Building a New Plan from an Enterprise Template

One of the principal goals of practicing EPM is to maintain standard ways of describing work in projects across the organization. Previously in this book, you’ve been introduced to templates for Project on the desktop. Templates are an excellent way to help ensure consistent project structures and schedule logic, task names, and even initial resource assignments. Such consistency is essential for multi-project or portfolio management within an organization.

In a Project Server-based EPM setting, an organization can implement enterprise templates that reside in Project Server and are available to Project Professional users. Enterprise templates can help enforce organizational standards and give project managers a quicker start when developing new project plans. In this section, you’ll view an enterprise template used at the fictitious A.Datum Corporation.

As noted above, we do not require that you have access to Project Server. Instead, we will guide you through some common Project Server-based EPM scenarios by playing the roles of various users in the A.Datum Corporation.

1. Steve Masters, a project manager at A.Datum Corporation, starts Project Professional.

2. On the File menu, Steve clicks New. In the New Project task pane, he then clicks On Computer to view the enterprise templates for Project Professional.

Like all enterprise templates, these are stored in Project Server and are available to Project Professional users at A.Datum Corporation. The people who set up Project Server-based EPM at A.Datum Corporation created the enterprise templates for the most common types of projects the organization performs and populated each enterprise template with task lists, schedule logic, and other information that reflects the best practices of the organization.

3. Steve creates a new project plan based on the A.Datum New Product Template.

This project plan contains a task list and links between tasks as well as generic resources assigned to tasks.

Similar to regular work resources in a resource pool, generic resources reside in the enterprise resource pool that all Project Server-based EPM users share. Generic resources, as the name suggests, are placeholder resources usually identified by a specific role or job title, such as Manufacturing engineer or Safety. Just like a regular enterprise resource, a generic resource can include cost and skills details. One way to think of a generic resource is as a resource starting point; a certain type of task should be performed by a certain type of resource. The generic resource describes that type of resource but doesn’t represent a specific person or group of people. As a project manager develops a project plan, he or she can initially work with generic resources to make sure the right types of roles are assigned to the right tasks and then replace the generic resources with real resources before the tracking stage of the project begins. This replacement can be manual or automated and is shown later in this chapter.

4. To wrap up his initial work, in the Project Information dialog box, Steve adjusts the start date for the new project he is planning to May 26, 2008.