Managing Programs with Project Server 2016 / 2019 / Project Online

For program managers, their support staff and their subproject managers who use Microsoft Project Professional and Project Web App (PWA) with Project Server to manage an integrated program schedule.

About This Course
What to do when you have 500 handoffs between 15 subprojects in a 10,000 task program schedule? Programs are notoriously hard to schedule: the amount of data is mind-boggling, subprojects are interdependent and the client wants to see the Critical Path for the entire program. The presenter will share special techniques with you that he and his team developed for identifying the Critical Path in large programs and managing it. If you have more than 1,000 tasks in your schedule, you should attend this course.

Each participant will receive a copy of the 120-page course manual and an electronic certificate with PDUs upon completion.

This course is aligned with the PMI^® Standard for Program Management, third edition.

Program Prerequisite
Participants must have managed at least one project from beginning to end with Project Professional in an enterprise environment. If you don't meet this requirement, we recommend you take our Managing Projects course first.

Course Learning Objectives
Overall, you will learn how to effectively use Microsoft Project and Project Server for managing programs. The following learning objectives are subject to customization in onsite training:

• Be able to determine whether to keep one large schedule for the program or split it into sub schedules
• Be able to choose the best orientation to break a program schedule into subproject schedules
• Be able to re-integrate subproject schedules into a program schedule
• Be able to create dependencies across the subproject schedules
• Be able to track the buffers or slippages of handoffs between the subprojects
• Be able to identify the Critical Path to the next major milestone
• Be able to manage resource workloads across multiple subprojects
• Be able to track the subproject progress and program schedule during execution
• Be able to collaborate with subproject managers on their subproject WBS, documents, risks and issues
• Be aware of best practices for managing integrated program schedules in a Project Server environment

• Project management, PPM and business processes
• Business benefits of Project Server
• Microsoft Project, Project Server, and PWA and how they work together
• The different users, groups and categories in Project Server
• High-level architecture and database structure of Project Server

• What is a 'program'? How is it different from a 'project' or 'project portfolio'?
• Modeling a large program: How to prevent drowning in data?
• Establishing scheduling guidelines for subproject schedules:
• Importance of focusing on deliverables (handoffs between subprojects)
• What is the appropriate level of detail: 1%-10% rule
• Minimizing the use of date constraints
• Completing the network logic
• Rolling wave approach: look-ahead window for detailed planning: how many months ahead?
• WBS: Should we put the major milestones at the top? Pro's and con's
• Dependencies: the importance of identifying all dependencies within each subproject schedule and dependencies between the projects (handoffs)
• Deadlines (target dates) and schedule constraints (fixed dates): types of schedule constraints and how they make your program schedule rigid
• Resources: sharing resources across the program subprojects and across other projects
• Documents, risks and issues: the program workspace

• Keeping one large program schedule or splitting it into separate subproject schedules: centralize or delegate scheduling? Pro's and con's.
• Centralized scheduling: the need for a program management office and scheduling support services; how many schedulers do you need?
• Delegated scheduling: Splitting the program schedule into multiple sub schedules :
• What orientations for breaking down programs are available? Pro's and con's
• Transferring ownership to the subproject managers using PWA
• Training subproject managers on scheduling guidelines
• Implementing quality assurance for sub schedules

• Ways to re-integrate sub schedules: cross-project links feature, deliverables feature, macros to create and remove cross-project links on as-need basis, third-party solutions
• Creating the cross-project dependencies: use the master schedule to avoid circularity!
• How to check the completeness of the network logic in a large program (while keeping your sanity)
• What to do if circular dependencies suddenly appear?
• Creating the back-end of the integrated program schedule where all subprojects come together: assembly and integration testing
• Monitoring and governing cross-project impacts

• Tracking Gantt view: how to verify if schedules are up-to-date and how to assess performance
• Earned Value as a program performance measurement technique
• Drilling down from the program schedule into the subproject schedules
• Customizing textual status report templates and merging received status reports into a program status report
• Program dashboards in PWA

• Proactive or reactive workload leveling?
• Reactive workload leveling: allowing workloads to accumulate, then resolve over-allocations
• Proactive workload leveling: checking on resource availability before assigning and preventing over-allocations
• Resolving over-allocations:
• Making workloads visible and finding the over-allocations
• When to level by hand and when to rely on automatic leveling by MS Project?
• Leveling workloads by hand:
• The best view to resolve over-allocations yourself
• A complete list of ways to resolve over-allocations manually
• Leveling workloads automatically:
• What MS Project can and cannot do for you in resolving over-allocations
• Automatic leveling in MS Project using project priorities
• Where to check how MS Project resolved the over-allocations?

• Finding the Critical Path to the next major milestone
• Our technique to identify the Critical Path into the major milestone:
• Sequester the sub network of the major milestone
• Isolating the Critical Path into the major milestone
• Shortening the Critical Path
• Monitoring the forecast finish date of the entire program

• Creating one-page reports ... always ... even on very large programs!
• Earned Value report, Major Milestone view, Swim Lane Chart
• Working with large schedules requires you to become a master at filters: using multiple conditions, using and/or logic (Boolean) and interactive filters
• Reporting the project the way you want: developing custom views using custom Fields, Tables, Filters and Grouping
• How to promote custom views to new enterprise views
• How to defend a visible time buffer or cost reserve to your manager, sponsor or client

• Updating tasks versus updating assignments (time sheets): what update info to ask for?
• Maintaining the integrity of the program schedule baseline
• An easy check to verify if a subproject schedule is up-to-date
• Interpreting the Tracking Gantt chart of a subproject

(PMI and PMP are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.)