Possible to recreate schedule or project state as of certain miles

[Schlafcommodore]

Project is good for managing project resources, but what if I were most
interested in demonstrating or EXPLAINING the state and schedule (actuals)
based upon past dates or milestones?
In other words, in performing the autopsy of a project or getting lessons
learned, it would be good to be able to explain to senior leaders just what
state the project was in 6 months ago and what the schedule looked like THEN.
The ultimate goal would be to show progress and SEE the schedule change as
the project ran its unique course - sort of like watching time-lapse
photography of a high-rise building going from the foundation up and being
completed.

Any thoughts?

 

[John]

Project is good for managing project resources, but what if I were most
interested in demonstrating or EXPLAINING the state and schedule (actuals)
based upon past dates or milestones?
In other words, in performing the autopsy of a project or getting lessons
learned, it would be good to be able to explain to senior leaders just what
state the project was in 6 months ago and what the schedule looked like THEN.
The ultimate goal would be to show progress and SEE the schedule change as
the project ran its unique course - sort of like watching time-lapse
photography of a high-rise building going from the foundation up and being
completed.

Any thoughts?

Schlafcommodore,
Let me offer a couple of thoughts, others may have their own "take" on
how to do a "lessons learned autopsy".

Project can accommodate multiple baselines. If that feature was used
during execution of the plan, then it will provide a basis for post-plan
review. However for my money the best approach to preserving snapshots
of history is to periodically save the plan as it is executed. You can
then go back and review or even use the compare utility to see how the
plan changed from save to save. If you really wanted to do some in-depth
analysis, you could create metrics of critical plan data and pull that
data, either manually or via automation (i.e. VBA), from each save.

It all depends on what you want to "learn".

John
Project MVP

 

[Schlafcommodore]

Thanks to both of you - yes it has occurred to me to save the Project file on
a specific date, but it seems to me that all of the info is there in MSP to
recreate on any given date - or am I wrong about that? Does it note or store
the deltas and when changes took place? Maybe it doesn't

Anyway I prefer to not deal with a giant collection of files when I could
have a database of state instead. In other words, when I do a post-mortem
exam of a project in front of a murder board type panel of seniors, and I am
asked what was going on for such-and-such on ANY given subcontract or
unexpected situation, I would like to just be able to "call up" the state and
the tool provide me that state or snapshot instead of rummaging through a
giant pile of files, opening each one in succession and saying, "oops no
that's not the one" and then trying another saved copy. That search and
delay kills a presentation.

Anyway thanks for the ideas

 

[John]

Thanks to both of you - yes it has occurred to me to save the Project file on
a specific date, but it seems to me that all of the info is there in MSP to
recreate on any given date - or am I wrong about that? Does it note or store
the deltas and when changes took place? Maybe it doesn't

Anyway I prefer to not deal with a giant collection of files when I could
have a database of state instead. In other words, when I do a post-mortem
exam of a project in front of a murder board type panel of seniors, and I am
asked what was going on for such-and-such on ANY given subcontract or
unexpected situation, I would like to just be able to "call up" the state and
the tool provide me that state or snapshot instead of rummaging through a
giant pile of files, opening each one in succession and saying, "oops no
that's not the one" and then trying another saved copy. That search and
delay kills a presentation.

Anyway thanks for the ideas

Schlkafcommodore,
As far as I know, once changes (i.e. progress updates) are made and the
file is saved, the underlying project database is changed - permanently.
Project does not keep a running change history - believe me you wouldn't
really want that because the mass of data would be tremendous.

As we both indicated, our preferred approach is to save on a regular
basis. If you are concerned about "finding" specific deltas, as I
indicated before, you need to come up a set of critical metrics, not the
whole thing.

John
Project MVP

 

[Steve]

You can store up to 11 baselines in Project 2003, and then view them using
View -> More Views -> Multiple Baselines Gantt. Combined with a reasonably
detailed project change and/or lessons learned log (you ARE keeping one,
right?), you should be able to manually build a picture of changes. If you
need to track changes in a more granular fashion, you need to save versions
separately as suggested or perhaps you could use the versioning feature of a
SharePoint document library.

I don't know of a way of generating a visual "fly-through" of the changes
other than through screenshots taken at the time of critical changes. If you
have a lot of spare time, you could use Flash, Silverlight, or the Slide
Show features of Powerpoint to build your time-lapse picture, adding in
comments and special effects as appropriate. Do your audience a favor,
though, and go easy on the "whoosh" stuff ;-)