Take time during the interviews to draw out the requirements that create tangible benefits. The best way to do this is by conducting stakeholder interviews. Once you understand who the stakeholders are, the next step is to determine their needs and concerns. Figure 1: Power-Interest Grid for Stakeholder AnalysisĪs you can see from the matrix above, stakeholders in the top right quadrant are the ones you should pay close attention to because they can have the most significant impact on your project, either positively or negatively. How important is it that they are happy with the outcome of the project? A tried and tested way to understand the interest level of each stakeholder group is to create a Power-Interest Grid. Next, you need to prioritise your stakeholders by their influence on the project. The users of the project output (end users).The customer who receives the deliverables.It is not always easy to determine the stakeholders of a project, particularly those impacted indirectly. Remember, a stakeholder can be internal or external to your organisation.Īs a first step, it is crucial to identify the stakeholders in your project. A stakeholder is anybody directly or indirectly impacted by the project. Step 1: Project GoalsĪ project is successful when it has met the needs of the stakeholders. Upon completing this guide, you should have a sound project planning approach that you can use for future projects. This article looks at a simple, practical approach to project planning. However, many people fail to realise the value of a project plan for saving time, money and many problems. Often project planning is ignored in favour of getting on with the work. Creating a project plan is the first thing you should do when undertaking any project. You can then review each task and establish its dependencies manually to represent the true flow of work through the project… without dealing with the automated software assumptions.The key to a successful project is in its planning. I suggest disabling this option to avoid inadvertent dependency logic being introduced into your project schedule. ![]() This could cause unintended changes to the logical cause-and-effect relationships throughout your project schedule, therefore making your forecasting model inaccurate. The moral of the story is this: with the ‘Autolink inserted or moved tasks’ option enabled, Microsoft Project automatically makes assumptions and creates task dependencies / links while you are working in the project schedule… whether you intend to do this or not. ![]() …Microsoft Project automatically links the task to its new neighbors… but is this what you want? When you drag a task from one position in the task list to another… Microsoft Project is making another assumption that the two neighboring tasks should be sequentially connected, but is this assumption correct? ![]() Notice that the new task is automatically linked its neighboring tasks:ĭoes the new ‘Review project schedule’ task indeed need to wait until after the ‘Prepare and submit project schedule’ task is finished? Must the ‘Prepare and submit schedule of values’ task wait until after the new ‘Review project schedule’ task is finished? Is Microsoft Project incorrectly assuming that the order of the items in the task list truly indicates the sequence that the tasks should be performed?Īlso, when deleting a task which is linked ‘in series’ between two other tasks, Microsoft Project automatically re-establishes new links / dependencies between the neighboring tasks: Consider the example project schedule below… When the ‘Autolink inserted or moved tasks’ option is enabled, Microsoft Project automatically establishes logical dependencies - or “links” - when you insert a new task between two existing tasks in the schedule. ![]() Only then can you decide whether you should enable the option… or disable it and potentially save yourself some grief. This option is typically enabled when you install one of the recent versions of Microsoft Project, and it is important to understand how it affects your project schedule. One of the options available on the ‘Schedule’ page of the ‘Project Options’ dialog box is ‘Autolink inserted or moved tasks’ option: You can view or update these settings through the ‘Project Options’ dialog box (‘ File‘ > ‘ Options‘): There are several configuration settings available in Microsoft Project that control how the tool looks and behaves many of the settings are merely personal preferences, but some of them can be dangerous to your project schedule if you do not understand and configure them properly.
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