Instead of asking the resource for the remaining hours and the system calculating the percent complete, it wants the user to figure the % complete. Let’s take an example – if you were allocated 30 hours of work, and you have spent 25 hours but still have 10 hours of work left, what is the % complete? Not easy, right? Resources find great difficulty in reporting the ‘% complete’ for a task. The ration of the allocations will determine the effort assigned to each resource. This % is not the proportion of the work, but the time they will work per day on the task. In Microsoft Project, you have to enter the total effort and allocate resources in %. You do not allocate resources in this way in Microsoft Project. For example, it is natural for a manager to allocate Joe to work 20 hours while assigning Mark 10 hours on the same task. When multiple resources work on a task, the natural way to think about it is to give each resource individual work. It would be great if a stakeholder could click a button on a task to see who changed the date and when. Yes, they have baselines, but with the scope being so fluid nowadays, things are never that simple as to take a Baseline after each change. This makes it difficult for stakeholders to believe the plan. Managers can change task dates without leaving a trace. Many are left scratching their heads or wasting time in Microsoft Project forums.įor users who have an analytical bent of mind and have been trained well, it may work, but the rest are focussed on getting their job done and not learning another tool. “Everybody is happy,” they say.Īlso, there is also no help provided to the user in understanding why a task date starts or finishes on that date. Many users I know use the “manual scheduling” feature and use Microsoft Project to generate pretty Gantt charts. They try to change one field, and something else gets broken. Some managers try to wield its power but a week later find themselves getting confused as to why the task’s dates are so and so. Many concepts don’t resonate with the real-world observation and seem artificial. They are still confused whether to add a constraint, or whether to add a dependency with lead time, or whether to make a task manually scheduled. Even after rigorous training, users do not know how to use the flexibility correctly. There are too many concepts that are practically impossible to master. Scheduling in Microsoft Project is powerful but painfully complicated. Plus the licensing is extraordinarily complex and difficult to understand. Yes, we have the Microsoft Project Server option, but it is expensive to set up and maintain. It also means that the “anytime, anywhere access” idiom that we have taken for granted is not correct. Today, when Microsoft Windows is not ubiquitous anymore, this is severely limiting. It doesn’t work on mobile phones, tables, macOS or Mac OS X devices. Microsoft Project works only on Microsoft Windows. A Desktop Solution – no anytime, anywhere access Even if you have decided on using Microsoft Project because you already have it installed on your computer, you should read this to understand what you are missing. In this article, we shall look at a few of the significant problems with MS Project. They do a whole lot more, are easy to use and inexpensive. There are a lot of better alternatives to Microsoft Project today. Today, it has become the defacto standard with 66% of the market share and millions of users. With an Excel-like interface and WYSIWYG Gantt charts, it quickly rose to prominence. Launched in 1986, Microsoft Project was one of the first project management software to be made available to the common public.
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11/7/2022 0 Comments The day of the jackalThe pandemic has changed so many things about the way we behave. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Some of the most insightful business and life lessons that I have applied to my success have been learned from small business owners and entrepreneurs. I tend to be more focused on “what people do” more than “what people say” and try to emulate the best actions. There are so many that I have learned from including colleagues that were leaders, peers, and those whom I have led, but also my friends and family. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that? None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Trusting smart people to make good decisions has always been a winning formula. To me this means providing an environment for your team to excel, getting out of the way and empowering decision making at the individual or micro-team level. I have a strong belief in the servant-leader approach. I’m not sure I have a specific quote but I’ll share my approach to leadership. It was great to see the entire team rally around this effort and be able to support customers in need, especially educators.Ĭan you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life? During this time, we also had to rapidly respond to any issues with our Beta and release new versions or hotfixes in record time. This included adding support resources including more direct support, increasing our customer communications and content, providing some services for free, and bypassing limits on plans for customers so their service would not be interrupted. We are a small team and to respond we pivoted our entire team over to support operations and, in parallel, rapidly address any issues experienced in the Beta. Customers were very stressed and looking for some extra help to get going. Then the pandemic hit! We were inundated with existing and new customers globally who needed our tools immediately, especially schools and universities. This new service was a completely new architecture, platform, and code and we were in the process of migrating our existing customer base over to the new app as well as offering this experience to all new customers. Shortly before the pandemic started we had launched a Beta of our new video and image hosting services. There are so many but one that stands out is a recent experience that happened during the pandemic. Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career? Matt has deep experience defining strategy and vision, business planning, building and leading teams, developing business processes, and securing company financing, With leadership experience in both startup and large scale organizations, Matt has the ability to understand emerging technologies and apply sound business and technical discipline to corporate objectives. Matt Champagne, CEO of Screencast-O-Matic is a seasoned technology executive with broad background. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Champagne. In this interview series, we are interviewing business leaders who share the strategies, tools and techniques they use to effectively and efficiently communicate with their team who may be spread out across the world. What strategies, tools and techniques work to be a highly effective communicator, even if you are not in the same space? How can teams effectively communicate if they are never together? Zoom and Slack are excellent tools, but they don’t replicate all the advantages of being together. We are living in a new world in which offices are becoming obsolete. |
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