PM Best Practices for Managing the Project Using MSP

8/3/2019 PM Best Practices for Managing the Project Using MSP

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PM Best Practices for managing the project using MSP

Contingency in Schedules

How do you determine the appropriate contingency level?

Contingency level is specified in the IAE under the field “Estimate Confidence Level

Justification”. The recommendation is to discuss the contingency level in IA Review

meeting that is help with the Project Team. In order to be more accurate the

product contingency level template should be used to asses more accurate the

number.

TODO: Product Contingency Level Templates for each product.

How should contingency tasks be added to the schedule?

Contingency should be normally added at stage level – design, development,

validation. One exception to that would be if multiple resources are involved toproduce project deliverable in the same stage it’s recommended to add thecontingency at deliverable level.

Figure 1In the example from Fig.1, I’ve added contingency at stage level for Developmentand Validation. Development is all done by the same resource – Software Engineer -while in the Validation stage there are 2 resources involved – Test Engineer and

Test Lead. Because the task on which the Test Lead is working is a closely relatedand dependent on the task that the Test Engineers is doing I did not addcontingency separately.

In the same time for Design stage I’ve added 2 contingency tasks.

• One is for the Design activities which are 2 separate activities but are doneby the same resource in this case. If there were 2 resources involved ondoing High Level Design and Detail Design, I would recommend havingseparate contingency tasks.



• The second is for Test Plan task as another resource is involved in doing thisproject deliverable

Baseline the schedule

When should the baseline be done?

Schedule should be baselined before the activities on the schedule start even if notall resources are allocated. When the resource gaps are filled in and start dates andallocations are committed the baseline should be updated to reflect them.

How do you baseline?

Go to Tools->Tracking->Save Baseline.

Figure 2Multiple baselines can be saved for later use and the level of granularity can beselected as well: Entire Project or only Selected Tasks.



Figure 3

Benefits of baseline

Once you have a baseline you can start tracking and monitoring of schedule andcost variances. If you select Tracking Gant for a view you will be able to view theoriginal baseline (the bottom bar of each task) tracked against actual progress (thetop bar of each task).

The red bar tasks are part of the critical path for this project

Figure 4



Tracking Progress to asses Estimates vs Actuals/Earned Value

Analysis

Prerequisites• A schedule with baseline is needed in order to be able to track estimates vs

actuals.

• Actual time spent on each task

• Remaining task time estimated by the resource working on the task

How do you track progress using MSP

The easiest way to track progress is to select View->Table->Work.

Figure 5 The default work view will be selected with columns Work, Baseline, Variance,

Actual, Remaining and % Work Complete displayed. For each task the actual spentand remaining hours should be updated based on the information collectedpreviously. As information is entered you will be able to see in Tracking Gant theimpact of the tasks that have overrun on the final delivery date. See Figure 6.



Figure 6

Contingency monitoring/update

In case a task has an overrun (actual work is bigger than the baseline) the

contingency should be updated by subtracting the difference.

Eg: Task Baseline hours: 20 hours Total contingency for the activities in the stage: 15 hours Task Actual Time: 25 hoursOverrun: 5 hoursContingency remaining hours should be reduced to:20 hours

Once contingency is down to 0 there is big chance the task will impact the end

delivery date if the task is on critical path.



How to analyze and report Estimates vs Actuals

After the data is entered in the schedule the calculation are done and the results

can be used to report both progress and estimates vs actuals.

Figure 7

TODO: The data can be entered weekly in the spreadsheet built by Joe for reportingpurposes or another spreadsheet can be generated from MSP.

Earned Value Analysis

Go to View->Table->More Tables and select the Earned Value view. If will display

the following indicators that can be used to analyze the health of the project.



Table 1

Figure 8 – To be updated

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PM Best Practices for Managing the Project Using MSP