Category Archives: Microsoft Project Tips

Baselining and Variance Analysis

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If you are someone who regularly reads our blog, you will know that most of the time, our articles cover OnePager and how to use it more efficiently. However, we here at OnePager we like to keep things fresh and exciting, so instead of discussing OnePager, this article will cover Baselining and Variance Analysis in your Microsoft Project file.

The best way to get into this discussion is to review what a Baseline and Variance are and what they represent in your schedule.

The Baseline in your schedule can be a kind of snapshot of your project. This snapshot has five categories from which it captures data for every task: start, finish, duration, cost, and work. With this data, you can compare actual vs. planned progress, allowing you to identify areas where the project could use extra attention.

The Variance depends on the baselines as it represents the difference between your original and current schedule. Microsoft Project calculates this by using a formula that I have placed below. Within your project are five types of Variances: start, finish, duration, cost, and work.

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Summary Task Percent Complete

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When creating a schedule, one thing stands out when presenting to an audience: the percent complete. While it is nice to see the start and finish date for the summary tasks in the schedule, it is essential to show how far along a task is. Most of the time, your project plan’s percent complete values will suffice, but there are other times where the percent complete might seem ahead or behind schedule. In this blog, we will discuss what OnePager has to offer to remedy this issue: a feature called %Complete EV.

Before we begin discussing this exciting feature in OnePager, I want to clarify that this is a OnePager proprietary calculation that only looks at the percent complete for summary tasks. If you find that your issues are with the non-summary tasks, you should check out our blog that covers that issue here.

Microsoft Project averages all the tasks under the summary task, giving you an overall percent complete. However, this calculation can be incorrect due to other factors that Microsoft Project didn’t consider, which is what OnePager %Complete EV fixes. If you look at the example below, you will see that the Summary Task is behind schedule, even though all of its children are right on track.

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Identifying Late and Very Late Tasks with Finish Variance

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In Microsoft Project, a field called Finish Variance shows how many days there are between the Finish and the Baseline Finish fields. Using this data can be helpful when trying to determine if your tasks are finishing on, before, or after their planned finish dates.

If you want to use the Finish Variance field in your OnePager Conditional Formatting Rules to show visually if your tasks are late, you’ll run into an issue: Microsoft Project treats Finish Variance as a string field instead of a number.

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Are you still on 32-bit Project?

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Microsoft began releasing 64-bit versions of Office, including Project, back in 2010. Eleven years later, we still see that a lot of our users still haven’t switched from 32-bit Project to 64-bit Project, even though they’re continuing to upgrade their Microsoft Project versions from 2010 to 2016, then to 2019 and onward.

Believe it or not, 66% of OnePager Pro users are still using 32-bit Project. The vast majority of these 32-bit users are running a relatively modern version of Microsoft Project like Project 2016 or Project 2019. On top of that, almost all of these users are on 64-bit Windows 10.

You read that correctly: people who have a blazing-fast computer with the highest-powered version of Windows available are still running a lower-horsepower version of Microsoft Project. It’s a common misconception that if you have 64-bit Windows that you will automatically have 64-bit Project, but the reality is that most 64-bit Windows users are still on 32-bit Project.

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Color-Coding by a Custom Status field in Microsoft Project

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Many of you already use OnePager’s conditional formatting to automatically assign colors to your charts based on Microsoft Project’s Status field. But what if you need status calculated differently than how Microsoft Project does it out of the box?

In this article, I’ll show you how to create your own custom status field in Microsoft Project, and then bring that into OnePager to drive the color-coding of your timeline.

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Heads Up: Rotten Office Update Headed Your Way

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We have become aware of a critically-broken Office Update that Microsoft began pushing to users this past Tuesday, November 12th.

The update, once installed, will immediately break a number of key Microsoft Office features and many Office add-ins, including OnePager. It also will break any third-party applications that rely on certain Office components to be functional on your system.

In short, it is an unmitigated disaster.

To learn how this impacts your use of OnePager, read here to get more details, and to learn how to fix the issue so that your access to OnePager is not interrupted.

For more general information on the issue, since it impacts many other applications beyond OnePager, read here, and here.

In the meantime, if you have not already been hit by this update, please temporarily suspend Office Updates until Microsoft has released a fix. To turn these off, launch Excel, and go to File > Account > Update Options. Choose to Disable Updates

If Microsoft provides us with more information on how to stop this issue from happening without waiting for their next update to be pushed, we will let you know ASAP.

Introducing tips on Primavera P6 and more

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Theoretically, we here at OnePager are experts on … OnePager. But, having been in the business of helping project managers present clear and eye-catching Gantt charts for many years, we have picked up a lot of tips and tricks along the way about the project and portfolio management (PPM) software that feeds data into OnePager.

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Getting Ready for Office 2019

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You may have heard that Microsoft is releasing Office 2019 later this year, including Microsoft Project 2019 and Excel 2019.

Here at OnePager, we’re Microsoft Certified Partners, and have early access to the updates that are coming soon in Office 2019. We’ve been testing OnePager Pro with Project 2019, and are doing the same with OnePager Express and Excel 2019. This way, when Office 2019 is released to the public later this year, you can be assured of seamless upgrades on day one. Many of our enterprise customers won’t see Office 2019 for many years to come, since large organizations can be slow to upgrade, but we also know that some of our customers tend to upgrade more quickly, and we’re keeping that in mind as we complete our compatibility testing.

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Measuring On-time Performance Across a Portfolio with OnePager

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So you’ve taken many steps to get to this point: Your firm has launched a PPM tool, and your staff is trained how to use it. You’ve built a base set of standards, and are beginning to reap the benefits of having all your data in one place, reporting your initiatives, and tracking how much they truly cost. You finally have an eye on things.

But now you want to investigate whether or not you have any more deep-seated issues within your organization.

One visual that will help significantly with this is a Stacked Resource Timeline.

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Your Project Status Date isn’t Percent Complete

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Microsoft Project gives users the ability to mark that their projects are complete through a certain date:

This is a useful feature in some circumstances, but It’s debatable how appropriate this practice is in general. While it’s nice to be able to set your project as current through a certain date, many project managers agree that you can’t simply declare things as finished, just because you’ve gotten to a certain point on the calendar. Real life projects just tend to be a little more complicated than that.

Right or wrong, Microsoft Project lets you do this, so what’s behind the percent complete values that it calculates? In my sample plan, Project re-calculates my percent complete values as follows:

Those percent complete values look ok, but when you go over to the native Microsoft Project Gantt chart, there is a problem.

At first glance, it looks pretty good. All five tasks are precisely lined up so that their progress bars hit the red line that represents the status date.

But as you look closer, there’s a problem. The percent complete values in Project don’t match the progress bars on the Gantt chart. For example, the percent complete value for Task A is 70%, but if you measure the width of the progress bar in Project’s Gantt chart, pixel-by-pixel it’s 74.7%.

When you build a report in OnePager, we use the percent complete values from Project:

Compare Task A between Project and OnePager. In Project, the progress bar is right up against the status line. In OnePager, the task appears as if it’s almost a day behind schedule. Tasks B and C have the opposite problem: Project shows them as on track, while OnePager shows them as ahead of schedule.

It’s not a question of right or wrong. It’s a question of apples and oranges. The date through which your project is complete is not the same as percent complete.

If you want your progress bars in Project to match OnePager, then you need to use percent complete across the board, since it’s a more precise calculation. To do this, right click on the Project Gantt chart and choose Bar Styles:

Now, in the Bar Styles form, change your all of your progress bars to use “% Complete” instead of using “CompleteThrough”. This will create a three-way match between the numeric percent complete values in your Project file, the progress bars in the Project Gantt chart, and the progress bars in OnePager:

After clicking OK, Project will change its Gantt chart progress bars to reflect the percent complete values that you see on the left, and will match what OnePager shows as well:

So while it’s sometimes tempting to use MS Project’s ability to quickly status your plan to a certain date, it’s important to recognize that the resulting percent complete values are going to have a degree of imprecision, due to working and non-working time in your project calendar.