EPM Team

The Catapult EPM team is responsible for delivering Microsoft project and portfolio management solutions. Their blog reflects team insights and real-world experiences developing world-class EPM solutions.
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Sep1

Troubleshooting Text Formatting Issues in Microsoft Project

I was looking through my LiveWriter queue this week, and realized that I had a couple of posts left over from the last several months that I never posted.  This is one of those posts.  I originally wrote it for Microsoft Project 2007, but it should be just as applicable to the 2010 version.  (The screenshots are from 2007.) This is a question which has come up a couple of times both at work an...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Wednesday, 1 Sep 2010 07:49.
0 Comments | Categories: Project Professional 2007, Project Professional 2010

 
Aug26

And Now For Something Completely Different

In the Houston area and looking for something fun to do this Sunday?  Read no further.  …but if you’re interested in what happens when a bunch of IT consultants, business coaches, and a restaurant manager get on stage to push their comfort zone by channeling their inner Drew Carey, then come on down to the Third Coast Theater for the graduation performance of our improv comedy class. To pa...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Thursday, 26 Aug 2010 05:00.
0 Comments | Categories: Gratuitous Self-Reference

 
Aug24

The Gartner IT PPM Report and the Commoditization of Math

That little post on Portfolio Analysis in Excel that I threw out into the Interwebs a couple of weeks ago seemed to engender a surprising amount of conversation – both online and off.  As I’ve stated before, I am not a math major, but figuring that as of this writing we had three distinct comments posted – and generally most posts generate zero comments, then by my calculations, if I figure 3/0...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Tuesday, 24 Aug 2010 08:40.
2 Comments | Categories: Project Server 2010, Portfolio Management

 
Aug19

Adding Departmental Rollups to Risk and Issue Reports

This question came up in the newsgroup a little while ago, and intrigued me enough to play around with it.  The question was how to add Departments to the Issues and Risks reports in Project Server 2010, so that you can report a rollup of how many issues or risks exist on projects by Department.  I played around with it a bit, and the answer turned out to be pretty simple.  Basically, we just h...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Thursday, 19 Aug 2010 07:52.
2 Comments | Categories: Business Intelligence, Project Server 2010, Reporting

 
Aug14

Displaying Near Critical Path Activities in Microsoft Project

One of the schedulers I support was asking me this question the other day, and it seemed like it might make a nice tip and trick.  Hence, you’re seeing it here as a blog post. The question was how to display both Critical and Near-Critical Path tasks on the Gantt Chart – basically how to flag tasks with Total Slack below a specific predefined threshold.  You’d want to do something like this to...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Saturday, 14 Aug 2010 06:10.
0 Comments | Categories: Best Practices, Project Professional 2007, Project Professional 2010

 
Aug6

Accessing Project Server from the iPhone

Well, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything serious.  We just got back from a relaxing vacation, and I am finding it hard to get up the motivation to pick up a couple of blog posts I have had lying around and get them ready for prime time. In the meantime, our IT guys just got a demo environment stood up in the cloud, and I figured I’d try it out from my iPhone (3GS OS4) to see...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Friday, 6 Aug 2010 06:14.
0 Comments | Categories: Project Server 2010

 
Aug6

Chris Vandersluis on the Batphone

Chris Vandersluis hits another one out of the park with his article on implementing EPM (here).  This is from his From the Trenches series posted to the Project Technet page.   Definitely required reading if you’re contemplating an EPM engagement....
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Friday, 6 Aug 2010 09:35.
0 Comments | Categories: Best Practices, Deployment

 
Aug5

Austin PMO LIG Event: Beyond the Gantt Chart – August 10

If you’re in Austin on 8/10, you may want to check out this upcoming event by Dan Patterson of Acumen.  Looks to be quite interesting. And after that, you can check out some Korean tacos at Chi’Lantro.  I read about them last week, and now am looking for any excuse to make it out to Austin (or to go find a competing outfit here in the Houston area.) Note that registration closes tonight.  N...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Thursday, 5 Aug 2010 09:39.
1 Comment | Categories: Best Practices

 
Jul19

Two Cool Blog Posts For Today

I wasn’t planning on pushing anything out today, but a couple of really good blog posts on Project desktop caught my eye, and I wanted to make sure you all saw them:   1) Dale Howard from MS Project Experts on deploying the default 2000-2007 macros to Project 2010.  These macros have always been underused and underappreciated, but the Format_Duration macro has saved my project plans on many o...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Monday, 19 Jul 2010 03:52.
0 Comments | Categories: Project Professional 2010

 
Jul11

Project Server At Houston Techfest 2010

Looks like I’ll be speaking on Project Server at the Houston Techfest on October 9, 2010.  (More Information)  We’ll see if that MVP designation makes everyone think I am smarter – or if it just unreasonably raises their expectations.  The event is free, so I can definitely guarantee that if you attend my presentation, you will at least get what you paid for. Hope to see some of you there…...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on Sunday, 11 Jul 2010 10:01.
0 Comments | Categories: Gratuitous Self-Reference, Project Server 2010