Microsoft Project Version 2002 Inside Out (Inside Out (Microsoft))

Chapter 13

As part of your efforts in tracking and controlling your project, you might want to analyze certain aspects of project performance. Project analysis can give you a closer look at the overall execution of the project. For first-time efforts at managing a particular kind of project or new variations on an established project theme, you and the stakeholders might want to see performance indicators and estimates for the remainder of the project. These indicators help assess the effectiveness of the plan and define the amount of corrective action needed to bring actual performance in line with the baseline. Three key factors often examined in performance analysis are:

• Work required for task completion
• Cost required for task completion
• Schedule adherence

In the course of tracking your project, you probably study different views; you might even have created custom views to show specific types of project information, such as schedule slippage. The careful study of the data in those views is a kind of analysis, as is the evaluation of project information in other formats presented by Microsoft Project. There are also techniques you can use with Microsoft Project to analyze project information, including exporting data to Microsoft Excel and performing earned value calculations.

The starting point for any analysis is to decide what you want to evaluate. Do you want to look at schedule performance, resource performance, or cost performance? You also need a good idea of how you'd like to work with the data to get the information you need.