May 13
When MS Project isn’t worth the effort, what do you use?
Susan Cotts
I started my career in 1990 and I've been with C/D/H for 16 years now.
Some of my most interesting projects include: SharePoint publishing portals, SharePoint extranet collaboration portals, and SharePoint executive dashboard portals.
When I'm not at work I care for my family, play with my kids, downhill ski, fish, run, vacation on the beach, summer BBQ with friends, volunteer at my church, etc.
I’m a pretty ordinary middle aged working mother, and I love it!
More about Susan
Articles by Susan Cotts
I’ve been an IT project manager for over 13 years, and there have been many occasions where the effort to develop and maintain a complete MS Project project plan has been critical to a project’s success.
MS Project has been, and continues to be, a very useful PM tool, but I’ve also been in situations where maintaining an MS Project project plan just isn’t feasible due to time, resource and/or budget constraints. In those situations, I’ve found that you still need some level of project planning, resource tracking, task assignments, and task tracking. You need a quick and dirty project plan!
Before collaboration tools like SharePoint, Excel spreadsheets seemed to do the trick. A quick project task list in Excel with columns for description, assignment to and status worked. Now, however, I use SharePoint 2007 for my quick and dirty version of project management! And, it works!
If you have more than one project or 2-3 subprojects that relate to a single project, then I recommend the SharePoint 2007 template, Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects, built for WSS 2.0.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb407286.aspx
You can quickly enter a project list, create a list of milestones for the projects listed, and then create the tasks related to those milestones. Furthermore, you can easily track project issues and add a contacts list for the team to use. The template has built-in dashboards for “My Items”, “Overdue Items”, and “Unassigned Items” that quickly give you the status of the work being performed. C/D/H has enhanced and customized this template over time, and our internal PMO team is now planning to implement it as a part of our standard PMO toolkit.