go over your BAC, you’re cutting into the margin which is never a good thing

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Baselining

• Before you track to your schedule you must baseline it

• When you baseline, you backup important columns from your schedule to “Baseline” columns

• Throughout project execution you can tell how your project is going by comparing your current project to the baseline project (difference is variance to plan)

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For the MSP canned reports (or EVM data) to be of any use, you must baseline the project schedule

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1-1 Schedule Reviews

• Before you start tracking to the project schedule, have 1-1 reviews with team members

• Filter schedule on team resource name, keep the following columns:– Task Name

– Start/Finish dates

– Duration

– Work

• On Resource Usage view summarize tasks to get team member’s total work budgeted

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1-1 Schedule Reviews (continued)

• Have a discussion and confirm responses to these questions:– Are there any tasks that you need to be doing

that’s not on here (you will need to later add)

– Is there any tasks listed that you know you won’t be doing or won’t need (you will need to later remove)

– Are you ok with budgeted hours

– Are you ok with task assignments

– Are you ok with duration & due dates

• Ideally, via the WBS, the team member provides direct inputs to the project schedule, but often this is NOT the case

• If your team is too big, have this discussion with your direct reports and instruct them to do the same with their subordinates

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With the 1-1 reviews, you get the commitment from the team that they can complete theirAssigned tasks as scheduled. Also gives them an avenue for feedback regarding their planned work

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Interactive - #1

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Apply Work Updates• You will do this at least once a

week - schedule a good chunk of time to do this

• FFP Projects are stand-alone MSP arrangements, so you will have to manually enter your teams hours into the project schedule

• Be sure your team members get their time sheets to you on time – send out scheduled reminders – nag those who are late

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On FFP projects, we don’t need to track the clients hours in the schedule. We just need to get their% complete on tasks (if they have tasks on the project schedule). We will review that later.

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Apply Work Updates - continued

• The last point on previous slide is very important. There are several ways you can do this– Have team send you snagit screen

prints of their timecard

– Have team send wbs code for each of their task and how many hours worked

– Get the numbers from them directly in a weekly team status meeting

• The point is, they must report how many hours they work and on what task.

• If they worked on a task that’s not on the schedule, be sure to add the task to the plan (covered later)

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Apply Work Updates – continued

• Once you have the hours worked information (you will need the following)– Task Name

– Hours worked

• Using this information, update the Actual Work completed for each team member on the Resource Usage View. Do NOT use the Gantt Charge Split Screen/Resource Work view

• Be sure to keep a log of each team member’s time sheet

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Apply Work Updates

• If a task is complete, mark it 100% complete by zeroing out Remaining Work (use Gantt Chart Split screen view) – this marks %Work Complete 100%

• Then its safe to enter 100% complete on whatever view you’d like.

• You only enter % complete when you’re NOT managing hours in the project schedule.

• If you are managing hours in the project schedule, let the tool compute % complete for you.

• Do not enter a Finish Date for the task. Project will do this for you once zero out Remaining Work (make 100% complete)

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There is a very good reason you must zero out remaining work for tasks that finish early

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Apply Work Updates – Update Metrics

Tool

• On the Res Forecast tab, enter how many hours worked for that week for each resource.

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Interactive - #2

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Adding New Tasks During Project

Execution• You may need to add new tasks to

your schedule during project execution

• Create a section in your project schedule called “Tasks Not in Original Baseline” or something like that.

• Whoever is requesting the task will give you a task name, start date, and number hours required to complete the task

• Add the task to the new section –go ahead and give it a hard start date (or you can use a dependency if you have one)

• Consider how you will fund this task.

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Adding New Tasks During Project

Execution (continued)

• Baseline the Task !!!!!

• You must baseline any new task added to your project schedule so that you can manage how you are tracking to that task

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“Removing” Tasks During Project

Execution

• You may have budgeted hours and dollars for tasks that you won’t have to do

• You don’t actually delete the task, you just make it 100% complete (make remaining work zero, then mark 100% complete)

• You shouldn’t literally delete a task after you’ve baselined the schedule

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For documentation purposes, you can enter in the task comment section that the task was “deleted” and the hours used elsewhere

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Adding New Resources During Project

Execution

• You may have new resources rolling onto your project – in addition to your existing staff

• Add them to the resource sheet

• Then add them to whatever task they are assigned to work on – remember, when you assign them hours, those hours have to come from somewhere

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Removing Resources During Project

Execution

• If someone on your project leaves, pull their unused hours and redistribute to other team members as needed

• Don’t erase them from the resource sheet (consider updating resource comment to reflect when resource left and other relevant facts)

• You may still need to keep a record of all the work they’ve done even though they are no longer on the project

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Replacing Resources During Project

Execution• If you’re swapping out one resource

for another, you do a combination of the previous scenarios

• Add the new resource to the resource sheet

• Zero out remaining hours for departing resource

• Add new resource to tasks of departing resource and assign remaining hours

• OR you could simply replace the departing resource with the new resource using the resource assignment tool (for future tasks only)

• What you choose to do depends on the level of detail you want to keep re: task history

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Interactive - #3

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Fast Tracking Your Project Schedule

• Fast Tracking is a form of schedule compression

• Tool to use if your project is behind schedule

• Fast tracking is changing your project schedule so that two or more critical path tasks occur in parallel instead of one after the other

• Increases risk and requires more attention to communication

• Use dependency feature of MSP to implement fast tracking

To

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Crashing Your Project Schedule

• Crashing is another form of schedule compression

• Another tool to use if your project is behind schedule

• Crashing is making cost and schedule tradeoffs to accomplish the greatest amount of schedule compression with the least amount of cost. For example:– Adding resources to tasks on

critical path

– Putting more skilled resources on critical path tasks

• Generally increases project costs

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Interactive - #4

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Audit Your Project Schedule

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• While tracking your project during execution, you want to confirm that your schedule’s hours burned (Actual Work), and dollars burned (Actual Cost) are as close to the official record as possible.

• Its very easy to screw up the numbers in MSP, which is why we recommend using the external tool to manage the data required for reporting metrics.

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Audit Your Project Schedule (continued)

• Here are some things you can do when you audit your schedule:– Mark completed task 100% by zeroing

out remaining hours– If you added tasks to your schedule, be

sure to baseline them.– Never tinker with actual hours in your

schedule– Unless working with hard constraints,

don’t change task start and finish dates– Audit actual hours worked by team

member (MSP vs Organization Internal Status and Metrics). Often the discrepancy lies with a few members of the team

– Sometimes MSP will add Actual Works worked to a task if you mark it 100% without zeroing out Remaining Work. This can cause problems. Look out for this. !!!!!

– Avoid use hard constraints on new tasks – schedule them to start “As soon as possible”

– Schedule new tasks “Fixed Work”

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Interactive - #5

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Earned Value Refresher

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Old Name

Current Name

Full Name Meaning

BCWS PV Planned Value Estimated value of the work planned to be done

BCWP EV Earned Value Estimated value of the work complete

ACWP AC Actual Costs Actual cost incurred

BCAC BAC Budget at Completion Amount budgeted for project

EAC EAC Estimate at Completion Currently expected total for project

ETC ETC Estimate to Complete How much more to finish

VAC VAC Variance at Completion How much over/under we expect to be

Earned Value lingo has changed over the years. The first column has termsyou might still see but are now effectively obsolete

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Earned Value Refresher

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Name Formula Meaning

Cost Variance CV = EV-AC -ve=Over Budget, +ve=Under Budget

Schedule Variance SV=EV-PV Ve=Behind Schedule, +ve=Ahead Schedule

Cost Performance Index CPI=EV/AC We are getting x cents out of every $ spent

Schedule PerformanceIndex

SPI=EV/PV We are progressing at x% of the rate originally planned

Estimate At Completion EAC=BAC/CPI As of now, how much do we expect the total project to cost

Estimate to Complete ETC=EAC-AC How much more to finish

Variance at Completion BAC-EAC How much over/under we expect to be

SPI >= 1 On or ahead of schedule

SPI < 1 Behind schedule

CPI >=1 On or under budget

CPI < 1 Over budget

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Requirements for Producing EV

Metrics in MSP

• All work resources (assigned to tasks) must have an hourly rate

• All tasks with work must have resource(s) assigned to them

• Project schedule (and all new tasks) must be baselined

• Project schedule must be routinely updated with hours worked

• Status Reporting date must be updated ****

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MSP Does EV Metrics For You

• As long as you manage your schedule properly, MSP computes all the data for you

• You just need to know what columns to show:– BCWP

– BCWS

– ACWP

– AC

– COST

– CPI

– SPI

– CV

– SV

– EAC

• All columns are computed for you for all detailed tasks

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Sequence of Events

• Create your project schedule and get it approved

• When you’re ready to start tracking project execution, baseline the schedule

• Apply actual hours worked to the schedule on a regular basis

• Set the Project Status date when reporting status

The last bullet is very important. You must do this for MSP to compute the mostrecent EV data after you’ve applied hours worked.

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Interactive - #6

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Preparing for Status Reporting

• Apply all team updates -timesheets

• Mark all completed tasks 100%

• Update status date **

• Reschedule unfinished work

• If project is behind schedule and/or over budget you MUST– Identify cause

– Draw up corrective actions

– Pull from the best and brightest on your team

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Hints and Tips

• Every two weeks, have follow up 1-1 meetings to review team member effort budget, and task status

• Review your schedule during status meetings. Past due and over budget tasks should be hot agenda items

• For projects bigger then $1M (< 10,000 hrs) consider having a project controller

• Put Red Risk milestone dates on the project schedule

• Try not to go more than 5 levels deep when developing your schedule

• Know the different schedule types (process vs deliverables) and when to use them

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Even More Hints and Tips

• Your schedule contains many secrets – to do serious analysis, harvest schedule data from Resource or Task usage views, cut and paste, and analyze the numbers in Excel

• Back up current baseline whenever you rebaseline the entire schedule

• Save a new version of your schedule with every status report

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Wait, There’s Even More Hints and Tips

• MSP comes with useful canned reports. Use them to swiftly get important info (critical path, tasks behind schedule/over budget etc.) **

• Routinely publish your schedule to PDF and share with team

• Level, or at least be cognizant of over allocated resources

• Create a custom view for senior management reporting

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** The reports only work if you’re working with a schedule that has been baselined

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Questions

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