For Program Managers who use Microsoft Office Project Professional and Project Web Access (PWA) to manage an integrated program schedule that is broken into subprojects.

About This Course

This 2-day course prepares program managers to manage their large projects that need to be broken down into subprojects effectively in a Project Server environment.

Program Prerequisite

Participants must have managed at least one project from beginning to end with Microsoft Office Project Professional in an enterprise environment. If you don't meet this requirement, we recommend you take our Managing Projects course first.

Customization

The course is an onsite course typically customized to the Project Server configuration of the client organization. Our process for customization is:

• Onsite consulting days to review the configuration and select the relevant topics
• Offsite course customization
• Onsite test of custom course material and exercises
• Onsite course delivery

Participants need to be trained in the custom enterprise configuration of the client corporation. This can be:

• The production server with extra student accounts for training purposes, or
• A separate server in the classroom that is identical to the production server, or
• A Virtual PC or VMware image created by ProjectPro Corp in which the client configuration is emulated. This will require extra consulting days before course delivery.

Course Learning Objectives

The following learning objectives are subject to customization:

• Understand how to most effectively utilize the Microsoft Project Server for managing programs.
• Be able to determine whether to keep one large schedule for the program or split it into subschedules
• Be able to break a program schedule down into subproject schedules
• Be able to create dependencies across the subproject schedules
• Be able to manage resource workloads across separate subprojects
• Be able to create local resources specific to your program
• Be able to collaborate with subproject managers on the program breakdown structure, documents, risks and issues of each project
• Be able to track the overall program schedule and the subproject schedules during the project execution phase
• Be aware of the dashboards views for the project sponsor and senior management: portfolio views (traffic lights and Tracking Gantt views) and portfolio analyzer views (resource utilization, portfolio bubble charts).
• Be aware of the configurable options in Project Server that affect program managers using Microsoft Office Project Professional
• Be aware of the best practices for using Project Server for managing integrated program schedules using Project Server

Detailed Topical Outline

The following course topics are subject to customization:

Overview of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution

• Project management, EPM and business processes
• Business benefits of Project Server
• Microsoft Office Project, Project Server, and PWA and how they work together
• The different users, groups and categories in Project Server
• High level architecture and database structure

Creating a new enterprise program in Project Server

• What is a 'program'? How is it different from a 'project' or 'project portfolio'?
• Modeling a large program:
  • What type of breakdown structures are possible for programs? Pro's and con's
  • How to prevent drowning in the data?
• Establishing scheduling guidelines and standards
  • Options and calendars
  • What is the appropriate level of detail: 1%-10% rule
  • How to ensure guidelines are followed?
• Rolling wave approach
  • Detailed planning look ahead window: how many months ahead?
  • One or more look ahead windows?
• Providing guidelines for the Work Breakdown Structure of the subprojects
• Finding the right level of detail
• Recurring tasks and overhead tasks
• Estimates
• Guidelines for estimating: duration or work estaimtes, pure or gross estimates
• Dependencies: the importance of identifying all dependencies within each project schedule
• Deadlines (target dates) and schedule constraints (fixed dates): types of schedule constraints and how they make your program schedule rigid
• Resources: sharing resources across the subprojects and/or enterprise
• Calendars: using enterprise calendars (base calendars) as project calendar and task calendars.
• Assignments
• Three rules to make MS Project an easy tool for you
• Enterprise assignment processes: who staffs projects with resources and who assigns resources to tasks?

A large program team and the need for delegation

• The program team often has three (or more) hierarchical levels:
• Program manager, project managers and team members, or
• Program manager, team leaders and team members
• Keeping one large program schedule or splitting it into separate subproject schedules: centralize or delegate scheduling? Pro's and con's.
• Keeping one large program schedule:
• Centralized scheduling: the need for a program management office and scheduling support
• Delegation features in PWA: program manager assigns to project managers (team leaders) that forward assignments to team members
• Project managers (team leaders) exclude themselves, keep monitoring assignments or approve time sheets
• Splitting into separate subproject schedules:
• Setting up a new subprojects and transfering ownership to the subproject managers using PWA
• Relevant MS Project options for subprojects

Separate subprojects and dependencies between them: integrating the subproject schedules to a program schedule

• Using the master schedule to create cross-project dependencies
• Monitoring cross-project impacts and establishing business processes for dealing with cross-project impacts
• How to check the completeness of the network logic in a large program (while keeping your sanity)
• Creating the back-end of the integrated program schedule where all subprojects come together: assembly and integration testing
• What if circular dependencies suddenly appear?

Separate subprojects and sharing resources across them; the need for a shared resource pool

• Using the Enteprise resource pool, if available
• Monitoring and managing workloads across all enterprise projects (program and non-program)
• How to deal with enterprise workload leveling policies?
• Using a shared resource pool that is specific for the program
• Be able to establish program specific guidelines for workload leveling
• What guidelines make best sense?

Publishing subprojects to Project Server

• Checking the schedule before publishing
• Did the project manages apply the guidelines?
• Did the project managers apply the best practices of scheduling: using our 40-point checklist and ready-made filters
• Publishing
• Saving versus publishing a schedule
• The publishing menu and collaboration options
• Publishing the project and publishing the assignments
• Working offline with schedules

Monitoring and managing subprojects in PWA as a program manager

• Tracking Gantt view: how to verify if schedules are up to date and what conclusions to draw
• Earned Value as a program performance measurement technique?
• Drilling down from the program schedule into the subproject schedules

Optimizing

How to manage resource workloads

• Proactive or reactive workload leveling?
• Reactive workload leveling: allowing workloads to accumulate, then resolve over-allocations
• Proactive workload leveling: checking on resource availability before assigning and preventing over-allocations
• Resolving over-allocations:
• Making workloads visible and finding the over-allocations
• When to level by hand and when to rely on Project 2003/2007?
• Leveling workloads by hand:
• The best view to resolve over-allocations yourself
• A complete list of ways to resolve over-allocations manually
• Leveling workloads automatically:
• What MS Project can and cannot do for you in resolving over-allocations
• Leveling algorithms used by MS Project
• Where to check how MS Project resolved the over-allocations

How to decrease the duration of your program

• Optimizing for Time (assuming unlimited resources): the Critical Path Method (CPM):
• Difference between free and total slack (float)
• Situations that fragment the Critical Path and what to do about it
• Shortening or crashing the Critical Path
• Schedule risk management: parallel subprojects converge and compound the risk

Risks, Issues and Documents

• Collecting and managing risks and issues
• Publishing project documents and document management
• Customizing textual status report templates and merging received subproject reports into a program status report

Updating

• Updating tasks versus updating assignments (time sheets)
• Baselining
• Options
• Two update cycles: team members update to project managers, project managers update program managers
• Team member updates:
  • Timesheet view
  • Team members update on changed assignments
  • Project manager checks the timesheets and updates the project schedule.
• Project manager update
• Project manager re-optimizes the schedule after assignments updates from team members
• Project manager publishes updates

Reporting

• Creating one-page reports ... always ... even on very large programs!
• Working with large schedules requires you to become a master at filters: using multiple conditions, using and/or boolean logic, and interactive filters
• Reporting the project the way you want: developing custom views using custom Fields, Tables, Filters and Grouping
• How to promote them as new enterprise views
• How to defend a visible time buffer or cost reserve to your manager, sponsor or client?
• Status reports: how to use and best practices