Two years ago, I was involved in a project for a luxury company. The previous project manager had used Scrum as a tool to manage the project and the deliverables. After a quick introduction to this methodology, I used his tools (mainly Excel) to implement Scrum.

Today I would like to reuse Scrum in another project, but I wanted to see if it was possible to use Microsoft Project instead of Excel to manage Scrum artifacts such as Product backlog, Sprint Backlog and the Burn down chart.

Note that this article will not explain the methodology; you can check this article in Wikipedia or watch this interesting video by Hamid Shojaee for a quick course on Scrum.

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For those without Microsoft Project Server, here is a way to manage shared resources through various projects. Through the use of this method, the program manager or unit manager is able to check team member allocation and also plan projects.

 Firstly, you will need to create the resource pool by following the steps detailed below:

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Recently, I was asked if it was possible to create a task which would last the entire duration of a project (e.g. Project Management task, or weekly meeting) and set it to auto-extend should the project be delayed. Here is the solution:

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With Microsoft Project Professional, it is possible to synchronise your tasks between Project and Microsoft SharePoint. This allows project managers to take advantage of the advanced scheduling capabilities of Project Professional, whilst enjoying the collaborative capabilities of SharePoint.

In the attached PDF, I will explain the steps that will allow you to exploit this extremely useful capability.

Please click here to view the PDF

A great time-saving feature of Internet Explorer 9/Windows 7 is the capability to ‘pin’ sites to the taskbar. In doing this, not only will the user have their favourite sites close to hand, but they will also be able to use the pinned site as they do other desktop applications, as it has its own Jumplist and icons.

The good news for website owners is that the Jumplist can be customised. In the attached PDF, I will show you how you can add the pinned site functionality to your website, as well as customize the Jumplist.

Click here to view the PDF

One of the the favorite question of a project sponsor during a steering meeting is “So, what is the status of my project?” If things are looking good, a frequent answer from the project manager often sounds like this: “Well, we seem to be within the budget and it looks like we will meet the target go live date…”. If things are a bit dicey, he or she might say “Well, there have been some roadblocks and bottlenecks, so it looks like the timeline might slip by a few weeks and we will also need an additional budget…” Now if I were a project sponsor, this is definitively not what I would want to hear. I will share in this post a good way to report on project status, using a simple methodology: the Earned Value Management.

The goal of Earned Value Management (EVM) is to objectively understand what was accomplished, and compare it to work planned, in other words what was spent and how. By using EVM, the project manager wants to manage cost (and schedule) rather than just monitoring and reporting it.

Let’s take an example of a project status. The project, 10000 CHF budget, 10 days effort, will produce 10 deliverables. The status report gives the following elements: Time elapsed 5 days, spent to date 6000 CHF, deliverables produced: 5 complete and 1 half done. What is the status of this project? How far along are we? What about the performance of the team? If we spend 60% of the budget, does that imply that we have 60% of the project completed?

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Sources of project failure

After several surveys, it appears that the main cause of project failure is the lack of project management methodology.

Presented in the form of a Pareto chart, here are the main causes of project failure.

The purpose of the Pareto chart is to highlight the most important among a set of factors. In quality control, it often represents the most common sources of defects, the highest occurring type of defect, or the most frequent reasons for customer complaints.

Reading this results show us that the most important phase in project management are “Initiating” and “Planning” phases.

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