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Project monitoring and tracking with Project 2013 & SharePoint 2013

Anonymous
2016-02-02T09:31:55+00:00

I am tasked to implement a solution for our department's project tracking and monitoring. Currently, the task is performed with Excel linked to a master spreadsheet showing the project status of each team's projects. The spreadsheets are stored in shared folders so that the PMs can do their weekly progress reporting on the spreadsheets. However, as the number of projects increase, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the list, not to mention speed of loading the lists. Moreover, the above method does not allow co-authoring of the spreadsheet. I am looking at migrating the monitoring to Project 2013 synced with SharePoint 2013. However, my searches for solutions seem to suggest that co-authoring of mpp files is not supported in SharePoint 2013.

My department currently has 5 teams of 4-6 PMs and about 30-40 projects per team spanning across a few years. I need to have a Summary view of each team's progress (eg, which projects are On Task, Due, Overdue, Not started, etc) as well as detailed view of the targets and milestones achieved monthly. It would be even more wonderful if I can have a dashboard showing the overall performance for the department as well as each team's performance.

May I ask if anyone implemented something similar above using Project 2013 and SharePoint 2013, or with Excel 2013? Due to office policies, I am unable to use Access for the above. Hopefully someone can leave a light in my dark tunnel for me. 

Thanks in advance.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Access | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-02-02T12:40:11+00:00

    What you seek has been done many times. Well, actually, it has been attempted many times and a fraction of those attempts has been successful, and another large fraction have been colossal failures and enormous waste of time, money and energy.

    Here's why. You cannot solve the problem just by throwing money and technology at it. The most important thing is to make sure that your people have a firm grasp of the basic concepts and principles which are at the foundation of MS Project, and especially understand what the Critical Path Method is, what it is for etc.

    You need good, complete, rock solid plans to start with and then a method for tracking progress which works, and a lot of discipline.

    From your question, it sounds like none of your 30 PMs has ever used MSP before.

    Address this first.

    Start simple, start soon and start right.

    Before exploring the use of consolidated project plans, shared resource pools and project server environments, get some basic training and make sure everyone knows what they are doing.

    Any help?

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