Project

Or at least poking the periscope above the water. This week sees 3 new Project Server authors (presumably on a dare from Brian Kennemer). For some reason all of them have double letters in their names just like Brian...

Dr. Ed Hanna http://projectified.typepad.com/dr_ed/:
I'm expecting good things from Dr. Ed. His writing is very clear and is based on real issues people have. I think this is the most useful kind of writing even if I do not indulge in it myself :-)

His first post is about how things are features not bugs "Users are constantly finding “imagined bugs” in the software that—on closer inspection—are really not bugs at all. These problems are just a result of the way that they are misusing the application.". Ed, I agree with you. Many times people think microsoft project is doing something wrong when it is really that they just don't understand project. For example, write-only properties can't be read because they are write-only. You can't be silly and think that you can read what it is before you operate on it! Likewise, I have no idea why people think that the "effort-driven" box would be the equivalent of making a task fixed-work.

Ok... maybe I'm being too subtle here and on the internet no one can see you smirk. There are a lot of things Project does which are counter-intuitive or just plain wierd. The sad thing is that after using Project for years, they start to seem normal. When users don't "get" the application you can either blame the user or the application. Like the poor craftsman, I prefer to blame the tools - but always with a healthy dose of explanation about why Microsoft Project might not do things the way you expect it to. Making the application easier and more understandable should be a goal of the development team. Understanding the workings of Project should be a goal of the users. Hopefully they will meet in the middle.

Anyway, sorry about going off about this. That wasn't my intent. Dr. Hanna, Congratulations on your new blog. I hope to see more!

Kermit Llaurador - http://projectified.typepad.com/boricua/
Kermit's blog so far is just a placeholder. Looking forward to seeing a post or two here.

Reid McTaggart - http://projectified.typepad.com/reidsprojectworld/
Reid has recently guest posted for Evil Dr. Porkchop. The topic was a great example of how a couple of custom field formulas can be used rather than a macro featuring one of my favorite constructs, the nested Iif statement, and it is a long one at that:

Iif([% Complete] = 100,99,Switch([Enterprise Text1]=”Exclude from Phase Calculation”,100, [Enterprise Text1]=”Inception”,1, [Enterprise Text1]=”Planning”,2, [Enterprise Text1]=”Execution”,3, [Enterprise Text1]=”Closeout”,4))

Thanks Brian for encouraging these guys. And best of luck to all of you.