MS Project

The Top 10 Problems

MS Project - Current State

MS project plan’s can rarely provide an accurate answer to “So where are we in this project anyways?”1st Why: Because a current plan that all stakeholders agree on doesn’t exist2nd Why: Because there is way too much noise not enough signal 3rd Why: Because its too maintenance intensive to keep all open task dates accurate4th Why: Because a lot of clerical work is required whenever a single task date gets missed5th Why: Because of the hierarchical task architecture

Mark Corker

• President of Seradex – ERP Software Developer• Past Involvement with hundreds of project teams• Including software development, ERP Implementations, Lean

Manufacturing, Construction, Acquisitions etc.• Small to Mid Size Projects – 200 – 1000 tasks• Observed many excellent project teams and outcomes• Unfortunately have seen my share of project train wrecks

This Presentation is the first of 2 Parts

• In this presentation I will identify the top 10 MS Project problems

• In the next presentation I will show you my solution

MS Project

• Owns 75% of project software market• Millions of Users• The defacto industry standard• Numerous smaller competitors

Challenges When Using MS Project

• Monitoring performance against plan• Can’t proactively identify and solve problems.• No Easy process to update the plan get plan commitment.• No confidence by stakeholders on latest monthly schedule &

revisions.

Problem 1MS Project is Single User

• Deal breaker out of the gate

• Project Data has to be in the cloud

• Communication and collaboration is a key requirement of every project.

• Yes - MS Project and SharePoint can address thisBut these are costly (>$10 – 20K) to setup and configure to get a practical solution.

876 Pages

MS Project – The Cost of Collaboration

Plus• Hardware• Installation• Customization• Training

Problem 2No Change Order Control

• MS Project has no functionality to manage change orders

• Therefore no ability to make scope control transparent and visible to all stakeholders

• Every stakeholder needs to see cost and schedule impact of each change order

• No Change Order Control makes MS Project a glorified task manager

Problem 3Laborious Date Maintenance

• Multilevel and Hierarchical Task Structure - thoroughly blend forest and trees – big picture and minutia.

• Option 1 – linked task dates – if I change a date on a 4th level task all subsequent 430 task dates reflow – including into weekends, holiday and maternity periods.

• Option 2 – non linked task dates – I change a date on a 4th level task then I manually update the remaining 430 task dates

• Option 3 – Auto Leveling will scramble dates in unwanted ways

Result – 99% of MS Project Plans don’t have dates you can trust or manage to. All Noise – No Signal

Problem 4No Control on Date Changes

• Not only is it difficult to change tasks you lose the audit trail of who, why and when dates were changed

• MS Project does offer the ability to create baselines and interim plans that track start dates, finish dates, durations for every task

• Again mixing big picture and minutia so thoroughly that reporting on this detail is all noise and no signal.

• In my next presentation I will reveal a practical approach to managing dates.

Problem 5Percent Complete

MS Project offers 2 methods:• A) Effort Driven – ie if a task is scheduled for 9 days and you

run the schedule at the end of day 2 the task will be 22.2222% complete

• B) Percent Work Complete. A task with 45 hours of work and 23 hours of actual work will have a PWC of 51.1111% percent complete (23/45)

Obvious issues with precision vs accuracyNeither method provides any practical or actionable information.Again – can’t tell us where we really are in the plan

Problem 6No Embedded Approval Process

• There is no mechanism to record Stakeholders commitment either on designated time intervals or

when change orders are implemented

• Because MS Project is single user all kinds of updates can be made by the person who has the mpp file on their laptop

• Adjustments are made without discussion or buy in of all stakeholders

Problem 7BI and Custom Reporting Limits

• Communication is key for Project Success

• One Page Summary Dashboard doesn’t exist

• Not simple to generate Custom Reports from data in MPP files

• Can use Project Server and SharePoint but again complexity

• Need auto notifications, reminders, reports, updates and dashboards

• No built in ability to automatically update the stakeholders

Problem 8 No Integration to Outlook

.

• With MS Project most issues, changes, costs and project documentation are done outside of the application

• No task dates or status updates displayed in Outlook – which every user has

Problem 9No Risk Management

• Again Forest and Trees are blended

• No ability to identify 1 task or a group of tasks as high risk

• In MS Project all tasks have equal risk – all noise no signal

• Every project has areas of risk that require management attention.

Problem 10 Managing Multiple Projects

• If you are running 1 project you will have numerous challenges using MS project – as already outlined

• This is compounded exponentially if your organization runs multiple projects using overlapping resources.

The Top 10 Reasons MS Project is low Signal to Noise

1. Single User2. No Change Order Control3. Laborious Date Maintenance4. No Control on Date Changes5. Percent Complete6. No Approval Process 7. BI and Reporting Limits8. No Integration to MS Outlook9. No Risk Management10. Weak for Managing Multiple Projects

To be Continued……Presentation Part 2

If you would like to learn what I did to address the Top 10 issues please email me.

mcorker@seradex.com