Chapter 13: Analyzing Project Information

Overview

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 for 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 make actual performance in the project conform to the baseline.

The starting point for any project analysis is to decide what you want to evaluate. You can examine:

• Work required for task or project completion.

• Cost required for task or project completion.

• Schedule adherence.

In the course of tracking your project, you probably analyze the data in various views or reports in Microsoft Office Project 2003. You might even have created custom views and reports to show specific types of project information, such as schedule slippage.

In addition, there are specialized techniques you can use with Project 2003 to analyze project information. These techniques include performing earned value calculations, creating formulas in custom fields, and exporting data to Microsoft Excel and calculating figures there.