One of the most valuable aspects offered by Project 2013 has traditionally been its ability to recalculate task schedules when you change the project start date or a change to one task’s schedule affects one or more dependent (linked) tasks. This powerful behavior saves the project manager — you — from having to rethink and reenter dates to rescheduled tasks throughout the project.
But flip sides to the benefits of automation always exist, and in the case of project scheduling, automatic scheduling can lead to unwanted schedule changes based on software behavior and not on human expertise.
To retain the helpful aspects of automation that make scheduling less time-consuming while allowing project managers to retain schedule control when needed, Project 2013 allows user-controlled scheduling.
In user-controlled scheduling, you can select one of these scheduling modes for each task:
Auto Schedule: Project calculates task schedules for you based on the project start date and finish date, task dependencies, calendar selections, and resource scheduling.
Manually: Project enables you to skip entering the duration and dates, and specifying them later. When you enter the duration and dates, Project fixes the schedule for the task and doesn’t move it unless you do so manually. The manually scheduled tasks move if you reschedule the entire project, in most cases. The Gantt bars for manually scheduled tasks also differ in appearance from those for automatically scheduled tasks.
The indicator for auto-scheduled and manually scheduled tasks is at the bottom of the Project window. The project file can have all manually scheduled tasks or all auto-scheduled tasks — or any mix of the two. By default, all tasks that you create use the manually scheduled mode.
You can change the task mode two ways:
For the overall project: To change the mode for all new tasks, select the Task tab, click Mode in the Tasks group, and then choose Auto Schedule or Manually Schedule from the menu.
New ssd not showing. Any individual task: To change the task mode of an individual new task or a task that you’ve previously entered into the schedule, click the Task tab on the Ribbon and then click either Manually Schedule or Auto Schedule in the Schedule group.
Or, in the sheet, click the Task Mode cell for the task, click the drop-down arrow that appears, and click either Manually Scheduled or Auto Scheduled in the drop-down list.
You need to balance the desires of your inner control freak versus the need to be an efficient project manager in determining how often to use manual scheduling. Though manual scheduling prevents Project from moving tasks that you want to stay put in the schedule, you may need to edit the schedules for dozens of dependent tasks in a long or complicated project.
The best balance — particularly for beginning project managers — may be to use manual scheduling sparingly.
We are excited to announce availability of Project 2016. This release includes significant updates to Project Professional, Project Pro for Office 365 and Project Online. Project 2016 delivers on some of the most requested capabilities: Resource Management and Resource Capacity Planning. Supporting these key capabilities are enhancements such as new Resource Engagements, a brand new experience for resource managers, and Capacity heat maps. Project 2016 now provides an end-to-end experience for managing and optimizing your resource utilization.
In addition to resource management, there are a host of improvements and new features to help you be more productive with Project, such as improved timelines, Tell Me integration and full support for Office add-ins.
Resource Engagements
For project managers, securing resources to ensure your project is properly staffed has always been a challenge. With Project 2016, it’s now possible to systematically request a resource, and once approved, lock that resource to guarantee it’s available.
Creating an engagement and submitting it for approval sets off a simple workflow that enables the resource manager to approve or reject the request.
The project manager will always have an up-to-date view of the status of their requests from within Project Professional 2016 or Project Pro for Office 365. Once a locked resource is assigned to a project for a duration of time, managers of other projects will get notified if they try to overbook a resource.
The resource manager experience
The resource manager (or line manager) is a people manager who may not want to use the full Project client. To allow the resource manager to collaborate with the project manager, Project Online now has an area for the resource manager to view and approve or reject all proposed resource contracts. In addition, the new resource views allow the manager to understand the capacity utilization of their resources at a quick glance.
Resource Capacity heat maps
Ensuring that the resources are well utilized and productive is a key strategic need for any company. Project 2016 introduces the Capacity heat maps and a brand new set of intuitive reports to enable at-a-glance visualization of resource utilization. Both under- and over-utilization of resources can be problematic, and both can be seen quickly with the new heat map.
Timelines
Communicating the project schedule is a critical part of any project manager’s job. But for many audiences, a Gantt chart isn’t the best way to visualize the schedule. More than ever, a timeline is the best way to communicate how a project’s lifecycle lays out. With this in mind, we have overhauled the Timeline feature to include multiple timelines, each with different start and end dates, representing a user-defined set of tasks and milestones.
There are several rich features in the new Timeline visualization, including:
Independent start and end dates for each timeline.
Drag and drop between different timelines.
Save to PowerPoint with editable objects.
Tell Me
Difference Between Ms Project 2013 And 2016 Full
With so many features in Project 2016, wouldn’t it be great if you could just ask where a certain feature was, instead of having to hunt for it? With Tell Me, you can do just that. Blur game download for pc windows 8.1. Better yet, the answer that Tell Me provides is a live button, so you just have to click the answer and it will do as you ask. It’s a huge time saver.
Read/Write Office add-ins
Office add-ins are extensions that you can download from the Office store that add functionality to Project. This means that Microsoft and its partners can continuously and easily deliver new features so you can customize Project to your tastes. With Project 2016 release, Office add-ins now have full Read/Write access to the project you are working on, providing richer extensions than have ever been possible.
Availability
Project 2016 is immediately available online as part of Office 365. The new service side features, such as Capacity heat maps, are being rolled out into Project Pro for Office 365 and Project Online right now. When you choose to activate these features, we will automatically upgrade all of your existing Resource Plans to Engagements. The new resource management features will be available to on-premises customers in the spring of 2016 when Project Server 2016 is released.
Enjoy the new Project!
—Howard Crow, principal group program manager in the Project engineering team
Microsoft Project knows 4 different resource types:
Work resources (people)
Material resources (e.g. cables, bricks)
Cost type resources (e.g. airfares, scrap)
Budget resources (e.g. training budget, externals budget)
A fifth resource type
We think that Microsoft should also have included a fifth resource type, by acknowledging that material resources could be either consumable (like cables or bricks) or have a capacity that can be booked (like a test machine or training room). If you have such a material resource with capacity, we recommend you to use the work resource type instead.
Working in a server environment
If you are working in a MS Project Server environment, you might need to work with server resources. Server resources are createdcentrally by the MS Project Server administrator for the purpose of having one central enterprise resource pool. Personal holidays will be administered here and resource capacity and resource availability can be seen and managed across projects.
Learn it all!
Our e-course Maturity Level 4 Resource Management is about the work resources, Level 5 Cost Management is about the other resource types as we think that only when it comes to cost management, these other resource types will start to bring true value. Get our pro course here!
In this article, I’m gonna answer the below Microsoft Project questions:
What’s the difference between %Complete and %Work Complete?
What’s the difference between Actual Duration and Actual Work?
How the %Complete field is calculated in MS Project?
How the % Work Complete field is calculated in MS Project?
What’s the difference between %Complete and %Work Complete?
Briefly, Both fields refer to the percent of achievements. but the difference is
The %complete field(PC) is value based on Duration.
The %Work Complete (PWC) is field value based on Work.
In Microsoft Project, when you tried to add %Completeand %Work Completecolumns, you will note that both fields have the same value as shown below. these values will be changed based on the Actual Duration field and the Actual Work field.
Example: Consider you have a project that has one task. this task has duration 7 days that started on 08/04/2015 and today is 11/04/2015. So
The percent of achievements based on duration (%Complete) is about 50 % in case your plan is on scheduleand based on the actual duration.
Meanwhile, The percent of achievements based on work (% Work Complete) will depend on the working hour per day and the amount of work that has already been done by resources assigned to tasks.
What’s the difference between Actual Duration and Actual Work?
The Actual Duration field shows the span of actual working time for a task so far, based on the scheduled duration and current remaining work or percent complete.
The Actual Workfields show the amount of work that has already been done by resources assigned to tasks.
How the %Complete field is calculated in MS Project?
When a new task has been created, you will note that the % complete value is zero percent.
As soon as the actual duration is updated, The MS Project will calculate the % complete as below:
In case the % Completefield is set to a value greater than zero,
The Actual Start field is set to the scheduled start date if you have not entered an actual start date yet.
In case the % Complete field is set to 100,
The Actual Finish field is set to the scheduled finish date.
In case you typed the % Complete field value, MS Project automatically calculates actual duration and remaining duration. Likewise, entering a value in the Actual Duration or Remaining Duration field automatically recalculates the other fields.
In next section, I’ll simulate How to calculate %Complete as a custom field by following the below steps:
Open Project in Microsoft Project.
Go to Project Tab > Click Custom Fields,
Make sure that you have selected the Task.
Set Type to Text then scroll down until getting an unreserved field.