Project Plans in Excel - Tracking to Completion

The series on maintaining a project plan and Gantt chart in Excel has been popular, and I've had a lot of queries about tracking progress. So, in this bonus post I’ll describe how to display tasks’ progress on the Gantt chart that was featured in the previous posts in this series. In addition, I’ll show how to highlight “today”. Alongside this paragraph (right) you can see what the result of this post looks like.

In the three previous posts in this series I described how to create a neat and simple Gantt chart, how to add dates to the day numbers, and how to group tasks. These three simple sets of steps have given the developer sufficient knowledge to quickly create a simple but effective Gantt chart that demonstrates the developer is in control of the project (without spending more time on planning than on delivery). Alongside this paragraph (left) you can see what the results of our previous efforts looks like.

Let’s start by inserting a column after E and heading it “%Done”. This is where you'll need to type values to indicate your progress. Then, after column N let’s add “Done” and “DoneEnd”. I’ve made the text colour of the latter two columns a semi-visible grey because they’re our working values and not of interest to the reader of the Gantt chart. If you see the picture below, you’ll see that I’ve also populated the %Done column with some values.

Now let’s populate the calculated columns. The working columns are not strictly necessary, but they’ll help illustrate the calculations that we’re doing. Firstly, let’s understand what we’re trying to achieve. Cell H3 represents progress on activity #1 on day 1. We’ll display a block in the cell if progress on the activity is equal to (or greater than) half a day’s effort. So, for activity #1 we can see that effort is complete up to the end of day 3; for activity #2 the effort is complete up to 2/3 of the way through day number 2. Since day number 2 for activity #2 is more than half complete we’ll put a block in that cell (but not day number 3).

NOTE: Data Set Reader and Log Analyser from Oceanview

UK-based Oceanview Consultancy have a couple of neat SAS utilities that just might meet your SAS team's needs. DSREAD reads a SAS data set and provides information about it without requiring SA software; and Elvis(!) is a log analyser par excellence.

Back in May 2006 when NOTE: was an email newsletter and boasted 3,700 subscribers worldwide, issue 17 featured the Elvis log analyser (and some awful usage of some of The King's record titles). Well, Chris Long wrote to me recently to tell me of his latest creation - DSREAD.

NOTE: Don Henderson Has a Blog

Somewhat humbly titled "Jurassic SAS in the BI/EBI World", long-time guru of SAS Don Henderson has joined the blogosphere. Don's CV is long and impressive and includes over 30+ plus years of using SAS;
Don is author of the SAS Press book "Building Web Applications with SAS/IntrNet: A Guide to the Application Dispatcher", and one of the principal architects for sasCommunity.org.

I've already learned useful stuff from Don's postings, including his January 26 post "An autoexec facility for the Stored Process Server" wherein he mentions that stored processes can have a program automatically run after each invocation (like a retrospective autoexec). I'd overlooked this useful feature.

Project Plans in Excel - Grouping Tasks

In the two previous posts in this series I described how to create a neat and simple Gantt chart and how to add dates to the day numbers. In this post I’ll describe how to groups your tasks in the chart that was featured in the previous post. The picture alongside (right) shows the end result from today's post. Grouping tasks is a generally useful thing to do, but I also find that my list of tasks increases as time goes by, so I might not need groups to begin with, but they become a useful way of keeping my plan tidy after it has grown.

As with the previous cases, I’m going to describe a quick and simple method. The objective is to have a useful and communicative chart without spending too long on creating it and without making it difficult to maintain. We start with the chart that was created in the last posting (shown to the left). Remember my comments in the first post in this series: I expect SAS developers to run their own (small to medium sized) projects from time-to-time, and I expect them to know how to work to a plan.

NOTE: Successes and Tools

My previous post was our 100th and marks quite a milestone. Since starting in July last year, Google Feedburner tells us:

• yesterday we achieved our highest ever number of subscribers: 156
• we've clocked-up 36,000 views
• our most popular post of all time is Dashboards & Scorecards: What To Measure with 1,055 views (note that the widget in our right-margin shows popularity over the last 7 days)

And Site Meter tells us that the average visit length is over 2 minutes, so we know that you're reading the articles as well as just looking at them ;)

NOTE: Success Demonstrates BI Scope (the BI evolution)

Business Intelligence (BI) spans simple historic reporting to embedded real-time analytics. This is our 100th post and we're sharing our (minor) celebration with a SAS success.

BI is a commonly used term with a raft of different interpretations. Wikipedia begins to define it thus:

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

There's a BI evolutionary path that starts with simple, static reporting on historic data (often delivered with spreadsheets) through to real-time predictive analytics embedded into front-office transactional systems. Many suppliers who claim to offer BI systems barely get off the ground on the BI flight to delivering real value to the enterprise.

All those products that offer sexy, shiny, slick graphics with animated 2.5D fuel gauges that make your historic data look exciting but don't begin to tell you about where you're headed are flattering to deceive. If you're considering implementing a BI solution, make sure your chosen software will give you the headroom to grow the value that the solution delivers. Don't box yourself in with a sexy solution that ultimately offers no real intelligence.