Chapter 3: Initiating projects with Microsoft Project
The initiating stage of a project, which is also the first stage, is when you define the whole new project to be executed. Initiation is a crucial stage where the project objectives – that is, the big picture – is established with all the people involved. It is also a politically and strategically important stage as you will have to seek the support and resources you require to undertake your project.
Centuries ago, when Christopher Columbus sought to undertake an ambitious project to discover new frontiers by sea, he initiated the project by seeking money and ships from Queen Isabella of Castile. In return, the objectives of the project were aligned to profit the project sponsors.
During the course of this chapter, we will specifically discuss the usage of Microsoft Project in the initiating stages of your project. Using robust techniques for scheduling right from the earliest stages of the project has several advantages and helps you identify risks to the project early on.
In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:
How to get the best possible start to your projects by harnessing the power of MS Project
Creating our next hands-on project schedule exercise
A deeper understanding of all aspects of scheduling – tasks, dependency linking, and resources
Continued exploration of the Project UI, and uncovering several features that we will use in our exercise project
Initiating projects
In real-life scenarios, the initiation phase of a project often begins when your sales team is pitching a project to a client. The dynamics are very similar even when the project is only in-house with internal customers of the project. The stakes are often high and significant for all the stakeholders and the organizations involved. If the sales pitch is strong enough, the approving authority will want to know the numbers involved—budgets, return on investment, the time frame, resources required, and so on. Process-mature and project-oriented organizations will involve the Project Management Office (PMO), the project manager, and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) at this stage.
Using a robust tool such as MS Project in this situation has many advantages, such as being able to do the following:
Visualize and justify the complexity of the projects.
Justify the price, resources, and time sought.
Identify key milestones and mutual deliverables.
Establish a critical path and schedule risks for the project.
Make the schedule you have created as the centerpiece of the project-initiating documentation.
Establish professionalism and confidence with the stakeholders.
It is from this exact perspective that we will view MS Project in this chapter. We will not need to use several features of Project at this stage, such as tracking, reports, and so on.
What the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) says
There are two important objectives of the project initiation processes, whether it is for a new project or for a new phase of a running project:
Managing the expectations of all the stakeholders of the project. This means establishing the initial scope of your project.
Ensuring appropriate participation of the stakeholders to ensure the success of your project. This translates to you getting all the resources and approvals you need for the project.
Who are the stakeholders on a project? Everyone who is impacted by your project and everyone who can impact your project is your stakeholder. For example, this includes your customer, your boss, the PMO, various supporting departments in your organization, and your entire team. If society at large is impacted by certain projects, then it should also be considered as a stakeholder.
So, as the project manager, you must manage the end-to-end expectations of this stakeholder group. By doing so, you must ensure that this stakeholder group will facilitate the execution of your project to successful closure. For example, in the initiation stage, you might establish the following:
A high-level scope of the project
Stage-wise customer signoffs required on your project
The human resources, hardware, software, networking, machines, travel budgets, and so on, required for your project
The domain knowledge and SMEs required
The third-party vendor services or tools and libraries to be procured for your project
Key outcomes of the initiating stage
The key outcome of the initiating stage is a document called the project charter, according to standard project management terminology. The project manager will develop this document with the help and approval of all the stakeholders.
The gist of this document will often be the project objectives, in and out of scope details, high-level schedule (Gantt chart developed with MS Project), and other budgetary details.
Often, for small and medium-sized projects, the Gantt chart will be the most important component of the project charter.
Risk over the project life cycle
Proper initiation of the project will help uncover potential risks (and existing issues) that the project entails. At this early stage, it becomes a crucial part of expectation management to correctly appraise the stakeholders of risk. There are two fundamental ways that risk can be considered:
Risk mitigation, wherein you plan to reduce the probability of the risk materializing.
Risk contingency, wherein you plan your action for the circumstances when risk materializes. This is the proverbial plan B.
You can see that a high-quality schedule in the initiating stage will include details for these two aspects of risk. There is yet another compelling reason to consider risks right from the initiation stage. The cost of risk mitigation and contingency increases exponentially over the lifetime of the project.
Project for this chapter – digital marketing campaign
Case study: You are the project manager in a fast-growing mobile app company. Your company is ready to launch its first mobile app in 1 month. You have been put in charge of the digital marketing campaign project. The objective is to create a marketing leads database from the company's web and social media presence.
The critical success criteria for your project is as follows:
Create a web and social media presence for your company.
Create a database of prospective customers (also known as leads).
Create a functional sales funnel for the new product.
Do not exceed 1 month (20 working days!).
The assumptions are as follows:
You will rely on your company's existing ecosystem of third-party vendors.
Your company has web and digital marketing content readily available.
A breakdown of the work is as follows:
Launch Project.
Create the Business Requirements Specifications (BRS) document. This will form the guidelines for the vendors' work.
Contract the vendors to start the work.
Vendor 1: Design a blog-based website.
Vendor 2: Install the website.
Vendor 1: Upload the blog content.
Vendor 2: Design a social media presence.
Vendor 2: Create social media assets (LinkedIn giveaways, a YouTube channel, contests, a Facebook page, and groups).
Vendor 2: Upload social media assets.
Close the project.
With this much information, we are now ready to start our new project and replicate the same steps that you would encounter in your real-life work situations.
Scheduling with MS Project – a deeper understanding
Exactly as in Chapter 2, Fundamentals of Microsoft Project, fire up your Project application and create a new blank project. But before we proceed further with building the schedule, there are a couple of important configuration aspects that we will now learn about.
Project Information and Project Options
Select the Project tab from the main ribbon menu. Locate the button called Project Information. In the following reference screenshot, you will see this button highlighted with a red box.
When you click on this button, a dialog box will open called Project Information:
Figure 3.1 – Microsoft Project – the Project Information dialog box
An important aspect of this dialog box is that you can use it to set the start date for the entire project. In the preceding screenshot, I have set the project start date to the next upcoming Monday. For the sake of this exercise, you can also do the same and set the start date to your next upcoming Monday.
The project start date that you set here is used by Project as the default start date of every new task you create. If this date is not set, then by default, Project will use today's date (that is, the current date) for every new task created. In the same dialog box, you next have the option to tell Project's algorithms to schedule from either the start date or from the finish date. It is also possible to schedule in reverse order, from a fixed finish date. These are for situations when the project has a fixed and "hard" finish date constraint.
Notice that there is an option to set the base calendar for your project. There are pre-built calendars within Project that can be used for most common situations. We will discuss calendars in much greater detail later in Chapter 4, Underlying Concepts of Microsoft Project.
At the bottom of the dialog box, there is a Statistics button, which is really just a quick and dirty version of the overall project statistics. At this stage of our project, you will not get any useful information, but it is available if you want to use it in the later stages of your project. You can now close this dialog box and return to the main work area.
There is one more important dialog box where most of Project's configurability is presented, and that is the Project Options dialog box. Click on the File ribbon tab and enter the Backstage area. Locate and click on the Options tab.
This opens the Project Options dialog box, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.2 – Microsoft Project – the Project Options dialog box
This dialog box has special importance because it is the location where you will find all of Project's default behavior. Specifically, for now, locate the Schedule tab and then on the right, locate the section titled Scheduling options for this project. Click on the dropdown to select all the new projects and always ensure here that the new tasks created are set to Auto Scheduled by default.
By doing this, you have ensured that manual tasks are not accidentally introduced into your newly created schedules.
Pitfall – manual tasks
As we will see continually in this book, it is good practice to avoid manual tasks, except for special situations. Despite this, until recently, MS Project would default to manual tasks. Even now, it is common for new users to inherit project files in their organization that have inadvertent manual tasks. This is a common pitfall that needs to be avoided.
Tasks
We can now fill in the tasks of our project by referring to the task details from before. For every task, start by creating only the task name. For now, do not add other values such as their duration or any of the dates. When you are done, your screen should look similar to this:
Figure 3.3 – Microsoft Project – tasks have been entered for our project
You will already be familiar with the tasks so far, but before we proceed any further, I will point out some interesting aspects for your careful observation:
Figure 3.4 – Microsoft Project – observe tasks on the entry table
From the preceding screenshot, we can observe the following:
The thin divider that is present between the entry table and the Gantt chart can be dragged to the left and right to uncover areas on either side. If you work on a smaller screen, often, one or more of the default columns might be hidden from your view. Try it out now and get comfortable with this aspect. Observe that we have not yet discussed the standard columns, Predecessors and Resource Names.
Each and every column header on the entry table reveals a different parameter of the task, except for the first column, which is for Indicators. The default parameters are Task Mode, Task Name, Duration, Start, Finish, Predecessors, and Resource Names.
The rightmost column is just a placeholder called Add new Column. When you click on the column label, it reveals a dropdown with an enormous list of column data options that you can add to your table. All of these data points are, once again, different parameters of the Task entity:
Figure 3.5 – Microsoft Project – new column options on the entry table
You, my astute reader, may now have guessed that this dropdown gives an insight into the data structure used by Project to represent the Task entity – and you would be absolutely right! The view that you are currently in, and the table that you have active, will decide what column options are available.
Tip
Always keep a close watch on the Indicators column while working on a schedule. This is where Project whispers directly into your ear. Messages here can be warnings of potential issues, or it can draw your attention to the special nature of the task in question.
Task config dialog box
You can right-click on any task, and in the contextual menu that pops up, choose Information. The Task Information dialog box will pop up and this is where you can greatly customize any individual task. Notice that there are tabs that group different aspects of the task, including linking and dependency (Predecessors), resources, and other advanced options. Feel free to explore the different options but refrain from changing anything for now, or else it will impact our exercise schedule in ways you cannot predict:
Figure 3.6 – Microsoft Project – the Task Information dialog box
Some of these properties, such as the Priority setting, are only used in special advanced situations (for example, resolving over-allocations). However, we will visit this dialog box often in our exercise projects throughout the rest of the book. If you save any inadvertent changes in the dialog box, you can undo your recent action.
Duration
This is one of the most important parameters of a task. MS Project's definition for this column is the total span of working time for a task. There are several connotations to this definition, and we will examine them in greater detail in Chapter 4, Underlying Concepts of Microsoft Project.
Observe, in Figure 3.6, that the default value inserted by Project for a new task is 1 day?. The question mark denotes that this value is just an assumption made by Project on your behalf. If you enter a value there, the question mark will disappear.
Continuing with our exercise project, now let's fill up estimates for our task durations. Refer to the following screenshot and proceed to enter the values accordingly:
Figure 3.7 – Microsoft Project – enter task duration values
It is sufficient for you to just enter the number in the task's Duration cell and hit the Enter key. You will not need to explicitly type out the days every time. There are several small intelligent aspects like this that you will discover when you work hands-on with Project.
At this point in time, we are finished with entering the duration values, but there is still no schedule created, as you can see in the Gantt chart all our tasks lie on the same date. The correct technique for creating the schedule is to now build out the dependency links between tasks and allow Project to work out its algorithmic magic.
Linking and dependency
In the previous simple exercise project, we created task dependencies by using the Link button in the ribbon's Task tab. In this project, we will hand-craft the links in a different technique, by using the Predecessors column. This latter technique easily allows greater customization. Remember that in any given schedule, there are two special tasks. The first task will have no predecessor, and the last task will have no successor. With this guideline, we will create dependency links with all the other tasks, using only the Predecessors fields.
Start with the task named Create BRS, and in the corresponding Predecessors field, enter the row ID of the previous task. In my case, it will be 2. (I usually leave the first row blank just for better readability of the schedule). Refer to the following screenshot and you should also get a similar result:
Figure 3.8 – Microsoft Project – creating the first link
When you create this link, there are some interesting points to be observed:
In the Gantt chart, an arrow link has been created, indicating the direction of the task execution. Since this is a timeline view, chronological ordering has been established for these two tasks.
The second task, Create BRS, has been automatically pushed forward in time with a new Start date. Notice that this is highlighted to you by the temporary blue coloring of the cells in the table. The new start date occurs after the finish date of the Predecessor task (in our case, the first task).
A new Finish date is also computed for the second task. This is a function of the said task's duration.
Now that the two tasks are linked, any changes to the task's parameters will mean that Project's algorithms will kick in again and recompute the task parameters.
Now, proceed to link all the tasks, as in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.9 – Microsoft Project – schedule fully linked
There are some observations to be made at this stage, referring to the schedule we have created:
The zoom level default in your own Gantt chart will be different, as I have reduced the zoom here to fit the whole screen onto this page. This zoom feature will be explained later in this chapter, but it does not matter for now as it is just a visual aid and just makes your Gantt chart look bigger.
The task with ID 4, Contract Vendors, has two branch offshoots, as evident in the Gantt chart. Each branch logically represents a different vendor who has been contracted.
On the other hand, the last task, Close Project, has two predecessors. This logically represents the fact that both contractors have to finish their respective work for the whole project to be considered complete.
Pay special attention to the fact that even though the first vendor's branch executes a little early, the schedule is driven by the longer branch of the second vendor's tasks.
As a project manager, even if you have not been using Gantt charts, you will already be familiar with this kind of a schedule design, where individual resources (or teams) will branch out with their tasks and converge at significant stages of your project.
Best practices for task dependency linking
To ensure you derive the maximum benefit of this feature of MS Project, here are some best practices you must keep in mind:
Minimalism: Use minimum links to correctly create an executable project schedule. This is an implicit golden role and is often abused by new users of Project. Any extra complexity adds up quickly, resulting in unmanageable schedules.
Readability: Use white space intelligently to increase the readability of your schedule. Your schedule will have a large and diverse audience, including all of your stakeholders. It should be easy to read and follow along even when you are not present to explain your design.
Circular references: Project has some simple constraints in place that will prevent you from circuitously making a task dependent upon itself. But these situations are possible when you are in the on-paper design stage and also when you are working with groups of tasks (that is, summary tasks, which we will learn about later in this book). It is best practice to always watch out for circular dependencies in your schedule.
Orphan tasks: Avoid tasks with no dependencies (either successors or predecessors). These tasks are harder to track and monitor, especially for complex projects.
Manual mode tasks: When you are in the initiation stages of a project, it is very likely that you will not have complete information about individual tasks and their dependencies. Manual tasks are available in Project exactly for this situation. It is OK if you create some manual tasks in the initiation stage, but it is a good practice to convert all of them into automatic mode tasks by the end of the planning stage of your project. If any remain, they must be watched with special care after every subsequent modification to your schedule.
Resources
The next step in our project is to assign each of the tasks to the people who will execute them. The Resource Names column is where this assignment will be made. You can directly start entering names of the resources into this column now; see the following screenshot for a reference:
Figure 3.10 – Microsoft Project – assign resources to all tasks
Each task, when assigned to a resource, becomes an allocation. Once again, there are some interesting observations for us:
It is a common best practice to only use the job roles of the resources that you plan to assign to your task during the project initiation phase. This is simply because often, the project plan is not yet approved, and so organizational resourcing is also officially not yet approved. On the other hand, even if named resources are available, your company might choose to reveal only the client-facing employee names. In both cases, use only the job roles instead of actual names.
After resources are officially assigned, should you choose to do so, the job role labels can be replaced by the actual names of the employees, just by simply overwriting the labels.
Every time you add a resource name, you are actually creating a new resource entry in the internal database maintained by Project. You can see this for yourself, very quickly, by changing the view to Resource Sheet. You should be able to see something similar to the following screenshot:
Figure 3.11 – Microsoft Project – Resource Sheet view – a first look
From the preceding screenshot, you can observe the following:
Be wary of typos when typing in resource names directly. If you type in Jonh instead of John, Project will accept it without complaint, and create a new resource for the misspelled name. This is the cause of many subtle and serious errors when you are balancing the work of your resources.
This technique of easily creating resources on the fly is popular with users. However, it is possible to prevent typo errors by setting a simple option. To see this in action, click on the File tab and enter the Backstage | Options. The Options dialog box will open up. Open the Advanced tab and locate General options for this project section. Uncheck the option labeled Automatically add new resources and task. It will be checked on by default:
Figure 3.12 – Microsoft Project – General options – disable the autocreation of resources
It's best practice to always review your Resource Sheet view after making allocations, precisely to prevent any unwanted typo-created resources.
New UI: With the exact intention of preventing typo-generated errors while assigning resources, MS Project now has a new UI introduced from the 2019 version: a drop-down UI. If you notice the small arrow button next to the Resource Name field, it will open like this:
Figure 3.13 – Microsoft Project – the Resource Name drop-down interface
It is possible to assign multiple resources to a task just by typing additional names into the same field, separated by commas. However, it is not recommended to do so. The reason will become self-evident when we get to the advanced sections of this book, where we discuss project tracking.
There are some exceptions to this recommendation; for example, when certain tasks are designed to be accomplished by multiple resources, or even when the track is small enough to be tracked minutely. Even though this ambiguity exists, assigning multiple resources is a fairly common practice. The best way to avoid assigning multiple resources is by breaking the task down further into assignable chunks.
With that, we have completed our simple schedule of a project in its initiation stage. Now, let's look closer at some of the UI aspects right on your main screen that we have ignored so far.
Revisiting the UI
So far, I have been careful to introduce only those minimum UI features that are needed for us to proceed with our simple exercise projects. Now, let's take a quick look at the other useful features on your Project main screen.
Timeline view
Introduced in the 2010 version of Project, this is a such a loved feature that it occupies prime real estate on the main screen, albeit in a split window, sharing the honor with the Gantt chart view:
Figure 3.14 – Microsoft Project – the Timeline view
Task chronology is the key focus of this view, as the name suggests. The Timeline view starts out blank, and you can choose which tasks get added to it. In the preceding screenshot, you can observe that I have added a couple of tasks to the timeline. You can right-click on any task in the table, and in the contextual menu, select Add to Timeline. This action will add your task to the timeline at the right position on the timeline. The same button is also available to you in the ribbon's Task tab. We will look at this excellent view in some greater detail later in this book.
Gantt chart UI
You might have already started horizontally scrolling through the Gantt chart area, even with our short projects. The Gantt chart becomes complex very quickly. This is where the Gantt zoom slider buttons come in handy. You can locate these buttons at the very bottom right of the window, just below the Gantt chart:
Figure 3.15 – Microsoft Project – zoom slider for the chart
Adjacent to the left of the zoom slider is another set of buttons for the most popular views so that you can access them very quickly. This is just another one of the productivity features and is placed strategically next to the zoom slider.
Quick Access Toolbar
In the same vein, and at the diametrically opposite end of the screen, in the topmost left corner, you will find the Quick Access Toolbar. By default, it holds the most commonly used buttons, but you can customize it to add other favorite features of your own choice:
Figure 3.16 – Microsoft Project – the Quick Access Toolbar and customization options
The More Commands… option leads you to add practically any of Project's action features. This is a great way to increase your everyday productivity with Project.
The Indicators column
This column on the entry table is your best friend in Project. It can give you several types of information about your task and, sometimes, your whole project in general. It can warn you of some potential risks, such as resource overallocation and date constraints. We will study these indications in most of the later chapters of this book.
Options and configurations
Earlier, we briefly visited the Project Options dialog box when working on our exercise project to see how to make sure new tasks are created in automatic mode. Now is a good time for us to visit it once more. You can locate it from File | Options:
Figure 3.17 – Microsoft Project – The Project Options dialog box
It will be good for you to explore the many different options available from here, but do not change any of the configurations just yet, as they can change Project's behavior in ways that you will not be able to predict just yet.
However, if you want to observe what all the default assumptions that Project makes about your project are, you will find a whole lot here. Once you are more comfortable with Project, this is where you can customize preset parameters to your organizational standards.
Assignment
Here is a practice assignment for you. To solve this assignment, you must create a schedule for a project in its initiation stage. Optionally, your solution screenshots can be posted on my website, www.learngood.in, to share them with other readers and also to see their solutions.
Case study
You are a newly minted project management consultant, starting out on your own. You have rented a new but small office space in a commercial location of your city. Now, you want to prepare the interior of your office so that you can start using it full time.
The critical success criteria for your project is as follows:
You need a private working space for yourself and at least one employee.
You will also need a separate meeting space for whiteboard presentations to your clients.
You need some other basic amenities, such as a coffee machine, water cooler, and so on.
Constraints, assumptions, and instructions
Important: only use the concepts we have discussed so far in this book:
You have identified that these aspects of work are required: wall painting, simple light fixtures, and creating false wall cabins.
You have a moderate budget of USD 15,000 for this project, which will limit how fancy you can get with your office.
You only have 1 month to finish the project. The rent is high, and you have to start making productive use of the office as quickly as possible.
You have an architect friend who can be consulted pro bono.
You will outsource all aspects to professional workers.
What you must do
Create a Project schedule using only the concepts covered so far in this book.
Explain your plan – what other assumptions, constraints, dependencies, and risk plans you will have in place for your project.
Optional: submit screenshots of your project schedule solution to my website, www.learngood.in. You will also be able to see and discuss solutions from other learners there.
Summary
Our focus in this chapter was to understand how MS Project can be best leveraged to initiate projects, such that you will be set up for success. Experienced project managers know that well begun is half done, and so it is really effective to start with Project right from the early stages of your project. We then completed another hands-on project exercise in this chapter, during which we holistically explored tasks, linking, and resourcing. While Project offers a great deal of customizability, you must also understand that the default behaviors are often the best suited in the vast majority of situations. However, if you want to finetune any aspect of Project, this ability exists in various configurable dialog interfaces all over the Project interface.
In the next chapter, we are going into very interesting territory. Instead of just learning how Project features behave, we will understand why they behave the way they do. We will explore the underlying logic of Project's algorithms with simple and relatable examples. This will give you a deeper insight into the automatic behavior of Project, something that often baffles uninitiated users.