A lot of folks ask in the newsgroups how to save a Project file to Access.  This may be done for a number of reasons:

• Connecting to a reporting structure. (See an old article by Neville Turbit on project reporting in Access)
• Connecting to a SharePoint front end.  (Richard Fennell’s take on Access Services in SharePoint 2010, a video demo of Access Services 2010)
• Interacting with homegrown or third party systems.
• Exporting to a Microsoft Project viewer product.
• Reverse engineering some of the quirks in Microsoft Project.

For instance, once I had an end user ask me why the Predecessors are listed in the order they are in Microsoft Project.  I did a quick dump into Access and identified the table where Predecessors are stored.  We quickly were able to determine that each Predecessor link represents a UID, and the order in which they are displayed in Microsoft Project is sorted by Link UID.

In Microsoft Project 2003, it was relatively easy to save to an Access MDB file.  Just select File > Save As, and then pick the Access option.  In fact, as I recall, 2003 had this cool (but little understood option) to control how timephased data was exported to other file formats.

In 2007, that feature remains, but it got moved, and that has confused a number of people through the years.  To access the feature in 2007, select Reports > Visual Reports and then look at the bottom of the dialog box for the Save Data option.

In the resulting dialog box, select to Save as a Database.

And there you are, an Access database with all of your project reporting data.  As far as I can tell through some preliminary testing, that feature remains the same in 2010.

Reposting teammate Rafael Perez’s invite to what is sure to be a scintillating (or at least mildly interesting if you’re into such things) evening talking about search capabilities in SharePoint 2007.  Come away with ideas of how to optimize your SharePoint based PM Information System.

SharePoint TechDive: http://www.sptechdives.com/ 

The event is at the Catapult office at Richmond & the Beltway.  Come check out our new digs…

I am not sure how the Austin PMO LIG stacks up, but the Central Ohio one I used to attend was a great forum for sharing ideas and mixing with local program/portfolio managers.  This event is at the Texas Association of School Boards. 

From the invitation e-mail I received yesterday…

******

Have you wondered at all buzz regarding SharePoint and Project Management? Well, come join us for a demonstration of the most touted features for project managers and teams, along with real world implementation guidance.

Event Description:
Demos and Discussion
- Reporting and Project Communication - Leveraging SharePoint to implement your communications plan
- Team Collaboration - Document libraries and team workspaces
- Project Tracking and Change Control - Using workflows with task lists and document libraries
- Repeatability with Templates - Setting up your first SharePoint project site isn't difficult, and the second site is even easier!

Real World Implementation
- SharePoint Adoption: key success factors
- Understanding why tools like SharePoint go underused
- Understanding people's resistance to change
- An Enterprise-wide Roll-out success story

About the Speakers: Jim Adcock has been using SharePoint since 2004, starting by training project managers to utilize SharePoint as a document management tool in his role as the technical lead for the IBM Solutions Enablement PMO for two years. He has also utilized SharePoint as a process management tool and to create de-siloed information repositories. Jim has been very active in local SharePoint communities and activities for the last year, and is a past member of Austin PMI with project management experience.
Chris Morgan is founder and CEO of Blue Bicycle Software, LLC, creator of an on-demand solution that speeds up the planning and execution of planned IT outages. Chris previously served as PMO Communications Specialist at Temple-Inland for three years, where her role was to communicate, and create, simplify and support PMO processes and tools throughout the company. She is a PMP, a Certified ScrumMaster, and has a Certificate in Process Management and an MBA, both from Texas.

Registration: Please register on-line by clicking Register Now! or by visiting the event link on the PMI Austin Chapter website listed to the left on this page.

NOTE: If you have difficulties with completing the on-line registration process, please send an email to PMOLIG@austinpmi.org to register for the event. Cash or check payments will be accepted at the meeting; however, credit card payments can not be accommodated. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

RSVP and Payment Deadline: Monday, February 24, 2010, midnight.

NOTE on TASB location: All attendees are required to check in at the TASB lobby reception desk.

Questions: If you have questions, please email pmolig@austinpmi.org

Save These Dates:

• April 28 - PMO LIG event
• July 14 - PMO LIG event
• September 15 - PMO LIG event

Visit the PMI Austin Chapter website for more upcoming events and information.

About PMO LIG: The PMO LIG is a component of the PMI Austin Chapter and works in conjunction with the local chapter to provide additional opportunities for focused discussions on the topic of PMO's and Portfolio Management. The LIG also benefits from an association with PMI's Program Management Office Specific Interest Group (PMO SIG). For more information, visit any of the web links listed to left on this page.

PMO LIG Meeting Agenda: Sign-in and Networking 11:15-11:30AM Lunch and Meeting Presentation 11:30-1:00PM Payment: Meeting and Lunch (PMI Member): $12 Meeting and Lunch (non-PMI member): $15 Meeting Only (PMI member or non-member): $5 PDU Credits: 1.5 Registration Deadline: Midnight Monday, February 22, 2010. Register Now!

Well, I started this three part post back in September, then got caught up in other things, and never quite got around to finishing it.  I thought for a while of taking the Douglas Adams approach to trilogies: “Check out these two blog posts, giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘Three Part Series.’”  However, finding myself to be a posterchild for the Language Action Perspective, I felt that it was finally time to get back to wrapping it up.

So a bit of summary to get us to the right place:

1) Part 1 (Innovation Stories from Toyota) – we visited a fundamental feature of innovation – that successful organizations are ones that communicate their values to the folks identifying improvement opportunities, and that encourage ideas for projects to be developed from a wide variety of inputs.

2) Part 2 (The PMBOK) – where we took that concept of developing feedback mechanisms and applied it to the project as a system, discussing how the PMBOK processes can be interpreted as creating a self-organizing, learning system.

And finally, Part 3, where we apply the same focus on ITIL processes, and look at how this ends up presenting the organization as a fractal:

First of all, I don’t plan to introduce ITIL here.  There’re a lot of resources for that, and the best place to start would either be the Wikipedia page or the ITIL v3 Pocket Guide.  A lot of folks have different definitions of ITIL, based on their own focus, and I must admit that I am no different.  Some people have described it to me as a configuration database and the processes required to keep it up to date.  I prefer to see ITIL as an innovation system.

In ITIL, we have a prescription for a Change Management system.  Think of this as a processing mechanism for the myriad of change requests that pour into an IT operation on a daily, if not hourly basis.  The Change Management mechanism reviews changes, assesses potential risk, cost, and schedule issues, performs a cost/benefit analysis, and then manages the change building process until (or through depending on whom you talk to) the Release Management process.

So where do these changes come from?  That’s the beauty of ITIL in my opinion.  The guidance tells us what processes to put in place to identify potential changes.  We get a rich list of processes such as:

• Processes that monitor variance between the current state and the desired state:
• System Monitoring
• Capacity Management
• Demand Management
• Incident & Problem Management
• Availability Management
• Processes that define our desired future state:
• Service Level Management

…and the list of processes goes on.  Each individual process coming with all of the baggage of dedicated user groups, vendor ecosystems, critical blogs, and online forums…

In my view of the world, each one of these processes is primarily tasked with a single activity: identify discrepancies between the current state environment and the desired future state environment.  Then identify what it will take to get us to the desired future state and feed it into the Change Management process.  Each of these processes is a sensing mechanism for change proposals, or as they’re called in ITIL parlance, RFCs.

So in a sense, we have identified yet another innovation system.  Where else in the organization can we observe this combination of:

• A Goal/Values Identification Mechanism
• A Problem Sensing Mechanism
• A Problem Prioritization Mechanism &…
• An Execution Mechanism…?

What about Strategy Development, Portfolio Management, Project Management, Operational Change Management, and even taking that further, Departmental and Application Level Change Management….an endless cascade of repetitive forms and functions?

It’s a fractal structure, repeated ad infinitum from the top of the organization to the bottom.

I’ve attended a couple Microsoft Project 2010 events as of late, but of yet, I haven’t seen this functionality getting much play.  On first glance, I think this could be one of the most compelling new features added to Project: the task level Active field.

Usage Scenarios

Scenario #1: The project manager has been requested to calculate the cost and schedule impact of a potential change order.  The change order is developed as a series of extra tasks in the MPP file.  Based on that model, the change request is submitted to the project stakeholders.  They deliberate for several weeks. 

During that time, the project schedule is updated repeatedly.  As the project manager cannot very well report on the project with the unapproved change order requests included, the PM will have to remove the tasks and reinsert them later once the change order has been approved.

Fast forward, and now the stakeholders have approved the change request.  Now the PM has to go back to the change order calculations and reinsert them into the updated project schedule, hoping that the calculations of cost and schedule impact haven’t changed significantly.

With the Active field.  I can now add the change order, but render it inactive so that it is not included in status reporting or resource allocation calculations.  Whenever I need to revalidate the change order calculations, I can toggle the Active status to yes and review the schedule.

Scenario #2: I wish to remove tasks from a baselined in-progress schedule.  Generally, deleting tasks is frowned upon as this does not change the rolled up baseline calculations, and you therefore are removing a record of how that original baseline was calculated.  The guidance in 2007 was to zero out the remaining work on the removed tasks and then to prefix the name with something like “DELETED-Task1”.  Needless to say, this has been know to confuse project stakeholders.

Now I can simply render them inactive.  This keeps the original baseline calculations but allows me to track the historical record of how the baseline was developed:

This also allows me to start tracking the cost savings associated with eliminating specific tasks by grouping on inactive tasks with baseline data.

Scenario #3: I wish to develop a schedule with conditional branches.  I insert different branches based on potential information that may be developed at a later date.  As the information is received, I activate or deactivate specific branches.  With some macro coding and a rough Monte Carlo analysis, I could probably expand this to do all sorts of probabilistic analysis on the schedule.

Server Level Support

On the server level, you’ll note a couple of things:

1) Setting a task to inactive automatically toggles Publish to “No.”

2) Options to include inactive tasks in the OLAP Cubes.  I am still getting my head around how this would be used, but I suppose it will be heavily dependent on the organization’s methodologies, much like Proposed vs Committed in previous versions of Project Server.

The ITSMf Houston mailing list autospammed me the other day inviting me to an interesting upcoming event on Service Portfolios presented by Reginald Best, a Deloitte consultant - and if my memory doesn’t fail me from a brief conversation in Austin two years ago, a fellow Buckeye-in-exile.

The event is on 2/11 and will be at the BMC offices in Westchase.  Free event, free food, good content.  ITSMf is usually good for decent swag.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  Here’s the link: http://www.itsmf-houston.org/Meeting_2010-02-11/

Why you should care about ITIL.

I’ve had a couple of ITIL conversations as of late…mostly centering around the question of what exactly it is.  I’ve given the standard response as to British government best practices on IT operations supported by a vibrant collection of user groups around the world.  That never seemed to resonate.

Then I was chatting with an ex-oilfield equipment sales representative, and I was trying to find terms that he could relate to.  How’s this:

ITIL is merely taking all of the best practices around expensive capital equipment operations and maintenance, and applying them to organizational IT operations.  If a critical piece of equipment in a refinery breaks down, the organization is out hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars until it can be returned to operation.  Therefore, people don’t (or ought not) do stupid things when it comes to equipment maintenance.  IT is no different.  Even though the base components may be relatively cheap and available from the local big-box retailer, when you put them all together, they’re supporting the enterprise – and when they go down, so does the revenue stream that the enterprise depends on.

So ITIL is all about not doing stupid things in production IT environments.  It’s based on capital equipment maintenance techniques that have been well documented and studied since the 50s – if not earlier.  Furthermore, ITIL is about creating a learning organization that can identify stupid things, and avoid repeating them in the future.

So, assuming that most of the folks who read this blog came here because they’re interested in all things Microsoft Project or Enterprise Project Management systems, you’re probably asking yourself what does ITIL have to do with EPM tools…?

ITIL has everything to do with EPM tools.  Just try adopting ITIL processes in your organization without clearly defined project or change selection mechanisms….without the ability to accurately estimate the potential costs of changes to the production environment or the associated schedule risks….it simply can’t be done.  ITIL processes can’t be adopted without an EPM tool.

Conversely, although I have been working exclusively in Oil and Gas for quite some time now, many EPM implementers are IT PMOs building processes to support IT projects.  How can you implement EPM tools without also implementing the processes to identify environmental issues, and to develop the funnel of project proposals that will feed into the EPM system…or that will provide the feedback for determining project efficacy?

I fail to see how one can be implemented without the other…

Continuing with the BI thread, I was demoing dynamic reporting using SharePoint 2010 Visio Services during a recent Project Server BI spiel in Houston.  What struck me with the crowd, which was primarily from the oil and gas industry, was the interest in the Visio timeline.  I must admit, having used Microsoft Project for so long, I kinda forgot how many folks still use the Visio timeline view for reporting and scheduling purposes.  So it seemed to me that this would be a great example for a post on Visio Services in SharePoint 2010. 

That being said, I must admit that much of this would work in 2007.  The difference in 2007 is that the ODC file is not out of the box, and to display the Visio document in SharePoint, you will need either a third party tool – or deploy a custom webpart (here).  Note that in theory you could also apply the same principles to a SharePoint list synchronized with Microsoft Project Professional 2010, or Microsoft Project Professional 2007 using a third party add-in such as Project Publisher.

Note that the screenshots will all be using the 2010 Beta versions of the Microsoft Office product line.

Credit to David Parker’s Visio blog (here) for getting me most of the way there.

Usage Scenario

This is a generic example of Visio Reports, of which there are a number of potential use cases.  This particular example is built around the Visio Timeline view which is used in many companies to present high level schedules.  The 2010 MPP timeline function serves much the same purpose, although currently I am not aware of any way to programmatically take the timeline view from a Microsoft Project file and present it via a Web interface.

Instructions

1) Prepare your ODC file.  (instructions here) The main thing that will help in this scenario is to filter on a specific project, and on all of the top level tasks/milestones in the project.  Note that you can include all fields from the ODC file in the results, as we will go back in Visio and filter out the fields we don’t need.

2) Create a blank timeline view in Microsoft Visio.

3) Here we have several options.  You could opt to create the Visio timeline from scratch, and then link the data.  On the other hand, if you’re lazy like me, you might just take a copy of the MPP file and import it directly into the Visio diagram, thereby populating all of the key elements and naming them correctly – in which case all you need to do is Auto-Link the elements from the ODC file and you’re off to the races.  We’ll opt for the latter option.

4) If you’re using Microsoft Project desktop, save a copy of the file to your desktop and work with that.  If you’re working with Microsoft Office Project Server, save a copy of the file offline to your desktop, then use that as the base file.

5) Select the timeline menu in the Ribbon.  Import data from the MPP file saved to your desktop. 

6) Configure the options to generate a look and feel appropriate to your needs.

7) The result should look something like this.  Don’t worry about the formatting now.  We can adjust that later.  Note that all of the elements have the correct names – which we can now use to Auto-Link the ODC data.

8) Now add the Data Link to the ODC file prepared already.

9) You’ll see the top level data appear in the External Data Window at the bottom of the screen.

10) Now we need to configure the columns that we would like to use.  Right click on the data link view at the bottom of the screen.  Choose Column Settings.

11) Check or uncheck the fields that you would like to include as part of the shape data.

12) Change the names of the key fields to map to the shape field names (further instructions here).  By doing so, the Auto-Link function will import the ODC data to the correct parameters in the Visio diagram.  The key fields to be changed will be as follows:

TaskStartDate > Start

TaskFinishDate > Finish

TaskPercentCompleted > Percent Complete

13) Set the data to Auto-Link using the Task Name as the unique identifier. 

14) Since the items were named during the import from the MPP file, the names should be the same as the elements in the ODC file.

15) You’ll now see that the data from the ODC file has all been linked to the shapes.

…and that’s about it…feel free to format the timeline any way you would like – or to add Data Graphics tied to specific Reporting Database level fields.

Displaying the Data

With SharePoint 2010, we can now publish the data to Visio Services through functionality in the Backstage View.  (Note that I have blurred the Web folders that show up by default on my laptop as they may give away sensitive client information.)

And now the timeline is displayed dynamically using Visio Services – and can be surfaced using a Visio Services Webpart.

I can also select an element, and expose whatever fields I would like in the Shape Information Pane – in the browser.

And there you are….dynamic Visio timelines using Visio Services and ODC connectors.

This is another posting from our BI presentations last week in Houston and Dallas.  This is the first part of creating a dynamic Visio report, with the second part coming out later this week.  For that post, I plan to tackle the question of creating a dynamic Visio timeline linked to project data.  In the meantime, this is the prerequisite information on how to modify the Office Data Connector (ODC) files to do single project reporting.  (The same principles should apply to creating an ODC file in 2007.)

The default out of the box ODC files in Project Server 2010 are pretty good, but most users will eventually have to modify them – particularly if doing single project reporting in Visio.  Here’s a quick way to modify the ODC files to get the results you’re looking for.

Scenario: I want to quickly create an ODC file that only displays the top level information for a specific project to support a Visio report.

1) Open the ODC file that appears closest to what you’re looking for.  This will create a new Excel document with the data connection parameters.

2) In the Data menu, select Connections to review the embedded data connection file.  Click on Properties.

3) Edit the data connection.  I find the easiest way is to just grab the command text at the bottom and paste it into Word.

4) Add the filter statement to the data connection.  To do this scroll to the bottom of the string, and add the filter before the ORDER statement.  In this case, I am adding the following statement:

WHERE MSP_EpmProject_UserView.ProjectName=’BI Demo 1’ AND MSP_EPMTask_UserView.TaskOutlineLevel=1

This will filter the ODC results to display a single project and only the top level (i.e. phase level) summary tasks for that project.

5) Paste the resulting statement back into Excel and test the results.  Note that you may have to redo the quotes around the filtered text, as Word will insert curvy quotes, whereas the statement requires vertical quotes.  There’s a way to do that in Word, but I couldn’t recall how at the moment.

6) Change the name of the connection at the top of the dialog box.

7) Export the connection as a new ODC file.

8) Post the ODC file back to SharePoint, or keep local to your desktop for future use.  You may now use this file to drive Excel or Visio reports.  My guess is that for those organizations using Visio reporting, it will probably become routine to create specialized ODC files for each project or program being reported on.