Project managers are responsible for building and updating quality project schedules. When building these schedules, it’s important to ensure these schedules are free of potential scheduling errors that even experienced project managers make, such as the following:

• Tasks that have not been baselined
• Summary tasks with dependencies
• Summary tasks with resource assignments
• Tasks which need to be updated
• Tasks without resource assignments
• Milestone tasks with a duration greater than zero
• Tasks that have negative Total Slack
• Tasks that have an unfavorable variance and are on the project’s critical path

This article will introduce you to the creation of customizable graphical indicators that quickly and easily identify problems with your schedule such as those noted above. These techniques can be applied to standalone Microsoft Project, Project Online and Project Server.

Using a Graphical Indicator to Identify Tasks That Have Not Been Baselined

The following steps show you how to create a custom Flag field to identify all tasks in your project that have not yet been baselined.

Step 1: Open a project in Microsoft Project, right click in the heading of any column, and from the dropdown list, click Custom Fields.

Step 2: In the Custom Fields dialog:

• Select the Task button and from the adjacent dropdown list select Flag.
• Use the Rename… button to name your Flag field “Tasks Not Yet Baselined”

• In the Custom attributes section, click Formula…
• Complete the Formula dialog as follows and click OK.

• In the Custom Fields dialog, click Graphical Indicators…
• Complete the Graphical Indicators field as follows and click OK.

• Repeat this process to apply this formula to Summary rows as well.
• Click OK in the Custom Fields dialog.

Step 3: Add a new column in your project called “Tasks Not Yet Baselined”. All tasks that meet the criteria you established – [Baseline Start] = ProjDateValue(“NA”) – will have a red flag in the Tasks Not Yet Baselined column:

Interested in Learning More?

Author Ira Brown dives deeper into this topic in the lesson replay, Using Custom Fields and Graphical Indicators to Analyze the Quality of Your Schedule, as he describes how to effectively use custom fields and graphical indicators to ensure the quality of your project schedule. Watch the lesson and earn 1 PDU!