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Dave Ludwig: Today we're going to be talking about tracking your progress in Project 2013.
Why track progress? Why do we need to do that? We need to see what's been completed and what
hasn't. We need to also see what's on time, what has slipped or perhaps what's even early.
That's always a good thing. Dave Ludwig: So let's just dive in here and
look at our Gantt chart that we've been making during the previous webinars. Okay, during
the other webinars we made this company party project, okay? What we did is we listed out
all the tasks that is needed to plan and prepare and implement a company party, okay? We gave
a bunch of estimates for each task, and then we linked them all together, and we found
that if we start on June 18th we will finish by July 17th. You can also see that over here
on the lower right here, okay? Our boss has told us that this date cannot budge. We've
got to have the company party on July 17th, okay? It's a company anniversary or something
like that. Dave Ludwig: So we go ahead and we look at
this project, and we say "Okay, what do we do now?" We've set-up this plan, but really
it's only just a plan. It's almost like a theory or it's in our heads. It's like imaginary,
okay? These things should happen on these various days, but will they actually happen
that way? Who knows, right? Stuff happens, right? The best laid plans often go awry.
So we need to track our progress as the project actually starts and people actually start
to do work, okay? Dave Ludwig: The way you do that is you go
up here to the task tab, and you use one of these buttons, okay? Often you'll just click
"100 percent," and that deems that task complete. But before you do that it's a good idea to
set a baseline, okay? And I'm just going to do that here. I'm going to go up to the project
tab. I'm going to go to "set baseline" and then "set baseline" again and then "set baseline"
again, okay? I'm just breezing through that dialog box. There's a lot more you can do
there, but for beginners this is a good way to explain this.
Dave Ludwig: So a baseline, you didn't hear it, but it's almost like Project just did
a little like camera shutter, like "chi-chi," took a little picture, okay? It didn't take
a picture like a screenshot. It took a picture of all this data here and said "Okay, this
is the baseline of your plan. This is your original plan. We're going to remember this
baseline so that later when we track our progress we can compare that progress to the original
plan, the baseline, okay?" So you can see that baseline by going up to this Gantt chart
tools format tab. This is sort of a treasure trove tab that I actually didn't see until
several months after the release. It took me a while. And you can turn on your baseline,
and you can see there your baseline shows up underneath each of the task bars, okay?
So it's kind of nice, because it's a baseline. It's at the base of each of these task bars.
The gray is the baseline, the original plan, and then the blue is the actual progress,
okay? And right now it hasn't changed, because we haven't tracked any progress yet, but that's
how you see the baseline, okay? Go ahead and make this a little bigger here, resize our
columns so we can see everything. Okay, great. Dave Ludwig: So I'm going to turn off the
baseline for a moment, and we're just going to track some progress, okay? I'm going to
say to Dave "Dave, were you able to brainstorm ideas?" Oh, excuse me. I'm going to back up.
One thing before you start tracking your progress is you might want to set your-- or you should
set your project status date, okay? That's up here on the project tab, status date, and
let's pretend it's the end of Friday, June 21st, so I'll go ahead and type that status
date in there. You want to do that when you want to run reports or track progress as of
a certain day, like we're doing this as of June 21st, okay? So we plug that date in.
Dave Ludwig: So it's the end of this week, end of all these tasks, and we want to check
in with people to make sure they've been done or what's the status of each. So we say to
Dave "Dave, have you brainstormed ideas, and did you do that in one day?" He says "Yes."
So we go up to "task," we mark it 100 percent complete, and then two things happen. One,
you've got a checkmark here signifying it's complete, and you also get this dark blue
line that fills this whole task bar here, okay? That symbolizes that's been complete.
It's filled up there, okay? And if you hover over the bar you can see it's 100 percent
complete in that little tip. Okay. Dave Ludwig: We ask Sheila then "Sheila, did
you approve the ideas in a day?" She says "Yes." We mark that 100 percent complete.
We ask Ed "Ed, did you draft the budget on the 20th?" He says "Yes." We mark that 100
percent complete, okay? And another way you can do this is you can also rest your cursor
over the bar and then just drag, and that will fill that bar up and make it 100 percent
complete, okay? Dave Ludwig: Then we ask Sheila "Sheila, did
you approve the budget on the 21st?" And she says "You know what, I didn't get to it. I
have a lot of other things going on. I just didn't have time." And a good project manager
instead of telling her "Hey, you dropped the ball"-- a good project manager will say "Oh,
okay. What are the solutions we have here? Well, we got to figure out what we can do
to change the plan and get this working on time."
Dave Ludwig: So a couple things we can do, right? We can look at her task, and it looks
like she's linked. This task is linked to this milestone, and this milestone is linked
to this task and so forth and so on, so if she slips this task, if she's late, then our
party is probably going to be late, right? So we could unlink her, but if you link to
task in the first place it's probably a good idea to keep that link, okay, especially this
one. She's approving the budget, and that's a predecessor for all these tasks to be successful,
okay, renting a space, hiring a caterer. These guys got to know how much money they can spend,
so we have to think of another way to do this. We've got to come up with another solution.
Dave Ludwig: So she tells us that she's going to be able to do this on the 24th. We're going
to change our plan. We're going to say "Okay, fine. Sheila's going to do this on June 24th,"
okay? We're going to move the task but keep that link, right, because we don't want to
remove it. That would defeat the purpose of her approving the budget and all that. So
we'll click "OK." And sure enough what we suspect is true. We're now going to have this
party on the 18th, and you can see that here on our final milestone here, okay? That's
not ideal, right? We want to have that party on the 17th. Our boss said so.
Dave Ludwig: So what do we do here? Well, another way to identify if you're going to
be late is to turn on that baseline, right? There's our baseline. We can see, okay, here
is the original plan, and here's when she actually will do the task, okay, which in
turn slips these guys out, and you see these slip here, and you see the actual party slips
out a day, so another way to see if you're on time or not, okay? Turn off that baseline.
Dave Ludwig: All right, so we obviously need to shorten some tasks by a day so that we
can meet this goal date of July 17th. How do we do that? How do we identify which tasks
we can do that with? Click "critical tasks," okay? Critical tasks will show the tasks in
pink that are on that critical path, and a critical path is a chain of linked tasks that
directly affects the project finish date. If any task on the critical path is late the
whole project is late, right? I like to think of it like a tugboat pushing a bunch of barges
in front of it, right? They all have to get to the harbor, okay, and so if the tugboat's
late the others are going to be late. Dave Ludwig: So let's look at the Gantt chart
again here. And Sheila is that tugboat, right? She's pushing these big barges here into the
harbor, okay, and these are the ones we need to shorten to make our date, okay? So what
do we do? We look at these critical tasks. Aaron, Bill and Colleen here have a "hold
the event" task. Can we shorten that task by a day? That doesn't really make sense,
right, because we need to have a party, so we can't shorten that by a day. How about
setting-up the party, okay? I ask Aaron, Bill and Colleen "Can you maybe shorten that to
a half a day or quarter of a day or something?" and they say "No way, man. We need to set-up
for this party. It's a big party." Okay? Purchase decorations. That's not a critical task. We
couldn't shorten that, and if we shortened it it wouldn't have any impact on this end
date, right? Same with "practice speech," right? If we shorten this we'd still have
these to do, which are on that critical path and push out the end date. And of course Sheila,
she's got to have a day to do the approval of the budget, so we really need to focus
on these three tasks here, Scott, Colin and Doug, all right?
Dave Ludwig: So we ask Scott. We say "Scott, can you rent an event space in nine days instead
of 10?" and he says "Sure." So we notch that down and we click away, and Scott's Gantt
shrinks up a little bit. Actually it shrinks more than a day, because earlier in another
webinar we taught you how to log vacation for a resource, and we did that for Scott.
He's going to Vegas for a week. All right. Dave Ludwig: Hire a caterer, 15 days. We ask
Colin "Hey, can you do that in 14 days instead?" and he says "Yeah, I can do that." So we notch
that down, click away, and his bar shrinks by a day. Great. And then finally "Doug, can
you rent some equipment in 14 days? Can you do that?" He says "Yes, I can accommodate
that." Notch it down, and the bar shrinks, and the critical path therefore shrinks, and
our party now can be held on the 17th, okay? So that's how to see your critical tasks.
And why do you want to see your critical tasks? Those are the tasks that you can shave off
and save some time, okay? Dave Ludwig: So let's keep going here and
track more progress on this thing. So we'll go to the project tablet. Say the status date
is July 5th, okay, and now we need to mark more things complete here. So we're going
to go ahead and ask Sheila "Sheila, did you indeed approve the budget?" She says "Yes,
I did," so we mark that 100 percent complete. And the milestone, we mark that complete too.
Even though there's no one assigned to it we'll mark that guy complete too because all
its previous tasks are completed. Dave Ludwig: And then rent the event space.
I check in with Scott. I say "Scott, are you done renting the event space? What's going
on? What's your status?" He says "I'm 90 percent done. I just have a few little last-minute
details to take care of." We don't have a 90 percent button, so we can double-click
the task and we can get this task information box, and that's where we can enter a 90. Incidentally,
lots of other amazing functionality here on the task level, okay? So you'll want to check
that out if you already have a lot of knowledge in project management, okay? And that's 90
percent done. I'll turn off the critical tasks for a moment, and you can see, oh, okay, Scott's
bar is filled up to the 90 percent point. That's great.
Dave Ludwig: "Colin, how are you doing on hiring a caterer?" He says "I'm like 25 percent
there. I haven't really done a lot of work on it." So we mark that 25 percent. We ask
Doug "Doug, how you doing on renting that equipment?" He's like "Thumbs up, 75 percent.
I'm right on track." Great. Ask John "How are you doing on the speech?" He's done, 100
percent. "Kurt, how you doing on purchasing those decorations?" He just grumbles something
and sort of walks away, so obviously he hasn't started yet, so we'll leave that at zero.
Dave Ludwig: So when you're tracking progress like this you want to look for late tasks,
okay? And today's the fifth, July 5th, okay, so we just need to scan down here and see,
okay, which of these bars have the dark blue completion that's reaching the 5th. Scott
has it. Colin's not quite there yet. Actually he's several days behind. We'll check in with
him and see how he's doing, see if he needs help. Doug has completed all the way. That's
great. Kurt hasn't. So another way to see these late tasks instead of scanning down
like this, go back to that format tab. That thing's amazing. Click "late tasks," and you
can see, boom, late tasks right there as of the project status date.
Dave Ludwig: And then this report tab's pretty amazing too. Go up here, click "dashboards,"
"project overview," and this gives you an overview of what's happening with this project.
We've got percent complete on the total tasks in the project. We've got this breakdown here
of which tasks are complete and which are partial, and we got late tasks identified
here too. There's a lot of customization you can do to these reports too, so check that
out if you're interested. Dave Ludwig: Another good one, resource overview.
We showed this in a previous webinar. See our baseline here? That's the number of hours
for each resource we originally planned, okay, and blue is how much they've done, orange
is what's left. That's helpful to see. And then also in-progress late tasks, another
nice report that breaks down what is late, and then percentages of each tasks on schedule
is the orange, okay? Late is the gray. I think that's gray. Yeah, gray. So check out those
reports as you're going through your Gantt chart and ticking off tasks, okay?
Dave Ludwig: So that's the tip of the iceberg for tracking progress in your schedule. If
you want more information about this topic go to aka.ms/project4, and there's some links
down there at the bottom. Not only are there links at the top that refer to our other webinars,
but the links at the bottom will give you more information, including how Project works
behind the scenes with its scheduling. We also have a link there to longer webcasts
that might be more in-depth if you're needing more detail, okay? Of course you can go to
aka.ms/offweb for just general information about our webinars, including a calendar,
a downloadable reminder and so forth and so on.
Dave Ludwig: Next week Doug's going to talk about ergonomics at the computer. That'll
be a really interesting webinar, kind of take us out of the user interface or the programs
and really talk about our bodies and how we should align them in a healthy way when we
work with our computers, so you'll want to come back for that next week.
Dave Ludwig: Special thanks to folks on the IM thread today, Eli, Scott, Doug, Bruce and
Chris, and thanks very much for stopping by. Stick around for that Q&A and we'll answer
any of the questions you need. Thanks.