Determine project management requirements

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In this article:

• Characterize your projects

• Determine your Office Project Server 2007 scenario

• Worksheets

After the Enterprise Project Management (EPM) initiative team is established, you can begin to plan the Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 configuration. It is important to identify the project management needs and requirements for your organization. Your configuration will vary according to the type of work that your organization performs and whether you use Office Project Server 2007 for time tracking, collaboration, or portfolio management. After you characterize the typical projects for your organization, determine which Project Server scenarios you need to support.

Characterize your projects

Understanding the characteristics of the projects in your organization enables you to plan your Office Project Server 2007 configuration. The following characteristics have a significant effect on your configuration:

• The number of projects that your organization is working on at any given time.

• The size of your projects, which varies with the number of tasks and assignments that your projects include.

• The length of time that it takes to complete a project.

• The number of team members that are assigned tasks in projects.

Most organizations manage projects that vary in size and duration, but the degree to which they vary is a function of the size of the organization and the type of work that it performs. For example, a large consulting company might manage several thousand projects that range from small, 10-task projects that last two weeks to large projects that include 1,500 tasks and last for over a year.

Although other organizations might work primarily on one type of project of one particular size, such as small and simple projects or large and complex projects, organizations typically have a number of projects that range in size from small to medium to large. For planning purposes, be sure that you can adequately support the type of project that your organization works on most frequently. Plan for performance and capacity (Project Server 2007).

Determine your Office Project Server 2007 scenario

Your project management needs and requirements vary according to the type of work that your organization performs. As part of your configuration planning process, identify which scenario you need to support. For example, you can use Office Project Server 2007 to support the following types of scenarios:

• Program deployment

• Time tracking

• Hosted deployment

• Portfolio management

Using Office Project Server 2007 for program deployment

The Office Project Server 2007 scenario for program deployment applies to a large organization whose area of focus is top-down planning driven through the Project Management Office (PMO). This scenario is more commonly seen in the product development and manufacturing markets. It is characterized by:

• A small number of large projects that are often related

• Focus on the PMO

• Extensive use of Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007

• Work Tracker usage

Using Office Project Server 2007 for time tracking

The Office Project Server 2007 scenario for professional services/timesheet deployment can apply to a large organization that wants to use Office Project Server 2007 mainly to capture and report time. In this scenario, employees and contractors use Office Project Server 2007 timesheet functionality to submit hours worked on tasks during specific time periods. This scenario is characterized by:

• Minimal use of Office Project Professional 2007

• Time and material billing

• A large number of projects that have relatively few tasks

• A predictable peak period of usage that corresponds to scheduled timesheet entry in Microsoft Office Project Web Access

• A single Web application (also called a virtual server)

Organizations that support this scenario typically use a limited set of Office Project Professional 2007 features to track time and costs by using timesheets to capture information. This scenario presents scalability issues, because when a large number of timesheets are submitted within a short period of time, system resources can become severely strained.

Using Office Project Server 2007 for hosted deployment

In the Office Project Server 2007 scenario for hosted deployment, Project Server is hosted for an entire large organization. Multiple departments within the organization access their own Web application, all hosted on a single Office Project Server 2007 configuration. Individual Web application load is relatively low; however, aggregated load across the hosted Web applications can be quite high, especially with respect to Office Project Professional 2007 usage. This scenario is typically characterized by:

• Few projects per Web application

• Relatively high percentage of project managers (30 percent or more)

• Frequent use of Office Project Professional 2007

• Numerous Web applications

Organizations that support this scenario typically use a limited set of Project Server features; the main focus is to facilitate collaboration within teams or departments.

Using Office Project Server 2007 portfolio management

The Office Project Server 2007 scenario for portfolio management deployment can apply to any medium-to-large organization that wants to use Office Project Server 2007 to manage project portfolios. These organizations are typically characterized by:

• A large number of projects that have many assignments

• A high percentage of project managers

• Frequent use of Office Project Professional 2007

• A single Web application

Organizations that support this scenario typically use the breadth of Office Project Server 2007 features, including timesheets, document libraries, issues, risks, Enterprise Global Template, and the Enterprise Resource Pool.

The organization to which this scenario can apply can be as small as a medium-size organization (or a department in a larger organization) whose users all share the same physical location on the same LAN, or it can be a large organization whose users work in a number of different physical locations.

These organizations use Office Project Professional 2007 and Office Project Web Access on a daily basis to publish or update projects to the Office Project Server 2007 database, and they use Office Project Web Access to view assignments; report actuals; and access documents, issues, and risks. Additionally, these organizations generate online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes weekly.

Worksheets

Projects and project characteristics worksheet (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=73261)

Project management requirements worksheet (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=73262)

Download this book

This topic is included in the following downloadable book for easier reading and printing:

• Planning and architecture for Office Project Server 2007

See the full list of available books at Downloadable content for Project Server 2007.