projectified-old

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

Deployment Practices: Why Resource Max Units Should Never Be 100%

Reason number one is that in all but the most extraordinary situations it is modeling a situation that is just not possible.

But first some background on what Max Units really is. Max Units defines the percentage of a resource’s full calendar working “period” that they can be assigned to work on tasks before Project sees them as being over-allocated.

Example:
A resource’s calendar says they come in at 8am and work until 5pm and take a 1 hour lunch. They do this Monday – Friday. That is an 8 hour work day\40 hour work week. So if the Max Units is 100% then if the resource is assigned to work 9 hours in one day they will be seen as over-allocated. Same for if they are assigned to work on 2, 1 hour tasks during the same hour. This goes down to the minute level too so if two 1 hour tasks overlap by 1 minute then for that 1 minute they are over-allocated.

This helps the PM create models of assignments and get an idea of how many hours each team member is being assigned to tasks and how that falls across time, other assignments, etc.

So now you might be seeing what is wrong with 100% Max Units. It says that if I work an 8 hour day, I am available to work 8 hours on tasks. On it’s face this sounds logical but dive a little deeper and it becomes obvious that this is just not possible. Nobody ever arrived at work at 8am, took a 1 hour lunch, and then left promptly at 5pm AND got 8 hours of work done on tasks. EVER.

OK wait, I take it back. It is possible that someone did this on your project:  IF your project schedule has tasks for things like: going to the bathroom, answering non-project related emails, going to a company meeting, being tapped on the shoulder by your cube-neighbor and being asked for “just a quick 5 mins. of help” (that turned into 30 mins), the list goes on and on. So if your project contains a task for every possible distraction from YOUR project and you expect your resources to track all of that then never mind. You can set your Max Units to 100%. (just count on a lot of churn on your team.)

But for most of us it is not possible to work 8 full hours on PROJECT WORK in an 8 hour day. Doing so means that you were present for more than 8 hours so that all the other things had time in your day along side your real work. The best way to help our models (because that what project schedules really are: models of what we want our project work to look like) be more accurate is to lower Max Units to something more like 85%. That would be the highest I would ever go on any project I was managing. I have seen it set as low as 75% at some sites but generally I see 80-85%.

What this means is that if you have a 1 day duration task and you assign a resource that has an 85% Max Units value, Project will calculate the Work for that task to be 6.8 hours. This means that you are modeling that on average this resource spends 1.2 hours of their 8  hour day doing something OTHER THAN working on your project. A Max Units value of 75% means that 2 hours is spent doing other things. Of course some will get more than 6.8 done in a day and some will get less done. It depends on the nature of their job, their relationship with other projects, other teams, etc. So the value you set will never be perfectly accurate but it WILL certainly be MORE accurate than 100% which is nearly always wrong. The point here is to make your model as accurate as you can.

 

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I’m hoping to start a small series of Deployment Practices posts here covering things I have found to be useful ideas, practices or methods for deploying Project Server. Please email me if you have suggestions or questions.

Technorati Tags: Project Server,Resource Management,EPM

Project and Project Server SP1 Are Here!

The haters should note the date please. :-)

This TechNet article covers the how to (Read it before you update):

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/c3b86049-7cba-4b9c-8335-e37fb6e7518a1033.mspx?mfr=true

Here is WSS SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4191A531-A2E9-45E4-B71E-5B0B17108BD2&displaylang=en

Here is Office Servers SP1 (which includes Project Server and Office SharePoint Server):
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ad59175c-ad6a-4027-8c2f-db25322f791b&DisplayLang=en

Here is Project 2007 SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=CEC3E1E2-D802-4A03-BC78-05C48472559B&displayLang=en

Here is the Project Server MUI SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D322BA67-B199-4503-8AFF-6813B320D708&displaylang=en

Here is the Office Server MUI SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3A6C26FD-0BEB-40D5-8CBA-15164FAAB150&displaylang=en

And for Good Measure here is the Office 2007 SP1 download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=9EC51594-992C-4165-A997-25DA01F388F5&displaylang=en

Project Blog Search

Treb is a genius. He poked around with creating macros within the Microsoft Live search engine to create a special Live search page that searches just the blogs and other community sites that revolve around Project and Project Server. You can find it here.

Dieter Moving on but Replaced Well...And a New Project Server Blog!

Dieter is moving on to another position within Microsoft. Good for him, not so great for the rest of us! He has been a great and positive force within the Project Team for years! He will certainly be missed. He does mention his replacement Keshav though. This is good news for the community and the team. Keshav has been around for a long time and will be able to fill the big shoes for sure.

He also mentions his blog replacement: The Project 12 Blog. Welcome to the blog world Lidaine!

Iterative Design\Build Loops in the Configuration of Project Server: First Pass and Initial Thoughts

I have always been a fan (and in fact a major proponent) of the idea of iteration in the long term deployment and roll out of Project Server across an organization. Myself and Russ Young of QuantumPM were one of the first ones to talk about this in the Enterprise Project Management Deployment Guide way back during the Project Server 2002 days. Our work in this area was based on ideas that were widely held not only in the Project Server consulting world but in almost all enterprise software organizations. These iterations were fairly large scale ones dealing with the staged, incremental roll out of Project Server to the many organizations within a larger organization as opposed to the massive one-time dropping of Project Server on the entire company. This approach started with a small but representative (as much as possible) group or small organization and then using the lessons learned from this group the system would be adjusted (new fields added, new views, server architecture adjusted, etc) and then another group would be added. This process would repeat until the entire organization was using the tool. Each iteration added not only new people but also new or fixed functionality in the form of views, security, process, etc. This method is now used by virtually every consulting company doing Project Server deployments.

The kind of iteration I’m talking about here happen on a much, much smaller scale and deal with the actual design and production of the configuration of the Project Server system for a given organization. Instead of dealing with the successive roll out to new organizations I'm now talking about the iterative design\build loops around adding new fields, views, security configurations within any one of those larger iterations.

Understanding of the Environment and the Problem(s) to be solved
This includes the collection of what the users want the system to do for them in addition to the observation of the system at work so that you as the consultant can help make suggestions.

Configuration\Build
From the knowledge gained so far the system is configured to the best of your ability. Fields, views, security, etc.

Simulations
most organizational uses of tools like Project Server revolve around the capture and editing of project data and then in the use of that data to make specific business decisions that effect the ability of the organization or project team to function with regard to projects. I look at kernel, the very core of Project Server’s use in an organization as the viewing of data via views or reports by decision makers. Everything else that project Server does supports this in some way or another. With this driving principle in mind the check or test of the configuration\build ‘stage’ is a simulation where decision makers use the tool as it is currently configured to simulate the decision making processes they must go through to manage their work\projects\portfolios\etc. These simulations have the decision makers using the tool in a conference room with the design team and other decision makers up on a projector. Talking through the decisions they need to make and what data they would need to see to make them. How it would need to be displayed, grouped, sorted, how it should be secured, who can see it, who can’t see it, etc.All effort toward a better understanding of how the tool will be used and what decisions it will be used to support.

Revisiting the build stage…
At this point we jump into a loop of Configuration\Build and Simulation loops that successively improve the suitability of the Project Server configuration to the needs of the decision makers that will be using it to run the business\projects\work.  If this means new views or fields then so be it. If it means configuring and rolling out the use of timesheets to those doing the work or the development of custom OLAP cube building routines to provide company specific data in Portfolio Analyzer views then that is fine too.The point is that the design\configuration happens based on simulated use of the product as it is configured currently.

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This process can take place either prior to the system ‘going live’ or as part of the addition of new users to the system. Also, a variation on this process happens on an ongoing basis while the system is being used by the organization. As people touch the system and use it as part of their project management\portfolio management processes their new experiences and new expectations become, often, new requirements for the system. The administrator of the Project Server system should constantly collect suggestions and new requirements and evaluate them with the team for inclusion in the system. This constant updating of the product’s configuration ensures that it keeps up with the most current processes in use within the organization.

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Obviously this is not rocket science and I'm not claiming to have ‘invented’ it by any means. I’m sure that many others are using similar processes for their Project Server (or other PM software) roll outs. I should also mention that this process is only suitable where the organization is able to devote several weeks (at least 3 or 4) to this initial design process. Often organizations that are rolling out Project Server have only a very short time to do their initial design and configuration. In cases like this the process laid out here may require too much time. But it should be said that while this process requires more time than many methodologies it is much more likely to produce a usable system. Shorter term processes get you up and running very quickly but at the cost of fully understanding the processes and needs of the organization.

This is just an initial layout of rough thoughts on this process. It is by no means final.

 

New Project Blog

Larry Duff from Microsoft has a blog that is mostly about developing in and around Project and Project Server. It is a MUST read for those doing Project Server development, particularly when the next version hits. The insights he will have since he has been messing with the new PSI stuff will be HUGE!

The Project Conference

The conference, as usual, was very well done. The only substantial complaint I heard was that the most popular sessions filled up too soon and some were not repeated. I can understand this but for sure it is hard to know which ones will be in the highest demand. You can have a good idea going in but there are always surprises once the sessions get going.

Treb and Dieter have already gone into the new features so I will not repeat their fine work.

I am excited most about these though:

• Segmented databases (Working, Draft, Archive and REPORTING)
  This is going to make life very nice for those working with custom reports and also solve some issues around archiving
• Project as a WSS application
  Having Project Server as an integrated part of the WSS ‘framework’ will make building customisations much easier and addresses some of the UI consistency issues that were around from before
• Server-side Scheduling Engine
  VERY cool stuff. The ability for a PM to accept timesheet\status updates and have those updates put right into the schedule without the PM having to be at a machine with Project Pro installed! It will also allow for custom applications to add data and have the project recalculated based on those changes without having to automate Project Pro.
• Deliverables
  This is the feature where a task from a project can be ‘published’ and then subscribed to from other projects reducing the need for the ‘old’ cross project dependency links between tasks. A PM ‘publishes’ a task and then any other PM can ‘subscribe’ to that and make it the predecessor to one of his own tasks in his project. Basically it is creating a cross project link without having to have both projects open at the same time to do it.

How UMT gets integrated into the product is another obvious area of excitement. I am very anxious to see how it will play out.

More later…

Blogging the Project Conference

Starting tomorrow the Project Conference in Seattle is on and I (along with others) will be blogging the high points. I will try to distill what I’m seeing and hearing into something like readable nuggets for those not able to attend.

 

Now THAT'S What I'm Talkin' About!!!

Dieter talks SERVER SIDE SCHEDULING ENGINE for the next version of Project Server!!!

Nice!