I spent a lot of time working with Microsoft Project 2000 this week. I’d count myself as an intermediate user, which means I can deal with resources, tasks, Gantt charts, durations, constraints, and the like, but I don’t yet do much with PERT analysis, cost tracking, earned value analysis, or tracking against a project baseline. After spending literally days working on a project plan for a project that has a defined start date and end date, with an extreme (impossible?) amount of stuff to get done in the middle, here’s my take on how Project could have been more useful.
* more than one undo operation – what other Microsoft app only allows one level of undo????
* better help in figuring out circular dependency relationships
* spell-check that highlights the spelling error, rather than pushing me to a task number – showing me a dialog box that lists a task number does me no good. Take me to the offending task and show me the “error”.
* warnings when data gets truncated in text fields: we overloaded the text1 field to include a description of the task so that we could export a WBS dictionary. Project happily and quietly chopped our text.
* show me what’s going to change down the line, in terms of time lines: given that our end date is fixed, I spent a lot of time trying to get things to line up precisely to end on May 28. I didn’t appreciate it when making a change in March for a task that wasn’t critical path pushed out my schedule in May. Wish I could tell Project – hold the beginning _and_ the end constant.
* a how-do-we-fit-all-these-tasks-in template: My wish – I give the beginning and end date, and you make up a story as to how it will all fit in nicely. Options could include lengthening the work day, adding more people, shortening tasks, hiring nuns to offer prayers on our behalf…