On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:27:18 +0200 Maurice van der Pot <griffon26 kfk4ever com> wrote: > Can either of you recommend some reading material or some good > examples of visualizing this information? I unfortunately can't draw > from extensive personal experience in project management, so I really > appreciate anything you can share. Sebastien has given a pointer to how MS does it, I'd like to explain why. Having defined a plan its usually presented to management who give the OK and certain deliverables are expected to arrive on certain dates. We then save a baseline plan, this means 2 plans are displayed, the baseline plan and the "actual plan". If everything progresses on plan (ha ha ha) the 2 plans will be duplicates having the same start and end dates and the % complete lines will all end on today's date. Now lets say a task has run into difficulties and was due to be completed by 10 September but is in fact only 70% complete (this should of course been spotted before this) I need to replan in order to bring the major deliverables back on target. To do this I can play with the resource allocation and see the effect on the "actual" plan and whether it brings the major deliverables back in line with the baseline. Or I might decide that even though I've said task B is dependant on task B but in fact task B actually only needs to be 70& complete before task A can start, what effect does that have? Also in sometimes unthought of tasks race their ugly head and have to be added in. In this case it won't have a baseline so we need to baseline this one task without altering the existing baseline for the other tasks. Some might say that you should know the due dates of your major deliverables and that's OK if their are 1 or 2 but on a large project and in the past I have had projects with 8000 tasks the ability to visually compare the actual against the baseline is invaluable. As an aside as something to think of for the future you might consider another "management reporting" view where the detail is hidden and only the summary tasks are shown. I know you can roll up the tasks so only the summaries are shown but they are shown as summary bars with no progress etc. This is just an aside as it only becomes useful in very large projects. An 8000 task project can't be shown to management you have to get everything down to 2 sheets of A3. Hope this isn't a load of useless waffle and makes sense. Cheers Nigel PS. please excuse any typos but I've been drinking (Hic)
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