The Good and Bad of Microsoft Project
March 22, 2017
The Good and Bad of Microsoft Project
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Project
Microsoft Project is used for planning what we grade as a medium to large-scale project. Depending on the size and scope we may have a completely detailed project plan with everything from project management activities (scheduling meetings) to a simple task list. Project is included in our project methodology as a key tenant used to control dates, resources, and budgets on projects.
- Illustrating resource constraints based on availability and resource allocation on a project.
- Project will keep track of budgets if you include hourly rates for resources and track actuals. This is one of the more advanced features that if fully-implemented helps you project out more accurate costs and timelines.
- Creating custom reports with open tasks, assigned person(s), upcoming tasks and overdue tasks helps keep the project team members accountable.
- Project does require a fair amount of training and repetitive use to fully maximize the tool. Basic tracking with dates and personnel can even become difficult and/or not as useful if things are done out of order.
- There are many 'endless loops' you can get in to with both auto-scheduling and manually scheduling tasks with predecessors and constraints. I highly recommend auto-scheduling all tasks as they force you to gather ROM's from task owners.
- I do not personally like the Gantt chart that Project displays as it seems hard to read and provides little value to me. This may be personal preference as I've built Gantt charts in other applications that I believe are much more informative in a visual manner.
- Reducing re-work and keeping tasks on schedule helps the project manager to hold the project team accountable.
- Having the ability to create executive level summary reports can help illustrate areas where the stakeholders must get involved to push subordinates or other groups in order to complete tasks on-time.
- Using Project can help drive out required predecessors and constraints that may not have been discovered until long after a project has been started. You can also set milestones where if a task/group of tasks is not completed by a certain date then a project can be deemed too expensive to continue and cheaper to 'kill'.
Microsoft Project has more robust planning capabilities than Workfront and much more than Excel. If you already have a project selection process in place and/or you need a tool to help project out dates based on inputs of worker availability and estimated hours or duration then Project is your tool