Manager's View of Large Numbers of Projects

[Brian Whiting]

I'm trying to see if Project or Project Server can give me a manager's
viewpoint across a large number of projects. Project does far more than I
need for any one project, a simple Access database can hold everything I
need for simplistic projects, and can give me the management view I need to
create via forms capability. For instance I need to be able to create an
interactive form that can list all my engineers' summary project worklists,
click on an engineer and show their individual worklist of projects, then
click on a project and show the interactive project main form for that
project. Most of the projects done by this team are single person projects
and I expect an inventory of about 100-250 open projects at any one time.

I have looked over the Project Server and project lists and the Microsoft
web pages for them and have not been able to figure out if they can natively
do this kind of summary work. Does anyone have experience doing this or
have a good web reference I can look at?

 

[Mark Everett | PMP]

Brian - While I am not entirely clear about your requirements, I think
I get the gist of it. So let me summarize:

- > For instance I need to be able to create an interactive form that
can list all my engineers' summary project worklists.

This would be a simple grouping of project information by project
owner. This would show the project owner name, followed by the
project's at a summary level.

- > then click on a project and show the interactive project main form
for that project.

This is an out of the box capability. The project is shown at a
summary level. When you click on the summary, you will see project
detail.

In addition, you have the ability to use Analysis Services to "slice
and dice" project and resource information and WSS, which provides a
lite version SharePoint Services. Out of the box, you have Issues,
Risks and Documents plus some other features. The list feature can be
used to create just about any list you need, such as Action Items,
Change Requests, etc.

As a reference - I recommend the book that QuantumPM wrote (full
disclosure, I work for them) or the Admin and PM books that
MSProjectExperts wrote. The QuantumPM book is indexed and comes with a
CD so you have an eBook.

Hope this helps. Feel free to contact me.

Mark S. Everett
www.quantumpm.com

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Brian --

When you want to look at an engineer's work list, are the engineers project
managers or are they only team members? Let us know.

 

[Brian Whiting]

Although there is a project management force, it's my intention to eliminate
their involvement in the smaller projects. Virtually all technical effort
involved in a project is done by the engineers. In the past I have had the
team members use MS Project for single projects that are unusually complex &
involve several teams. In those cases the engineers were still tasked via
the workflow system and reported major milestones with it. Using project to
coordinate all the teams' actions was done at their own discretion. All
workflow reporting was done out of the internal custom workflow system.

Brian

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Brian --

Given your response, you can view the work of each engineer across all
projects in the system using the View Resource Assignments link in the
sidepane on the left side of the Resource Center page. It won't work quite
the way you describe, but it will ultimately show you what you want to see.
Hope this helps.

 

[Brian Whiting]

Can you tell me what products are required to do this? Will I require
sharepoint plus sql plus other stuff?

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Brian --

Refer to the following URL for a description of Project Server:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/project/prodinfo/epm/default.mspx

Contact your Microsoft rep for information about required software and
pricing. Hope this helps.

 

[BCW]

Brian --

Refer to the following URL for a description of Project Server:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/project/prodinfo/epm/default.mspx

Contact your Microsoft rep for information about required software and
pricing. Hope this helps.

Thanks. I managed to find the section that ties most of it together that I
missed before. It does sound like going this route will be much more
expensive than just implementing the simple things I want to do via Access.

 

[Steve Rollins]

Brian, by moving to Access you are losing the EPM power MS Project to
optimize your work (no much how small) for best efficieny in value in how
allocated your resources are and how fast your team can deliver projects.

In other words, you will be giving up control of the resource sense of
urgency since your focus will the single project not how the whole mix can be
delivered faster. Is this what you really want to do?