old projectified

Deployment Practices: Required Fields

Few things are more frustrating then using a system and being presented with a field you MUST fill in to continue at a time when you don’t know which value is appropriate for that field. Project Server is no exception.

You can make any enterprise custom field in Project Server a required field. At the project level this means that a project cannot be saved until each of these fields contains a value. This is great if you know for sure that the project manager will always know which value to pick from the list at the time they first save their project. But if they don’t you have a couple of things that are going to happen and you need to be prepared for them and decide if they are your intended consequences.

1. The project manager will NOT save their project until they find the answer (remember that the answer COULD be several days away.) Do you really want the PM to NOT save the project because they don’t have the answer to this one field? Where will they start their planning in the mean time? Where will their data go?
2. The project manager will pick one of the values from the list just so they can save the project even if that value is not right. Remember that they may not remember to come back and fix it when they have the right information!
3. The project manager will curse you (the administrator) and pray to their God that you be injured in some way very soon.

Number 3 is going to happen for sure, count on it. What you have to decide is if you want number 1 or number 2 to be happening while your curse\injury takes place. The easy way to avoid all three is to either NOT make fields required unless you 100% sure that the project manager will know which value pertains to their project OR provide them a “Not Yet Known” value in the lookup table.

I tend to prefer the “NOT YET KNOWN” option. It allows your views and reports to show which projects have complete field profiles and which projects are in need of more complete data. Just make sure that the people you have creating reports and views know to allow for this value in their filters. This means that if you want to show all projects where a field equals “X”  or “Y” that it should also contain projects where it equals “Not Yet Known” because those projects MIGHT be "X” or “Y”, we just don’t know yet. :-)

 

Technorati Tags: Project Server,EPM

WIP for Knowledge Work

I saw this post at Learning about Lean via Frank's Focused Performance blog and it speaks well about the issues we all face as consumers of data and information. But more importantly it made me think about WIP for the first time since I was doing process and project management work at Boeing in 1996-1997. I thought a lot about it then when I was dealing with manufacturing but not so much since then as I have been doing 'info work.'

The thing it made me to tonight was to think about not just my inbox (as Joe Ely mentions directly) but also about the partly finished "things" I have laying around and the creative price of not having all of them done. It made me think about the partly finished specs for Project Server addin's that I had to put aside for other more pressing commitments and it made me think about the half incubated ideas for papers and blog posts that I scrawled down when I was on a plane or in a meeting and an idea hit me but I had no time for finishing it out.

I think the real price is that as I go back over some notebooks and OneNote sections that hold these seeds I am struck by how complete I remember the thought being when I made the note and how incomplete I think they are NOW. I have lost something between then and now. I'm pretty sure I can get it back but how long am I going to have to think about each of these ideas to get back to where I was 2 months ago?

So what I took from Joe's post (even though it was not what he wrote about exactly) was that I need to do a better job of documenting what I know will become long term on-hold WIP so that when I get the chance to get back to it I will not have to spend hours rethinking it to get back on track with it.

You all have these on-hold projects sitting around in notebooks and in Word documents. How many of them are in a state where you could pick them up right now and start working on them without a lot of re-publishing and rethinking? Think about it.

What's in Your Bag?

I have seen these posts in a few places so here is mine. Here is a list of everything in my Laptop bag:

1. Timbuk2 Large padded laptop bag. There are two sizes, get the bigger one. I have also noticed that Timbuk2 started making a version of this bag out of a lessor material. Mine has a backing on the inside of the outer material that is waterproof. The new ones do not have this. Not sure it matters since I'm not planning on getting it wet. :-) Great bag! Holds everything and is tough. I have had this bag almost a year and it looks brand new!
2. Toshiba M5
3. Spare laptop battery
4. iGo charger for laptop and phone
5. Cingular 8525 Phone (If Cingular reads this PLEASE release the upgrade to 6.0. PLEASE!!!)
6. Zune for music
7. IPod 30gig Video for Video (when the Zune lets you get TV shows I will can my IPod)
8. Cannon Powershot SD30 camera
9. GPS sensor for Streets and Trips
10. Bag with about 10 different USB cables (Ipod, Zune, Phone, etc) plus small screwdrivers, etc
11. Microsoft LifeCam NX-6000. Great if you are on the road and have small kids. Video chat through Live Messenger is not the same as being home but it helps my daughter!
12. Microsoft LifeChat ZX-6000 Wireless headset.
13. 80 gig USB hard drive (Music, Document backups, etc)
14. 320 gig USB hard drive (Virtual machine library, full machine backups)
15. 4gig USB Flash Drive
16. 10 foot Network cable
17. Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. Coolest\Geekiest mouse EVER. Bluetooth so you don't need to waste a USB slot on it. Just the right size and if you press a button and turn it over it has PowerPoint slide controls and a laser pointer!
18. Compact USB hub
19. Ziploc with tiny packets of decongestant, Ibuprofen, etc)
20. Small Moleskine notebook
21. Large quad rules Moleskine notebook
22. One novel (Right now it is an old Horatio Hornblower), one non-fiction book (Right now it is Halberstam's Best and the Brightest)
23. Travel Document holder for tickets, receipts and the like
24. CPR Kit (gloves and and mouth to mouth mask) (because you never know when you might need it)