A project management consulting company has released its proprietary set of tools for expediting project management work as an add-on available to people who attend their training.
The Project Success Toolkit for Microsoft Project, from Project Success, offers a number of functions that enhance Project’s scheduling and reporting. For example, users can revise the duration of an activity without touching the resource assignments and vice versa. They can also “status” an activity using an estimated finish date or a remaining duration instead of percent complete.
Among the other features are these:
- Activity durations that aren’t automatically adjusted by Microsoft Project;
- A schedule quality check to identify unconnected activities and tasks that are violating the network logic, which could result in an invalid critical path and key milestone dates;
- Resource planning tools that prevent Project from touching task durations and status when resources are assigned or updated;
- Custom Gantt charts that highlight the critical path for a project and show the “driving path” for a selected task or milestone to emphasize main risk areas;
- A driving path tool that allows the user to identify and highlight the path of activities that are influencing the start or finish date of a selected task;
- An “activity update” form to allow people to report progress to their managers. The forms are received by an Excel spreadsheet which, when approved, can be forwarded to the project manager;
- A “look ahead” report that lets project managers remind activity managers about work due in the next work period;
- A group and sort tool that combines the Group By and Sort By features in Project and can automatically insert page breaks to create custom team reports; and
- A report showing predecessors and successors for each activity, along with the task name, relationship type and who owns the predecessor and successors.
To obtain the toolkit, users attend the company’s Project Success toolkit course covering Project 2010 and 2013.
