I'm going to be managing a small Data Warehouse project (I've seen the enemy and he is me ) and I must admit I'm horribly out of my depth here (but I'm having fun). I won't actually be coding on this project at all, but it won't be 100% of my job either (only about 25%, still leaving me time for "real" work ). At any rate, anyone know any good project management tools? I've tried a couple of times to set up projects using MS Project and I just can't make it do what I want.

Oh, and on another note- if anybody wants a DBA or PHP job in San Antonio, TX, let me know!

I've used MS Project quit a bit nd found it pretty extensive, what kind of things are you trying to do but it wont?
There are lots of tools around, several even web based, but that's just from a quick google, I have no idea how good they are.
Are you after project management or asset management or scheduling?

Thanks for the response. MS Project IS pretty extensive, so it's probably just an ID10T thing going on.

At any rate, what I'm trying to do right now is figure out a project schedule. The problem is that most of the tasks require involvement from multiple individuals, and I can't figure out how to make that work well. For example, say I have an initial task that will take 5 days to which I need an employee devote 50% of his or her time. But then once it's over, the employee can now devote the rest of his or her time to task 2. The problem is, since there were other individuals on task 2 it really can begin at the same time as task 1, but MS project won't let it be scheduled that way because it requires task 1 to be finished first (since the same employee is on both tasks). Now I can schedule them simultaneously if I only schedule the employee for 50% on the second task, but then the total hours required are off, because what I really want is for the person to work 50% on both tasks until task 1 is finished, and then 100% on task 2.

I'm trying to estimate both the time required and the amount of money this is going to cost, which means I need to know hours. Since just about everyone will be tasked on multiple tasks I end up with lots of people scheduled at less than 100%, waiting for another task to finish. This gives me an inaccurate view of how much time the actual project will take.

WHEW! I hope some of that made sense.

Pah... by the time you've done your gantt charts the project will be finished. Sometimes I think these tools are a waste of time when you can just get on with the work!

As the saying goes- "no battle plan survives the first shot". But the customer wants dollar values attached to certain tasks, so to do that I have to allocate hours and time. If I miss the estimate significantly then I'll be in big trouble.

Right now I figured out a method using an Excel spreadsheet and the Gantt chart in MS project, but it isn't pretty! I figured someone has to have a tool to make this stuff easy

Oh, and if this "management" stuff keeps up, I might have to change my sig

With anything, there is a balance that is required. The stuggle between engineering and management is not at a loss for historical documentation (ref. any/all Dilbert &/or Scott Adams books).
Good planning is a skill that helps any project- but that skill comes from intimate understanding of the project's components/requirements.
When the planners are disconnected from that intimate knowledge, that's when the going gets rough.

I sypathize with the parent poster- I'm just now getting back into MS Project to organize a simple list of tasks. It's taking longer than just using MS Word because I have to re-educate myself in the functionality of Project. Isn't there a way to associate resource availablility with task schedule? The 'resource' column must be there for a reason!

My experience has been that well thought out and planned projects go much faster and are far more robust then the "let's get on with it" approach.

One of my first, real world examples of this was the year after I graduated college while working with the guy who introduced me to the empeg. We had a large application that had to interface with other applications via UDP on a network, so we wrote a class to wrap this functionality up and make it easy to integrate into all of our applications. So we wrote it, the thing grew, and we had no end of trouble with it. Finally, out of sheer frustration he and I sat in the main conference room for a week and completely redesigned the thing. We didn’t code or even touch a computer. In fact, our boss came in and griped at us to “get on with it”. At the end of the week, all we had for our efforts were a bunch of diagrams of every aspect of this class and what it needed to do.

Then I started coding, and it took me about two weeks. No questions, no issues, and it worked the FIRST TIME (or really close to it anyway). We inserted this class into all of our code and didn’t touch it for the rest of the project. It was faster, more robust, and easier to work with. And get this: the total development time including our design was 3 weeks! Originally I think it took me 2 months to code the thing.

To be fair, we probably had a better idea of what we needed the second time around, but even at that we could have planned and executed more quickly than we originally did. So my lesson was learned, and I’ve operated the same ever since. And the results, I almost always start of slower than people expected but I ALWAYS surpass time estimates, even while spending entirely too much time reading posts on this bbs! I am a HUGE fan of process in software development, as long as it’s done right and adds to effeciency.

Of course, you can take this whole thing overboard, and that’s what I think a lot of people do. We did NOT accomplish a great design by having meetings. We did NOT accomplish a great design by spending time filing out meaningless reports that aren’t used for anything important.

I DO think meetings with clients and users are important, because those relationships are key. They have to know you’re being successful for it to matter, and you have to make sure that your task is hitting the right objectives. BUT, I do not think this is the task of engineers. A good project manager should be able to shield as many of his people as possible from this kind of overhead and engender trust so that when a meeting IS necessary for the team, they know it will be efficient and not a waste of their time.

Of course, ask me what I think in 6 months and we’ll see. This is about my fourth task to “manage”, but it’s the first on which I won’t actually be working. We’ll just have to wait and see if I join the “dark side” or not!

OK, I follow what you want to do, but it depends on how you want to represent it. If you have "consulted with your experts" and they say that a given task with certain people will take a particular amount of time, lock them in to that. In MS Project, if you go into the Task Summary form (double click on a task) and click the advanced tab, turn off 'effort driven'. This will stop the task duration being affected by the number of people and their time allocation.
You can manually adjust the allocation of a person to a task in hours or percent also, on a day to day basis. And, you can even adjust a person's cost table on a task by task basis, according to payment structures. ( i can elaborate, but let's get back to the project)
If you can fix the duration of a task (and hold the workers to the duration, (ha!)) allocate all the people you need to the task. This is more easily done in the task properties window. You can create coarse allocation, say 50% overall, to a particular person for that task.
Now the tricky bit begins.
With the Gantt displayed, use the vertical window splitter or choose Window>Split; click into the lower section and choose Resource Usage from the sidebar or View>Resource Usage. By default, you should be seeing the resource allocation for a SELECTED task, if you don't see anything, click on a task which has resources allocated.
You can manually allocate hours per person to avoid overallocation, or use percentages. Percentages dont show up by default so right click on the resource allocation view and choose Detail Styles. From the list, put in Percent Allocation across to the right window, leave in Work and click OK.
You can only change the hours allocated, but the percentages show you over allocation pretty quickly.
For any resource on a task, the work contour can be adjusted; if you know that a task will need expert (expensive) involvement toward the end, you can adjust that weighting automatically. Double click on the Task heading below a resource for Assignment Information; change the Work Contour as required and the allocation of hours will be adjusted.
Any task which has been manually edited will have a blue graph with a pencil in the information column.

The main thing is to get your baseline right for the client. Once you've set the times and everything in place, save a copy and then see what Tools>Level Resources buggers up. It might push tasks waaaay out, but if everything is cool, there shouldn't be too much change. Then do Tools>Tracking>Save Baseline. This then lets you compare other data with a known starting point. If you want more info on optimistic and pessimistic allocation, let me know.
The next impressive part is tracking actual costs/time. But that might be too much for now.

I hope this gives you a hand in your project.

Edit: Ok I just saw Murry's post. I truly wish I had someone with that depth of knowlege available as a mentor. Outstanding Murry!

This is all based on a novice's understanding of MSproject so there may be techniques I don't know yet.

The secret to MSproject is to understand that you don't assign durations to tasks. Project calculates them based on the hours allocated to the task and the % effort per person assigned to the task. (A task that requires 40 work hours to complet, with one person assigned at 50%, will spread over ten calendar days. Simple math right?)

The start times of tasks are dependent on both interdependencies of the tasks. (Task b must start after task a) and on the availability of resources. (People)

if Bob is assigned to task A at 100% and task B at 50%. Tasks A and B cannot overlap. No resource can be in 2 places at once. MSproject knows this and schedules the tasks so they don't overlap. Just make sure no one is over subscribed. As long as task A and B arn't dependent on each other, and don't require the same resource, they will overlap. (I'm not sure how ties are broken, by task numbers, I think.)

I think I answered what was asked, Yes No?

p.s. Project spreads resources across the eitire duration of the task. If you mean for someone to be devoted 50% for 2 cal. days of a longer task, you will need to break that task into smaller tasks and tie the tasks together.

Another trick i have, is playing with the calendars. There's a default calendar which can be set appropriately and every resource has their own calendar. If you have a regular meeting every week, make a calendar for it and make the times unavailable in the default calendar. You'll need to allow about half an hour each side of the actual meeting times so that Project doesn't complain that there's no time between them.
This way you don't have to manually adjust all of the tasks so they don't clash with the meetings and give over allocations.

BTW, i must stress that i am yet to use Project in a real project as a real project manager. I have no idea whether these systems are 'good practice' but they got the assignment done

I've just finished a Project Management class to finish my degree. I've done some project management in the past as well.

When these kind of problems come up, they are often best solved by further discretization of the tasks. Technically, a task (often called a "work package") is a block of work that requires resources. If you have a "task" that requires two people, you can sometimes divide this into two tasks and then schedule that way, otherwise you'll need to use other methods of scheduling to work around resource conflicts..

Which brings me to the important point: Everything depends on the work breakdown structure (WBS), which is a heirarchical breakdown of the work. You need to make sure that you have the WBS properly broken down to the "work package" level or you are going to have these kinds of nightmares with scheduling. After you have the project exploded down to the individual work package level, you can do two things: 1. Estimate resource requirements for each task, and 2. build a project network diagram.

The network diagram depicts work package dependencies. If you have allocated resources to work packages and made a network diagram to show what comes before what, then MS Project can build the schedule for you, resolving all of the resource conflicts.

That's the best way to do it. First, have a detailed WBS (the more detailed and granular the better). Second, for each work package assign an estimate of the resources (could be X person for Y hours). Third, build the network diagram which incorporates task dependencies into the plan.

The project schedule is the *result* of all of these things, and is put together relatively mechanically. The key is to spend the time on the WBS, estimates, and network plan.

I'd be happy to answer any questions as this stuff is pretty fresh in my brain right now.

It can get complicated. Don't try to do everything together in one step. First WBS, then task level estimates, then network diagram. It seems like a lot of busy work, but I promise you that it works like a charm.

Oh, before all of this, you should have a detailed scope statement, agreed to by project stakeholders. The WBS is the work breakdown to accomplish the scope statement. Save yourself lots of hassle down the road by putting *in writing* exactly what you are going to accomplish.

Best,

Jim

No problem, I won't regret it. We're all in this together!

You may not have estimates for each work package, but you can (and should) start on the network diagram. It's basically just a flow chart that sequences work packages and graphically depicts dependencies. You'll need this before you do any scheduling.

I googled for a network diagram and here's a picture. Each box is a work package. Each work package should have a number to uniquely identify it. Work packages say "what" gets done by "whom", the network diagram says what order it gets done in. The schedule (at the end) will say "when", based on resource constraints.

Jim

Sure, I remember creating those in my management classes back incollege. I even remember the details of "crashing" the schedule, etc. Is there a way to create such a diagram in Project? That's one of the things I was hopting to be able to do. There are several tasks that really don't depend on much, but there is DEFINITELY a critical path for the back end development, and that is where a lot of my scheduling issues are. It's easy enough to set up dependencies in Project (In fact, I've already done this), but it's hard to conceptuatlize in a Gantt Chart.

View>Network Diagram. but you might want to play with the box styles to display exactly what you want
You can show critical path tasks using the Bar Styles in the Gantt Chart too.

As Muzza said, yep, you make your network diagram right in Project. Once you have resources assigned to each work package and a network diagram made, then project will automagically create the schedule and Gantt chart for you. It will also identify the critical path(s).

If you have tasks that are not dependent on other tasks, then just put them as parallel paths in the network diagram. A project with no interdependencies would look like a bunch of resistors in parallel (one task per segment). If you have a complete and thorough WBS, then take the time to diagram out every single work package in a network diagram. Then, after you put resources and estimates on each work package, Project will make the schedule for you (which you may need to edit).

Jim

I don't want to hijack the thread, but I felt this should be on-topic enough (given the early difficulty with MS Project).

Has anyone ever checked out dotProject? http://dotproject.net/

My partner and I are considering using this for something we're working on. He's busy installing it right now for evaluation on the same server we've already set up with Mantis for bug tracking and Perforce for source/content version control (Subversion and CVS just don't seem there yet).

Bruno

I had a really quick look at it and it's not too bad, it has everything you'd need in there. But, it takes so many clicks to do simple things, such as adding a task, modifying a task. I didn't try to set a project from scratch, but that would be much the same i would guess.
If it does what you ask, and is the right price (free?), go for it.

I can't imagine that it you stuck to well established project managment principles, that any program work the install time would be any problem.