Chapter 20: Planning Work with Project Server

Chapter at a Glance

Capture an organization’s best practices and standards in enterprise templates, page 440. Build a team for a project from an enterprise resource pool, page 444.

In This Chapter, You will Learn How To:

• Understand the components of a Project Server-based enterprise project management solution.

• Create a new project plan based on an enterprise template.

• Assign work resources from an enterprise resource pool.

• Publish a plan to Project Server after developing it in Project Professional.

This chapter introduces some of the key differences between desktop project management (as you’ve practiced it in this book) and Project Server-based enterprise project management. Project Server is the cornerstone of the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution (we’ll refer to this as Project Server-based EPM). EPM is one of the more complex but potentially rewarding practices that a large organization can adopt.

Some organizational benefits of Project Server-based EPM include:

• Capture your organization’s best practices with regard to workflow models and resource skills in enterprise templates.

• Gain insight into resource workload and availability across all projects and other activities in your organization.

• Develop consistent ways of describing and tracking project activities across your organization.

Although you might be the sole user of Project in your organization, the real “user” of EPM is the entire organization; thus, the software toolset is correspondingly more complex than Project simply running on a single computer. For this reason, fully addressing the details of EPM is far beyond the scope of this book. However, we want to illustrate the key features and processes of Project Server-based EPM so that you can start to determine whether it can serve a useful role in your organization. For most organizations, we think the answer will be “Yes,” but getting from initial interest in Project Server-based EPM to full implementation is a series of complex steps. We hope that this and the following chapters can help you formulate some ideas of how Project Server-based EPM can improve your organization’s performance.

Chances are that you currently don’t have access to Project Server in your organization. In fact, it takes quite a bit of software planning and deployment to reach the point where you can see the Project Server interface. For this reason, we do not require you to purchase and install Project Server to complete the exercises in this chapter. Instead, we’ll play tour guide and walk you through the planning (this chapter), tracking (Chapter 21), and information management (Chapter 22) aspects of Project Server-based EPM.

Important 

This chapter does not use practice files and is not written for hands-on practice. We do not assume that you have access to Project Professional and Project Server or to the Project Server sample database that we illustrate here. Instead, this and the other chapters in Part 4 describe and illustrate important features of a Project Server-based EPM system.