Communication features in MS Project 98 Project Members Project Manager MS Project This presentation is about using some of the features in MS Project to communicate between Project Manager and Project Members.

Workgroup What is Workgroup? What can you do with workgroup? Your project team Composed of Workgroup Manager and Workgroup Members What can you do with workgroup? TeamAssign - Assign task to workgroup members TeamUpdate - Send task updates to workgroup members TeamStatus - Get task status from workgroup members In MS Project, there is something called Workgroup. By looking at Workgroup in MS Project, we can get an overview of the communications offered by MS Project. Workgroup is basically your project team Workgroup Manager is actually the Project Manager and; Workgroup Members are actually the Project Members Within a work group, you can do TeamAssign, TeamUpdate, and TeamStatus These are called Workgroup Messages The Workgroup Messages are sent through e-mail or Web. Either way the content and purposes of these messages are very much the same. Today we are going to look at some examples of these Workgroup messages from e-mails.

TeamAssign Task Assignment Manager Confirmation Workgroup Workgroup Members Workgroup Manager Task Assignment Confirmation Let’s start with TeamAssign. TeamAssign is a workgroup message that sent from the Workgroup Manager to inform the Workgroup Members about the tasks assignments. Once this message is sent, the Workgroup Manager is expecting an confirmation from the Workgroup Member.

Simple “Project” with 3 tasks. Each task is assigned to a workgroup member. To inform workgroup member about the assignments, press the TeamAssign button. May choose to send for all tasks or selected tasks. The TeamAssign message contains information related to the task. You may choose what types of information in the TeamAssign message Once the message is sent, a reminder appear on your project plan

Sample TeamAssign message received by Workgroup member The workgroup member may choose to accept or not When he reply, he may choose to add any message.

Project plan with the reminders Receive confirmation from Peter Update the Project plan with the confirmation from Peter Eventually received all the confirmations and update the project plan accordingly TeamAssign demo completed

TeamUpdate Manager Task Updates Workgroup Workgroup Members TeamUpdate is used to inform workgroup members of changes to tasks in the schedule.

TeamStatus Status Request Manager Task Status Workgroup Workgroup Members Workgroup Manager Status Request Task Status

Something to watch out 32-bit MAPI-compliant e-mail system E-mail or web server setup in MS Project Customize workgroup messages Check before “Auto-update” Update both “Reminding Work” and “Work Hours” Task accepted will appear in Outlook Task folder - MAPI stands for Message Application Programming Interface. What it really mean is, Microsoft e-mail and Lotus Notes. If you don’t have either one, use the web. - Either you use e-mail or web, you need to do some setup in MS Project. For E-mail, you need to setup all the e-mail address (in resources). For web, you need to tell the web server location (Tools -> Options -> Workgroup) - The workgroup messages that we have discussed so far are based on the default of MS Project. In fact, you can customize the Workgroup Message to allow additional information. To do this, Tools -> Customize -> Workgroup). Just remember that the additional information that you add to the Workgroup Message cannot be used to update the project plan automatically . - Be very careful when Update the project plan with the Workgroup message. Make sure you check the content before the update. You may need to have your project plan sitting side-by-side with your Workgroup Message. Because the original data is not show on the message. Only the reported data by the Workgroup member is shown. - The 2 most important data from the TeamStatus message is “remaining work” and “Work hours completed”. You may think that if someone worked 5 days on a 12 days task means there are 7 days left for the task to be completed. But this really not necessary the case. If someone only filled in 5 work days for a 12 days task and leave the “remaining work” un-touched, and the Project Manager use this to update the project plan, the task will show 5 days work was done and the duration will changed to 17 days. EXAMPLE - If a Workgroup member accept a task from the workgroup manager, this task will appear in Outlook Task folder. The Workgroup member can set the alarm for that task to remind himself. Even more annoying, the Workgroup manager can set this alarm before sending to the workgroup member.

Questions?

= Project Success Tools + Skills + Processes = PM Environment PM - What we have discussed today? - Communication feature in MS Project - PM tools - Critical Path Method - PM Skills - Program Management in a financial firm - PM Processes - What is all these means? - It is your PM environment - If you are having a PM environment. What you really have is Project Success = Project Success

Do I have adequate knowledge of my PM tools? Do I have sufficient PM skills? You need to ask yourself ... Do I have a PM process?