Many people find it difficult to work out how to use Microsoft Project outside the traditional PRINCE2 lifecycle stages or waterfall schedule approach. Iterative activities such as Scrum or agile planning and dynamic schedules are becoming increasingly popular and, of course, can be implemented with the help of Microsoft Project. Here you will find key steps for building an agile schedule (an Agile Mircosoft Project schedule) as well as pros and cons of Scrum features and approaches. You’ll also see how to blend a schedule to address tactical agile needs, while still providing rollup and time-boxed reporting to stakeholders. This example-driven webinar will reveal how you too can build agile, iterative schedules and address the need for a good time table that also helps map, track and report activities, features, story points and backlogs – all within Microsoft Project:
Customise Microsoft Project
Customisable fields and custom groups can be used effectively to create an Agile Mircosoft Project template. Custom fields allow you to add project-specific information, which can be used to filter or group tasks to provide different views into the Agile schedule. Our Advanced Microsoft Project training courses cover in detail how to customise and tailor your Microsoft Project data tables, including how to create formulae for calculated fields.
We can create custom fields for Agile-specific information including:
User Need Text Field
- Lookup Table: Low, Medium, or High
State Text Field
- Lookup Table: Not Started, In Progress, or Done
Story Points Number Field (Estimate of Story Points)
- Set Calculation for task and group summary rows to Rollup: Sum
Sprint Text Field:
- Lookup Table: Backlog and Sprint 1 through Sprint n
It would also be helpful to create two Groups:
Sprint Group by Sprint.
- The Sprint group will list all features in each Sprint; story point totals roll up for each sprint. Features not assigned to a sprint will be grouped under Backlog.
Burndown Group by State, then by Sprint.
- The Burndown group will provide story point summary by categories: Done, In Progress, and Not Started.
Story point totals roll up.
Find out more: Microsoft Project Training Courses
Key terms: Agile Mircosoft Project