Project Plan - Template

[Steve]

All,

I'm pretty new to MS Project - Please forgive me if I say something
stupid.

As part of my role at work. I'm now responsible for projects that
involve 3rd party applications or (COTS)

What I'd like to do is create a Plan that would offer 3 choices.

Application Only
Hardware Only
Application & Hardware (Project involves hardware and software)

Based of what I select when I first start to create plan.
MSProject will build the plan with task that are known and expected for
project type.


Is this possible?

Steve

 

[Rod Gill]

There have been a variety of attempts to write programs that provide choices
and so build schedules. They have all fallen by the wayside because they
either get too complicated and hard to maintain, or take for ever to work
thru and still don't provide a complete solution. I would just create three
basic templates and let the PM choose from them. Then they need to add and
delete tasks as required. This is the most effective solution in most cases.

 

[JackD]

I second Rod's advice. It is certainly possible to do what you want, but it
is less practical than using templates.

 

[Gord]

Yes, it is possible. I have done this for several clients. Essentially
we created one template that has all of the possible tasks and then
modified the Project Guide to ask a set of questions about the project.
Based on the answers, code executed to delete the unwanted tasks from
the project plan.

Our intention wasn't to provide the final version of the plan, but to
provide the project managers all of the appropriate standard tasks.
Apart from providing a great dynamic standarized starting point for the
project manager, this approach also made things easier to maintain as
there were not multiple templates with 80% of the tasks duplicated
between them all.

Best of luck,
Gord