Happy Halloween! This week I worked with a customer on their pmPoint 2010 site design. They want to support a highly repeatable process for complex retail development projects. This is all in Excel today, but the goal is to have a customized pmPoint template with a detailed project plan ready each time they start a new project.
I have seen a number of customers looking for something similar. Generally these are not IT or software development projects – these typically are business operations or marketing projects.
To prototype this, I added the task list from Excel into Microsoft Project 2010. I really appreciated the way Project preserved the initial dates that were in the spreadsheet in Manually Schedule mode. I added predecessors so that the same work breakdown structure can be used over and over, just by entering a new start date for the kickoff task.
The projects involve coordination by some 5-6 departments that own specific tasks. Resources are assigned at the time the project is kicked off. So I added a Department field by using one of Project’s custom fields.
Then I got ready to sync Project to SharePoint. I selected all tasks and switched them all to Auto Schedule, then sorted the Start column from Earliest to Latest. I clicked File, Save and Send, then clicked Sync with Tasks List. Then I pasted in the URL of the pmPoint project site that contains the Project Tasks list. (Clicking Validate Link finds any task lists in the site - generally the Project Tasks and simple Task List are found. Be sure to select the Project Tasks list.)
Before smacking the big Sync button, I wanted to be sure to include my new Department field. This was amazingly easy. Click Manage Fields, and then Add Field. I found the custom Project field I had created (by the internal name Text1), and provided the name of the custom field I wanted.
By synching, SharePoint creates the column for you, which is pretty cool. I changed the column type from Single Line of Text to Choice, added values and had my new column.