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

If you’ve completed the previous chapters in this book, you have a good introduction to project management on the scale of a single project manager with projects that have dozens of resources working on hundreds of tasks. You may be practicing project management at this scale now. Indeed, with a resource pool and multi-project features, such as consolidated projects, a single project manager should be able to stay on top of several different projects in various stages of completion with Project Standard running on a single computer.

Now, imagine dozens of project managers planning and tracking hundreds of projects, each with hundreds or even thousands of resources and tasks-all within a single organization. Project management at this scale requires a high degree of planning, coordination, and standardization. This is the realm of EPM: a large organization planning, coordinating, and executing a large number of projects simultaneously.

Think about any past or current experiences you’ve had working on projects in a large organization, and try answering these questions:

• Were potential projects evaluated against the goals and objectives of the organization such that the projects selected for execution aligned well with the strategic goals of the organization?

• Were the projects defined and scoped in a consistent way that would enable apples-to-apples comparisons?

• Were resource assignments made with full knowledge of each resource’s skills, location, and availability?

• Did the executive leadership of the organization have a clear picture of the status of each project?

If your answer to these questions is “No,” the organization was probably not practicing EPM. There is no question that many large organizations can gain great benefits by adopting EPM; however, this is no easy task, or they would have implemented EPM already. Succeeding with EPM requires a strong willingness from the leadership of the organization (executive sponsorship), a well-trained group of administrators, project and resource managers, and a software infrastructure capable of enabling it.

The Project Server-based EPM toolset includes the following:

• Project Professional 2007

• Project Web Access, the browser-based interface to Project Server

• Project Server 2007, running on Windows Server 2003 SP1 or later

• SQL Server 2000 or later, the database for enterprise project and resource data

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0

Deploying a complete Project Server-based EPM system requires considerable research, planning, and coordination within an organization that is well beyond the scope of this book. However, we want to give you a chance to see what Project Server-based EPM looks like and determine whether it could play a beneficial role in your organization. To illustrate the capabilities of Project Server, we’ll use a sample database from a fictitious company, the A.Datum Corporation. The following are some resources to help with your evaluation, planning, and deployment of a Project Server-based EPM solution:

• Review all of the relevant material on the Project Server area of the Office Online Web site at microsoft.com. Find it on the Web at http://office.microsoft.com, and then navigate to the Project Server page.

• Consider attending classroom training on EPM deployment from Microsoft Learning. Here is the link to the Project Server 2003 course; check the Microsoft Learning Web site for Project Server 2007 information: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/syllabi/en-us/2732Afinal.mspx. You can also investigate the new Project Server certification, described in Appendix B.

• If you are in an organization that is relatively new to the project management discipline or lacks an experienced internal Information Technology (IT) group, consider working through the Project Server deployment process with a recognized Project Partner. You can begin your search for a qualified partner firm with the Microsoft Resource Directory listed here: http://directory.microsoft.com/mprd/

• See also the learning and community resources described in Appendix B, “What’s Next?” Many of these resources scale from the Project desktop to EPM.