Few Questions on Reporting / Grouping

[Matt D.]

Hi all,

Forgive me if this is obvious, but I haven't been using Project like this in
a while, so I forget what it can and can't do.

I work in a small company where we typically have 10-20 jobs running
simultaneously. We recently got all of our schedules into Project and have
them in a decent format for our workflow. We have each individual job in its
own MPP, and we have a master MPP that just imports all of the jobs for the
company. This is working for us, and in general we can get the status and
reports that we need by using the master MPP.

Anyway, here is a typical scenario we run into. Say a client is X days late
on something (like an approval), and they know it will cause at least a
day-for-day slip. We can update the MPP for that job accordingly, but I
would like to see what the impact is on the master schedule. Primarily, I
would like to identify milestones that occur on the same day (ie, did the
slip cause two milestones to occur on the same day) because this is bad for
our workflow. What is the best way to do this, other than scrolling a Gantt
chart up and down? Is this something that would need to be a VBA macro?

A related problem is that when I do reporting / grouping on our master
schedule, tasks don't make sense out of the context of the project name and
summary task name. Is there any way to do reporting / grouping that
concatenates project name, summary task names, with the job name onto a
single line? I have been playing with the various options without luck.

Thanks for any ideas or starting points.

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

For your first problem: Filter for the milestones, then Project, Sort, Sort
By..., select Start, make sure to deselect Keep Outline structure. Identical
dates now follow suit. O course you could also write something in VBA.


For your second problem: Fellow MVP wrote a macro doing just what you need.
Look it up on
http://www.masamiki.com/project/summaryname.txt

Hope this helps,

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
+32 495 300 620
For availability check:
http://users.online.be/prom-ade/Calendar.pdf

 

[Matt D.]

Thanks a bunch.

The summaryname macro is a great starting point for what I need.

My saved filter for uncompleted milestones was including summary rows, which
was making the sort behave oddly. It looks like if don't include summary
rows, and use the summaryname macro, I can get the report I want.

 

[Jim Aksel [MVP]]

I think a baseline for the dates will help you tremendously. You can set
baselines under Tools/Tracking/Set Baseline
What this does is keep a record of your original planned dates. You can do
the same in the master. There are many "baseline columns" for
Start/Finish/Cost/Duration, etc.

Now look at the Tracking Gantt (from the View menu). It shows the baseline
dates underneath the Gantt bars.
Insert the column "Finish Variance" which is the number of days the task
will finish different from the baseline finish (could be positive or
negative right?). Using the auto filter, you can filter on the Finish
Variance column for >0 to see all the late finish tasks. It will also keep
your outline structure for you. If you want to only see the milestones,
then also filter on Duration = 0.

Let us know how things work out with any of the methods posted.

HTH

Jim Aksel

 

[Matt D.]

Thanks Jim. I think baselines will help. I also think that I need to find a
one day course to refresh my memory on all of the features.

 

[Prasad]

Matt,

I understand that you simultaneously perform 20 - 30 jobs in your
organization (probably manufacturing) and maintain a schedule for each
job in a separate mpp file. If a few common resources are required by
jobs for various operations, then an update of a job schedule in an
mpp file may cause resource overloading which necessitates updating
other mpp files (corresponding to the affected job shop schedules).
Without a powerful scheduling tool, it could be laborious and time-
consuming to resolve such resource overloading. I wonder how easily
you are updating the affected job schedules in order to avoid resource
overloading whenever there is a major change in one job schedule. I
hope I did not misunderstand your multi-project system.

Prasad