E
Eileen A
I need the advice of users who have much more Project experience than I
have.
We use MS Office Project Professional 2003 mainly as a
scheduling/coordinating tool: to track our work tasks, work estimates,
dependencies and resource assignments. We are not using it for any type
of costing.
Our intricate project will now be getting more complicated. We
recently found out that our project's initial database design needed
major improvements and needs to be reworked now (urgent). Therefore, we
must now plan for an entire database redesign effort that will run in
parallel with the project's ongoing implementation work. They are not
really "parallel" (as in not touching each other); in fact these 2
efforts are very closely interwoven and dependent on each other.
What this means in plain English is this: some tasks will continue to
be worked on as if nothing had gone wrong, and other tasks will be
stopped until the necessary database redesign work takes place. In the
meantime, the resources will be pulled back and forth between the 2
projects because they have multiple skill sets. There will be days when
they have to do database redesign work and days when they will be
working on task implementation.
The planning for this will be intricate and we don't know if MS Project
is the tool we should be using. Our manager is not a fan of MS
Project, believing it is not flexible enough to support the
rescheduling of tasks on a weekly basis. He wants to dynamically
manipulate a timeline or Gannt chart by being able to drag resource
time estimates around, so he can instantly see the effects of moving a
task. He's looking to be able to do an instant "what if" analysis: for
example, what would happen to the resource pool if we moved the work
task assigned to 2 system architects from week 1 of the project to
week 5? How does it impact other tasks? Will the system architects then
be overallocated or underallocated in those weeks and what happens to
the resource allocations of those other tasks? He wants to be able to
do these types of dynamic moves in order to model the impact/effect on
the schedule if priorities change.
My questions are these: can MS Project do what he is looking for? If
not, is there any software that can sit on top of MS Project that can
do this, or is there any freeware that can do it? Right now, he's
leaning toward having us build a tool that is more agile than MS
Project, perhaps an Excel tool to manage this effort instead of using
MS Project; this would require the use of grouped Excel worksheets and
cell formatting (for example: to show over allocation of a resource
skill set in Red font instantly). But why do this if something already
exists.
Thanks for any comments or feedback.
have.
We use MS Office Project Professional 2003 mainly as a
scheduling/coordinating tool: to track our work tasks, work estimates,
dependencies and resource assignments. We are not using it for any type
of costing.
Our intricate project will now be getting more complicated. We
recently found out that our project's initial database design needed
major improvements and needs to be reworked now (urgent). Therefore, we
must now plan for an entire database redesign effort that will run in
parallel with the project's ongoing implementation work. They are not
really "parallel" (as in not touching each other); in fact these 2
efforts are very closely interwoven and dependent on each other.
What this means in plain English is this: some tasks will continue to
be worked on as if nothing had gone wrong, and other tasks will be
stopped until the necessary database redesign work takes place. In the
meantime, the resources will be pulled back and forth between the 2
projects because they have multiple skill sets. There will be days when
they have to do database redesign work and days when they will be
working on task implementation.
The planning for this will be intricate and we don't know if MS Project
is the tool we should be using. Our manager is not a fan of MS
Project, believing it is not flexible enough to support the
rescheduling of tasks on a weekly basis. He wants to dynamically
manipulate a timeline or Gannt chart by being able to drag resource
time estimates around, so he can instantly see the effects of moving a
task. He's looking to be able to do an instant "what if" analysis: for
example, what would happen to the resource pool if we moved the work
task assigned to 2 system architects from week 1 of the project to
week 5? How does it impact other tasks? Will the system architects then
be overallocated or underallocated in those weeks and what happens to
the resource allocations of those other tasks? He wants to be able to
do these types of dynamic moves in order to model the impact/effect on
the schedule if priorities change.
My questions are these: can MS Project do what he is looking for? If
not, is there any software that can sit on top of MS Project that can
do this, or is there any freeware that can do it? Right now, he's
leaning toward having us build a tool that is more agile than MS
Project, perhaps an Excel tool to manage this effort instead of using
MS Project; this would require the use of grouped Excel worksheets and
cell formatting (for example: to show over allocation of a resource
skill set in Red font instantly). But why do this if something already
exists.
Thanks for any comments or feedback.