Project Management Scratchpad

Delivering Project Plans to Your Team

By Laura Bamberg – Global Sales Administrator

Recently one of our salespeople was talking to project managers on the trade show floor at a conference and discovered that many of them still print their project plans to pdf documents and distribute to their team and stakeholders.

If you prefer to use a program like Excel, it's important to note that this is not helpful for delivering project plans over the long term any more than printing to a pdf. What if the team members need to add information to your project plan? This is not at all feasible for them. This reminds us that Steelray Project Viewer  saves project managers time and prevents the hassle of trying to print plans to a pdf or strictly using Excel.

It would be simpler and faster to send an e-mail to your team, telling them where the mpp file is located so they can see it. The team can open it with our Microsoft Project viewer, and there will be no problem trying to get it to print correctly to a pdf or making sure everything exports to Excel perfectly. It is almost the same as if you had created it in Microsoft Project.

What are some of the other ways that our Viewer can help?

• There is no need to update to a third-party server - instead, store it on your server, and there is no need to create a new pdf.
• A pdf gives you one view - our Viewer gives you a sight-line to overdue tasks, incomplete, and tasks beginning this week, as well as tasks assigned to a person and more.
• Filter and navigate your view. Drill down to all parts of critical project information.
• A pdf file limits your zoom levels because you only have two options - bigger or smaller. Our Viewer allows multiple zoom levels with different timescales.
• The Viewer is also a navigator - it allows you to search in the same way you would use a search engine on the web.
• A team member can send a status update to the project manager's email inbox.
• If you like using Excel and feel comfortable with it, you can use one of our Excel templates that's included with our Viewer. You can also export tasks to Excel, as well as html.

What holds you back from using a better tool? Could it be that there are many products that cost a great deal of money out there, each vying for your attention and budget? Some companies charge a monthly fee, which actually costs you much more than the cost of our viewer.

We love to hear your feedback, so keep it coming! We’ve enjoyed our conversations with you on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Steelray Software Adds Schedule Analysis and Security to Microsoft Project

Atlanta, Georgia -- February 26, 2007 -- Steelray Software, maker of the leading Microsoft Project Viewer software, announces the release of two new Microsoft Project Add-In products. Steelray Project Analyzer is a schedule analysis and scorecard tool that plugs into the desktop versions of Microsoft Project. Steelray Project Protector is a low-cost security and access control solution for sharing Microsoft Project files.

 

The patent-pending technology at the core of Steelray Project Analyzer was developed at a leading Aerospace and Defense company and licensed to Steelray Software. Using statistical analysis, a team of project managers at the A&D company analyzed project schedules spanning several years to derive a set of common characteristics of the project schedules that were considered successful. Steelray Project Analyzer uses a built-in set of criteria to generate an easy-to-read scorecard and helps the project manager improve their schedule.

 

Steelray Project Protector was born from a need that Steelray's Microsoft Project viewer customers requested. "Our customers asked us for a way to share certain parts of project files, " said Brian Leach, Managing Director of Steelray Software. "With Steelray Project Protector, we're delivering an easy, low cost solution to that problem." With password-based protection, the project file is protected or exposed in its entirety (all or nothing). Steelray Project Protector is a big improvement because it offers filter-based protection, which allows the project manager to specify exactly which parts of the project file may be hidden or shared.

 

For more information on Steelray Software, or to download a free trial of any Steelray product, visit www.steelray.com.

 

About Steelray Software

 

Steelray Software is the leading provider of Microsoft Project Viewer software and offers easy, low cost project management software solutions. Steelray Software is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

Contact Information

Ray Paseur

(404) 806 0160 x1

ray.paseur@steelray.com

Steelray Project Analyzer 1.0 is Shipping

We are pleased to announce that our first version of Steelray Project Analyzer (SPA), our project analysis and scorecarding application, is shipping today!

SPA is a Microsoft Project plugin that checks your project schedule for a list of problems and generates a colorful scorecard showing you how to improve your schedule.  You can find more information about SPA at the SPA product web page, and download it here.

New Product: Steelray Project Analyzer

I'm pleased to announce the beta release of a new plugin for Microsoft Project: Steelray Project Analyzer (SPA).

 

SPA is an easy to use plugin that analyzes your project file and provides a scorecard on the quality of your project schedule. You can use our criteria or create your own criteria for what makes a project schedule "good." For individual project managers, SPA can help you improve your schedules. For larger organizations, it can be a great tool for assessing the health of a project and quality of the project schedule.

 

For more information and to download the beta, visit http://www.steelray.com/spa.php

Task Update in Steelray

The latest release of Steelray (our Microsoft Project Viewer) is now available, and with this version we introduce something our users have been asking for:  task update.

It's pretty simple:  the project manager "prepares" the project file by adding a custom property called Steelray Email.  The property's value is the email address of the project manager.

When Steelray Project Viewer opens the project file and sees that it contains this property, it adds a new tab to the task detail view.  The new tab allows the user to answer a few simple questions about the task status:  did it start, is it in progress, how much longer to finish, etc.

When the user clicks on the Update button, SPV sends an email back to the project manager with a concise update on the status of the task.

You can find out more (and see screenshots) about this feature on this page from steelray.com.

Microsoft Project Conference

Sorry about the long delay between posts . . .

I'm back from the Microsoft Project Conference in Seattle.  Some random notes from the conference . . .

Project '12' is going to be very well received. I'm not sure what I can and cannot say about it, so I'll take the side of caution.  I will say it is quite impressive and they've added some features that have been on my wish list for a lonnnnnnnnng time.

It was great seeing old friends and meeting new ones.  Microsoft was out in full force, wearing red shirts so they were hard not to spot in a crowd.  I spoke to a few of the Project MVPs and spread the word about Microsoft Project viewers.

I learned that Brian Kennemer (author of the excellent projectified blog) works for Microsoft now.  Sounds like a pretty nice gig -- helping large customers with EPM solutions.

There were lots of partners who offered EPM services and consulting, but not as many ISVs as I was expecting.  The opportunities to do Project add-ons and plugins are wide open . . .

I finally met some of the MVPs that I'd been corresponding with via email over the years.  Gary Chefetz and Dale Howard of Project Experts have a nice set of books (courseware, actually) for Project Server. They were exhibiting at the conference. Closer to home, I ran into Tracy Jacob from PM Resource Group and her team.

Seattle was much nicer than I was expecting, and it even stopped raining for most of the time I was there.  All in all, it was a very well-planned and well-run conference.  Hmmm, did they use Project Server to plan it?

Scheduling By The Second or Millenium

My company develops and sells Steelray, a Microsoft Project Viewer, so I'm in touch with companies using Microsoft Project almost every day.  I love seeing how people are using Microsoft Project, and I'm still amazed by the number of different ways it is used.

Every so often I come into contact with a project manager who schedules tasks by the minutes, which is a pretty cool concept.  I always wonder what sort of projects require scheduling by the minute; product assembly, real-time process scheduling, television production?

What if Project could schedule by the second, or millisecond, or microsecond?  What would people use it for?  Chemical reactions?  electronic timing charts?

On the other side of the scale, what if Project could schedule in decades, centuries, millenium, or even greater periods of time (ages, era)?  What tasks would make sense when scheduled by the era?  Opposable thumbs?  Amphibious life?

If Microsoft Project supported these extreme timescales, what would it enable us to do that we couldn't do today?

Deadlines in Microsoft Project

Deadlines are a nice but little-known feature of Microsoft Project.  People often get tripped up when they use constraints, like "Must Finish By."  Deadlines are a nice way to be alerted when a task is going to finish "too late."

These instructions apply to Microsoft Project 2003, but the concept it the same for earlier versions:

1. In Microsoft Project, doubleclick on a task to bring up the task information window, and navigate to the Advanced Tab.
2. Next to "Deadline," select a date which represents the date when the task must be completed by.

That's it!  The task now has a deadline attached to it.  How does this help?  Pick a predecessor task, one that your deadline task depends on, and make the duration large enough so the Finish Date of the deadline task goes beyond the deadline.

See what happened?  In the Information column to the left of the task name, Project displays a small red diamond with an exclamation point over it.  Hover the cursor over it, and a tooltip appears which explains that the Finish Date is now later than the deadline.

Try it out . . .