The PureProject Group Newsletter

Volume 1, Issue 2, February, 2003

Hello and welcome to the February, 2003 issue of the PureProject Group's monthly Project Management Newsletter. We're here to provide information and helpful tips on project management and related fields to small businesses and solo workers.

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In this Issue:

This month, we're tackling the tough subject of scheduling! This is a huge topic; in fact, it's so big we're going to spread our coverage over two months. This month, we'll talk about when to use a Scheduling Tool and show you the basics of schedule creation. We've also got a high level review of FastTrack, a project scheduling tool for the Mac and the PC. Next month, we'll talk about using schedules during project implementation and after the project is over, and we'll take a look at Microsoft Project Standard.

February Table of Contents

Topic of the Month - Building a Schedule

Software Review - FastTrack 8.0

Helpful Tips - Formatting The Critical Path in Microsoft Project

What's Up with Us - Rate Setting Seminar

About Us

Topic of the Month - Building a Schedule

Each month, we provide you with helpful information on project management topics. For more information on this month's topic, check out the resources section of our website at www.pureproject.com/scheduling resources.

Why bother? The tools are complicated, building a schedule takes forever and it's always wrong anyways! Well, it's nice to blame Microsoft, or software tools in general, but in truth, scheduling tools can be very useful and the tools aren't really that bad. So, when is it a good idea to build a "real" project schedule? If your project is quick, you've done the work before and your team is very small, don't bother with a schedule. Just write all the tasks down in Excel and calculate the number of hours required for each task. Simple. But If two of the following conditions are present, it's time to build a real schedule.

The project takes more than a month
The project involves more than one person
You are not quite sure what activities are required
You've done the work before, but your estimates were overly optimistic
The client wants a fixed bid for the project

Yes, a Scheduling Tool takes time to learn and requires a cash investment, but these tools work. They can save you time and money. A scheduling tool has the following benefits:

Helps you accurately identify and estimate the real time and cost of all project work.

Shows what resources you will need to do the work.

Highlights the relationships between activities and the order in which the work will occur.

Reduces project risk. Helps you identify time and cost concerns early, when you can still do something about them.

Allow you to track and measure progress on projects.

Improve schedule accuracy. At the end of each project, you can compare your estimates to actuals and make improvements in your assumptions.

Establishes an agreement between the team and the client as to your process and the scope of work.

Let's have a look at the schedule creation process.

Methodology - The most important element in a schedule is the methodology or process you use to do your work. The process is the set of activities you must complete to get the project done. While you probably "know" this process well, it's really useful to write all the steps down. This outline is known in the Project Management Biz as a Work Breakdown Structure or WBS, but we don't care what you call it. The import thing is to include ALL the tasks required to complete the project, not just the ones you are responsible for. Don't leave out anything you need to get paid for or that will extend the duration of the project. You'll still have to do the work, even if you forget to include it in your list, you'll just have to do it for free.

Let's use an example to highlight this process. Let's say you and your friend decide to make dinner. The menu includes pasta with pesto sauce, salad and your special garlic bread. We assume you have all the ingredients in your house before the project starts.

Make Dinner Task List
Open wine
Make pesto sauce
Prepare garlic bread
Wash and tear lettuce
Boil water
Cook pasta
Cut up veggies for salad
Make salad dressing
Heat pesto sauce
Broil garlic bread
Final pasta prep
Toss salad
Set table
Serve food
Eat dinner

Task Definition - All schedules are based upon the work you do to complete a project. You have to be sure to identify and define every task required. Defining tasks is a great way to make sure that everyone on your team and your client know what work is required. In our example, we don't need to spend much time on this step because we all have a good understanding of the tasks required to make a pasta dinner. If your process is technical or just new to your client, we recommend you write down definitions of each task and make sure your client and team know what each task entails.

Task Duration - Once you've got your list of tasks identified, you need to think about how long each activity will take. You may have a pretty good idea about activity durations, but we strongly recommend you talk to your team members, the people who will do the work. They may know more than you about the work required, and they may take more or less time than you would to accomplish a specific task. Our two-person dinner prep team has identified durations for each activity.

Task Durations

Open wine	1 minute
Make pesto sauce	20 minutes
Prepare garlic bread	10 minutes
Wash and tear lettuce	4 minutes
Boil water	10 minutes
Cook pasta	10 minutes
Cut up veggies for salad	5 minutes
Make salad dressing	4 minutes
Heat pesto sauce	5 minutes
Broil garlic bread	5 minutes
Final pasta prep	2 minutes
Toss salad	1 minute
Set table	5 minutes
Serve food	3 minutes
Eat dinner	1 hour

The Precedence Network - Okay, this list looks pretty comprehensive, but what about the order of events and the ownership of each task? So far, we've just created a list of activities and assigned durations to each one. Now we need to link all these activities together and come up with a final order of events. This linking process is formally called The Precedence Network, but this is just a fancy way of saying that we need to know the order in which activities occur, and the relationship of each activity to the other activities in our process.

There are four ways to link activities together.
1. Finish- Start (FS) - The most common relationship between activities. As the name implies, the first activity must be completed before the next one begins. For example, the garlic bread can't be cooked until the garlic butter is spread on the bread.
2. Start-Start (SS) - Two relationships that start concurrently. Since we have two workers and some activities don't require human effort, we can start a number of activities concurrently. For example, we can start boiling the water at the same time we begin the pesto sauce preparation.
3. Finish - Finish(FF) - This relationship employs the same logic as the Start-Start relationship, except both activities end on the same day. For example, we want our pasta to be finished at the same time as our pesto.
4. Start - Finish (SF) - The first activity cannot start until the second activity is finished. According to my management books, this relationship is not very useful and I've certainly never seen it used in a project schedule.
Schedule Creation - Alrighty, it's time to put everything together. Our team has two members, you are a pesto expert, and your friend is known for her garlic bread. Each team member will focus on their specialty, but what about the other activities, the ones anyone can do, like washing lettuce? Where do these activities fit in the dinner making process? Perhaps you are beginning to realize that the order of activities, the duration of each activity, and the number of people available to do the work is interrelated. Since anyone can wash salad and cut up vegetables, we'll assign them to the team members who have time available when this work needs to be done.

We've pasted in a graphic showing our final schedule. We created this schedule in Microsoft Project 2002, Standard Edition. In case you were wondering. We don't cook much, so our apologies if the time estimates are inaccurate. Yes, yes, we should have consulted pesto and garlic bread experts, and we would if were really going to make this meal!

Let's look at this schedule and see what's going on. First off, what's with all the red text? Red highlights the activities on the Critical Path. Urgh, not another new concept! Don't worry, it's not too complicated and it's so useful! The Critical Path is the set of related activities that make up on the longest route through the schedule. All these activities, laid out in a long line, determine the end date of your schedule. Let's look at our dinner making schedule.

Making the pesto sauce is the longest activity, other than eating, on our schedule. We also have to finish making the pesto before we can heat it or add it to the pasta. This means if the pesto takes longer to make, dinner will be delayed. Or, in project management parlance, the critical path will be extended. Alrighty, enough with the project management jargon, let's stick with the real word language!

Fortunately, we have two people on our project, so our garlic bread expert can focus on opening the wine, preparing the bread and putting the salad together while the pesto work is underway. We have one more advantage in our dinner prep schedule: technology. The pasta water can heat and the pasta can cook with almost no human involvement. Just think how long dinner preparation took before gas stoves and running water! We've set our schedule up so that the water is hot early in the process and the pasta is ready just as we finish heating the pesto sauce.

The fact that the schedule text is mostly red is a good sign. This means that almost all our tasks are on the Critical Path. Translation, no one is sitting around waiting for other work to finish or to receive deliverables. Of course, sitting around while making dinner might be a good thing!

Hopefully, this simple example highlights the power of a project scheduling tool over a piece of scrap paper or an excel spreadsheet.

If our example convinced you that building schedules is in your future (yeah, right!) we've added lots of useful new resource listing on scheduling to our website. www.pureproject.com scheduling resources.

Software Review - Fasttrack 8.0

This month, we take a look at Fasttrack 8.0 by AEC Software. This scheduling tool is an affordable alternative to Microsoft Project Standard.

Windows Platform

Windows XP/Me/2000/98/95 or Windows NT 4.0®
Pentium® processor or greater
16 MB of RAM
50 MB of available hard disk space
Color monitor with 800 x 600 resolution or greater
CD-ROM drive or Internet access

Mac Platform

Mac OS 9.1 or Mac OS X version 10.1.3 or greater
PowerPC® processor or greater
16 MB of RAM
50 MB of available hard disk space
Color monitor with 800 x 600 resolution or greater
CD-ROM drive or Internet access

FastTrack 8.0 by AEC software is a Project Scheduling tool for the Mac and PC platforms. It is, as far as we know, the only scheduling tool that runs on both platforms. One of the best things about this tool is the price, which runs around $270 plus shipping. This compares with around $460 to $500 plus shipping for Microsoft Project Standard Edition.

We found FastTrack easy to learn. The interface is fairly straightforward and if you have experience with Microsoft Project, the learning curve will be quick. Even without scheduling tool experience, learning FastTrack should not prove difficult. The tool uses a drag and drop approach to schedule development. Where MS Project pretty much builds a basic schedule as you enter tasks and durations, FastTrack requires the user to create linkages between tasks one at a time. This drag and drop approach is useful during the learning process and for those unfamiliar with schedule creation, but is slow going for those with schedule development experience. It is possible to set the tool up to generate schedules "on the fly," but it is not the default setting.

FastTrack offers three basic views - Schedule, Calendar and Resource. Initial schedule setup is done in the Schedule View, which includes the familiar Gantt Chart.

The Schedule View offers basic task and duration entries. It's easy to set up links between activities using the link tool. But, you have to specifically set up FastTrack to link tasks automatically and to determine dates based upon duration entries and links to previous activities. The Tool supports Finish-Start, Start-Start and Finish-Finish relationships. Links are normally created by dragging the link tool from one task to another. It's not possible to link activities together by typing in activity row numbers. This is a peculiar oversight, as linking by typing is much faster than using a mouse to drag link lines.

Durations can be entered in hours, days, weeks, quarters and years. You can use partial hours, i.e. .5 hours for 30 minutes. It's not possible to enter one duration type for say task one, and another duration type for say task two. You must set the duration column to hours or minutes and then are limited to this timescale for all tasks. An additional flaw in the Schedule View is the inability to display start and end dates with hours included. It's impossible to know if an activity starts at 8:00 am or 4:00 pm. This means dates will shift as your schedule unfolds and you will not be able to determine why without calculating start times for each activity yourself.

FastTrack shines in the entry of information once your project has begun. The tool uses a three-part structure: scheduled, revised and actual. Scheduled dates and durations are the baseline dates or assumptions you made at the beginning of the project. Revised dates are adjustments in your estimates, for example, extending the duration of an activity or moving the activity out on the timeline. Actual dates are just that, the amount of time it took to complete the task and the dates when the task actually started and ended. Project offers these capabilities as well, but entry of actual hours is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes.

You can set up a list of preset tasks. For example, if you company uses the same process on all schedules, you can add all these tasks to a list that will appear as Pulldown Menu in the Task Entry Cells. Pretty nice feature!

The Calendar View allows you to look at tasks in a monthly or weekly calendar format. As with Project, this view suffers from layout constraints. Tasks with long names and short durations are not fully visible in the Calendar. It's easy to tell the tool how many hours a day people will work and to exclude holidays and vacation days. It does not seem to be possible to create calendars for specific resources, as is the case in Project.

The Resource View allows you to enter resource names, roles and rates. The budget, based upon resource rates and duration of activities, can be displayed in the Schedule View.

FastTrack offers FastSteps, a scripting or macro system that allows you to automate tasks or functions you do repeatedly. Project offers a similar macro function. You can also save FastTrack in HTML format for display in a browser.

FastTrack doesn't support creation of a master file linking a set of sub files. You can build multiple schedules in one file. This does make it difficult for different managers or team members to update individual schedules. Project Standard does support linking of numerous files and creation of a master file. Master files are useful for resource planning and companywide budgeting and scheduling.

We found FastTrack easy to learn and the UI was fairly straightforward. The interface will feel comfortable for Mac users, since this program is native to the Mac Platform. While the feature set does not compare with Microsoft Project, for Mac shops with a limited number of projects and small teams, FastTrack is an affordable alternative to Microsoft Project.

Helpful Tips - Formatting The Critical Path in Microsoft Project

One of the problems with Scheduling Tools is they are hard to read. There are so many columns and numbers it’s often hard to make sense of the schedule. We’ve got several formatting tips that will make your schedules much easier to analyze.

We’ve set up our schedules to make deliverables (0 duration tasks) and critical path items stand out. Here’s how to do it. Open up Microsoft Project. You can set up your text formatting in a new file or any existing schedule.

On the Format Menu, select Text Styles
In the Item to Change Dialog Box, select Critical Tasks
Select Bold Italic in the Font Style Dialog Box
Under Color, select Red
Select Milestones in the Item to Change Dialog Box
Select Bold Italic in the Font Style Dialog Box
Under Color, select Blue.

You’ll see that all tasks on the Critical Path are now red, italic and bold and all Milestones (0 duration tasks) are blue, italic and bold. The colors are great for on-screen viewing, the italic and bold formatting are useful for black and white printed schedules.

Of course, this style is so useful, you’d like to use it on all your schedules. The easy way to do this is to create a template.

Set up an empty file with the formatting described above.
Select Save As from the File Menu
Under file name, we suggest a name like Your Company Name_Template
In the Save As Type pull-down menu, select Template. (*.mpt)
Save the Template File in the MS Project template folder (this is the default).
From the File Menu, select New.
On the right side of your screen, under New From Template, you’ll see your new template file at the top of the list.
Highlight this file with your mouse; left click and your preformatted file will open.
You can check to make sure your template has the formatting you want by entering one task. It should display in red, bold and italic. Enter a second task with a duration of 0. It should display in blue, bold and italic.

What's Up with Us?

This is the place to get information on upcoming classes and speaking engagements by PureProject Group staff.

Rate Setting and Contracts Seminar Coming up

Debbie Lefkowitz, The PureProject Group Principal will be giving her popular Rate Setting Seminar for Service Professionals on March 25th, 2003 at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. This seminar is useful for anyone who has struggled with what rate or rates to charge clients. We'll cover everything you need to know about setting rates and creating project budgets and schedules. Participants will receive a handy-dandy Microsoft Excel rate setting spreadsheet, plus lots of great handouts on setting rates, and building schedules.

Seminar Details

Date:

Time:

Location:

Cost:

seminar@pureproject.com

debbie@pureproject.com

That's it for this month. See you next time!

About Us

The PureProject Group provides service businesses and independent professionals with the project management tools, techniques and skills they need to achieve their business goals and improve their bottom line. The PureProject Group was founded on the premise that project management does not need to be scary or frustrating. The company emphasizes easy to learn, easy to implement approaches that provide service businesses with immediate, bottom-line benefits.

This newsletter is designed to provide project management support to small businesses and is sent with the understanding that the PureProject Group is not engaged in rendering legal or financial advice. If expert legal or financial assistance is required, the services of a licensed professional should be sought.