MicrosoftВ® Office Project 2007 Step by Step (Step By Step (Microsoft))

Chapter at a Glance

Compare actual progress against the baseline plan, page 312. Use different tables and sorting to view cost variance, page 318. Customize a field with a formula and graphical indicators, page 325. Use the customized field to create a stoplight view that illustrates cost variance, page 328.

In This Chapter, You will Learn How to:

• Determine which tasks were started or completed late.

• View task costs at summary and detail levels.

• Examine resource costs and variance.

• Use custom fields to create a stoplight view that illustrates each task’s cost variance.

After a project’s baseline has been set and work has begun, the primary focus of the project manager shifts from planning to collecting, entering, and analyzing project performance details in a tool such as Microsoft Office Project 2007. For most projects, these performance details boil down to three primary questions or vital signs:

• How much work was required to complete a task?

• Did the task start and finish on time?

• What was the cost of completing the task?

Comparing the answers to these questions against the baseline provides the project manager and other stakeholders with a good way to measure the project’s progress and to determine when corrective action might be necessary.

Communicating project status to key stakeholders, such as customers and sponsors, is arguably the most important function of a project manager and one that might occupy much of your working time. Although the perfect flow of communication cannot guarantee a project’s success, a project with poor communications flow is almost guaranteed to fail.

A key to properly communicating project status is knowing the following:

• Who needs to know the project’s status and for what purpose?

• What format or level of detail do these people need?

The time to answer these questions is in the initial planning phase of the project. After work on the project is under way, your main communications task will be reporting project status. This can take several forms:

• Status reports that describe where the project is in terms of cost, scope, and schedule (these are the three sides of the project triangle, described in Appendix A, “A Short Course in Project Management.”)

• Progress reports that document the specific accomplishments of the project team

• Forecasts that predict future project performance

Where the scheduled or actual project performance differs from the baseline plan, you have variance. Variance is usually measured as time, such as days behind schedule, or as cost, such as dollars over budget. After initial project planning is complete, many project managers spend most of their time identifying, investigating, and, in many cases, responding to variance. However, before you can respond to variance, you must first identify, document, and report it. That is the subject of this chapter.