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Project Schedule Assessment: A Case Study
Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.
I was recently asked to join a troubled program as a program management consultant. The program had eight major workstreams and the team recently developed a new integrated Microsoft Project schedule with revised launch dates. The program launch date had slipped several times before and this was the final attempt to deliver the program with the new round of funding. The project team was confident the project schedule for 3,500 tasks was realistic and on schedule to deliver.
In order to assess the project’s schedule status, I wanted to review the integrated project schedule to answer three questions:
1. Is the project on schedule?
2. What areas of the project schedule are running behind schedule?
3. What specific tasks are late?
Using Microsoft Project and Excel, I was able to quickly answer these questions and established a set of schedule metrics that the program applied to their status reviews. Reviewing a 3,500-task project schedule could’ve been a nightmare if I didn’t have an analysis tool. By combining MS Project filters, a data extract and a few formulas, I build several dashboard views to answer these three critical schedule questions.
Is the project on schedule?
One quick way to determine if the project is on schedule is to view the schedule variance table or the Tracking Gantt chart in MS-Project. The Tracking …
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