Does MS Project allow routing for approval to department heads?

[Terecy Joyce Chia]

When making changes in the project schedule, there must be a basis or a
reason for the said change.Once a change has been made, is it possble to be
routed for approval to department heads before the change will be implemented?

It has also come to my attention that a part of data extraction can be done
by generating reports with Copy Picture wizard feature....is there another
feature wherein data could be extracted to MS-Excel?

My last question would be....In order to post a reason for making any change
in project schedule, the user must be required to give his reason, how is
that possible to appear?or how is that possible to alert?will i use macro for
the desired output?

Kindly respond to my questions if anyone of you would have the knowledge
about it..thank you very much.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

By "user" is presume you mean "resource" - one of the people doing the work
of the project. Changes introduced into the project plan on the initiative
of resources without prior approval of the Project Manager are one source of
the very expensive phenomenon called "scope creep." Instead of allowing
them to enter changes into the plan, even with a documented reason, I'd
suggest you put into place a formal scope management process and require all
proposed changes to the plan, without exception, be submitted in writing
(perhaps create a standard form for this) to the Project Manager. Establish
a policy that no changes affecting project scope can be implemented or the
plan revised without a written approval in response and all approved changes
will be entered into the plan solely by you, the PM. Letting the resources
do it on their own initiative is comparable to a General letting the
Lieutenants decide the strategy of a campaign.

Reject changes that request organizational or facilities changes such as
suggestions for a salary increase or purchase of new laptops for the field
engineers (for example). Reject changes that are outside the defined
project scope unless they are for scope elements that you inadvertently left
out in the planning process. For all others, assess their impact on the
project schedule and budget as part of the approval process. If the impact
is minor, you can make the decision yourself in consultation with the
project team. If it is moderate, an impact statement should be drafted and
circulated among the stakeholders for comment and approval. If it will be
major, a formal business case should be prepared and the approval process
expanded to include the Project Sponsor and senior management.

Circulating changes to the department heads for approval is getting it
backwards unless they happen to also be stakeholders. The approval of
changes to the plan is a decision normally made far above the pay grade of
the functional department heads. Instead, resources and/or their department
heads should be submitting proposed changes to you, the project's leader.
You, usually in conjunction with the Project Sponsor (the senior executive
you report to on project matters and under whose authority you act) and the
Project Stakeholders, and not the functional managers, are the final
authority on whether or not changes are approved. In other words, you don't
ask them to approve a change or not - *you* decide on all changes and in the
event the plan is revised you inform them that of that fact.

You can extract / export a lot of project data to Excel in several different
ways. The "Copy Picture" is just that, a picture, an image file. While you
can paste it into any other applications you wish, it goes in as a graphic
and you can't access the actual data that it is based on directly from it.
How to extract the data depends on what your objective is. If you can go
into a little more detail, we'll try to help.

Hope this helps

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Terecy,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Apart from Steve's excellent advice, the question of exporting to Excel
could be answered from the Analysis toolbar and selecting Analyze Timescaled
Data in Excel...

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on )

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Terecy Joyce Chia]

Thank you very much for your abrupt response....I'll push through with my
research ang i think that the information that you shared would help a lot in
my upcoming deadline.I'll post messages again if i have more questions.

 

[Mike Glen]

You're welcome, Terecy

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP