P
Peters
Hello,
I am using MSP to track earned value in my product development projects, and
it works pretty well (after some good help from this forum). However, when
doing so, I experience a conflict between reporting actual hours truthfully
and then present progress in the project to the steering group.
On the on hand, I want to be inputing actual worked hours, which I do using
the resource or task usage views. On the other hand I want to be able to
present the progress of the project to the steering group. Earned value is of
course one way of doing that, but most steering group members feel more
aquainted with a gantt-chart, preferably with progress bars or similar.
Personally I prefer doing a Life-cycle Breakdown Structure of my project
with design stages, rather than more traditional WBS. I am thinking that a
good idea would to specify some summary tasks, filter them and show them on a
one-page Gantt-chart together with the progress bars. Even better would of
course to include the baseline plan as well. What prevents me from doing this?
The problem is that even if for example production is at the end of the
project, we might do an early start on some activities that belongs to
production. Now, to report the real earned value, I need to input these
hours, but just a few weeks into the project, all actual Gantt bars tend to
start the first weeks of the project since a small part of that phase has
started. This makes the pretty useless, since all bars will be full length
(at least in terms of starting). The same goes for closing a phase, where
some action might have been delayed or treated as an exempt. The phase is 99%
complete, but the bar still goes on.
I realize that there are some different strategies on dealing with this, but
would greatly appreciate some advice and experience on the best ways to
combine true reporting of hours and presenting the project progress in a
Gantt-chart that gives you a good overview.
Thanks in advance,
Peter
I am using MSP to track earned value in my product development projects, and
it works pretty well (after some good help from this forum). However, when
doing so, I experience a conflict between reporting actual hours truthfully
and then present progress in the project to the steering group.
On the on hand, I want to be inputing actual worked hours, which I do using
the resource or task usage views. On the other hand I want to be able to
present the progress of the project to the steering group. Earned value is of
course one way of doing that, but most steering group members feel more
aquainted with a gantt-chart, preferably with progress bars or similar.
Personally I prefer doing a Life-cycle Breakdown Structure of my project
with design stages, rather than more traditional WBS. I am thinking that a
good idea would to specify some summary tasks, filter them and show them on a
one-page Gantt-chart together with the progress bars. Even better would of
course to include the baseline plan as well. What prevents me from doing this?
The problem is that even if for example production is at the end of the
project, we might do an early start on some activities that belongs to
production. Now, to report the real earned value, I need to input these
hours, but just a few weeks into the project, all actual Gantt bars tend to
start the first weeks of the project since a small part of that phase has
started. This makes the pretty useless, since all bars will be full length
(at least in terms of starting). The same goes for closing a phase, where
some action might have been delayed or treated as an exempt. The phase is 99%
complete, but the bar still goes on.
I realize that there are some different strategies on dealing with this, but
would greatly appreciate some advice and experience on the best ways to
combine true reporting of hours and presenting the project progress in a
Gantt-chart that gives you a good overview.
Thanks in advance,
Peter