MS Project Tutorial -2

 Best Practices For Building & Tracking MS Project Plan

 Have you read  "Top 10 tips to new MS Project users” ? If not, click here to read it.

Now, you will learn top 16 best practices to make an effective project plan using MS Project 13. You can use them during preparing the plan or for tracking the plan.

1. Always track actual start and finish date. Actual dates must reflect when a task started and or completed. They should not be auto-generated and should not exist in the future. An actual finish date cannot be earlier than the actual start date for a task.

2. Ensure that all next level tasks all roll up to summary tasks. The calculation compares the baseline start and finish dates of the summary tasks to those of the lower level details tasks.

3. Always set a status date to get Cost Performance & Schedule performance Index against a chosen baseline.

4. The Critical Path is one of the most important areas of the program schedule. It is usually the most difficult, time-consuming, and technically challenging portion of the schedule. It should represent a small portion of the overall program schedule.

5.The schedule should be primarily made up of discrete tasks that have work associated with them. Summaries and Milestones are needed for reporting and program tracking but should not be the majority of the line items.

6. There should not be any missing predecessors and missing successors.

7. Please always careful during update of tasks that have begun when their predecessors or successors are not 100% complete

8. Schedule progress should drive the end dates of the program. Not scheduling forward or leaving incomplete work in the past does not allow for a correct picture of the project status and projected end date.

9. There should not be any summary tasks with resources because they are strictly an outlining or rolling up feature and should not drive schedule dates or resource loading. There shouldn’t be any summary tasks with predecessors or successors

10. Task duration should be within 5 to 20 working days

11. All schedules should have a reasonably small amount of slack or float. Large positive or negative slack values may indicate a poorly constructed schedule.

• Large negative slack indicates a logic error or a program that is no longer on track to meet its commitment dates.
• Large positive slack may indicate poor or missing logic.

12. Resource planning requires that all discrete tasks be resource loaded in order to analyze and identify resource constraints or overloaded resources.

13.  Baseline dates for tasks and milestones should be established in the project schedule early in the program. For large projects involving a customer, the contract may require this to be done in 60 to 90 days after the start date and prior to a formal review.

14. The majority of the task dependencies should be Finish-to-Start. Since most of the tasks represent work that will have a start and an end date resulting in some product or document that is needed by someone else, the work is performed in some sequence most of the time. 

15. Remove tasks that are missing links to its start or finish points.  These tasks can change duration without a detectable impact to the schedule.

16. Avoid inactive tasks and manual tasks to the extent possible. You should select auto schedule as default option.

In summary, You need to follow current, actual & baseline start, finish & duration. Always prepare based on initial effort and update the remaining work and reestimated duration based on remaining work. Never allow very short or vary long duration for tasks. Put resources and maintain resource calendar. Get the CPI & SPI ( will discuss them soon) based on baseline & status date.



Till now, you learn top tips on how to make a plan and best practices to build and track the plan. Next we’ll discuss & demonstrate how to make a plan in MS project for simple SDLC.

Next Article :  MS Project tutorial 3 on Microsoft Project schedule

Related Articles in our Project Tutorial :

1. Top 10 Best Practices for Making an IT Project Successful

2. Top 7 reasons why large IT projects Fail

 

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