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Oct

Neall Alcott, Springhouse VP of Technology, to Present at PMI World Congress

By Jeff Tincher

Image via Wikipedia

Neall Alcott, Springhouse Education and Consulting Services VP of Technology, has been invited to speak at the PMI World Congress, October 18-21, 2008. Neall will be sharing the speaking bill with other Enterprise Project Management (EPM) experts and will feature a keynote address by Former U.S. Secretary of State and World Leader Colin Powell.

Springhouse’s expertise in deployment and support of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management suite of tools has raised Springhouse to be recognized as a premiere partner. In addition to the presentation at the PMI World Congress, Springhouse is also presenting on EPM topics at the regional EPM Conferences held in the Philadelphia and Washington, DC markets throughout October.

Neall will be presenting on the topic of Mitigating Project Risk through Microsoft Project Certification. His talk will introduce new certification processes, share the success metrics that come with certification, and outline the certification process.

“We are excited that organizations are seeing the value of training and certification in mitigating risk on major projects,” says Alcott, “Our experience has proven that Client Satisfaction is consistently higher for those teams with high concentrations of Microsoft certified team members. Our goal at Springhouse is to provide those skills to help get teams to that level of knowledge, efficiency and validation.”

Baseline Best Practices Using MS Project

By Gabe Y

Many new users to MS Project, or any other project management tool for that matter, do not set baselines for their project files. Without a baseline, however, a you can never really accurately gauge performance on the project. For instance, you won’t see variances or earned value data.

A baseline is what I call an original snapshot of your project. When you set a baseline (MS Project 2007 calls it ‘Set baseline’; all previous versions refer to it as ‘Save baseline’), you are essentially saving Start, Finish, Duration, Work, and Cost data for the entire project, each subproject, and each subtask.

Although you may have multiple baselines for each project (up to 11 baselines in MS Project), nearly all of my clients and students only have a need for one. I usually recommend only using one anyway since there is no quick way to extract those other baselines without additional configuration. Anyway, I’ll save that topic for another day.

In the meantime, here are some general best practices for setting baselines:

Set your baseline when you are ready to begin the project. That means when it has been approved, the day before, the morning of, etc…
Only clear baselines when you don’t want to see baseline data in your tables and views. Otherwise, simply set the baseline again and MS Project will overwrite the previous baseline.
If you have new tasks during the project, you can save a baseline on only those tasks so you don’t have to save the baseline for the entire project.
Interim plans are similar to baselines but MS Project only saves Start and Finish data.