Starting this week we are starting a new series of posts on project management using Microsoft excel.

I have been working in various projects in the last 6 years and almost in all cases we have been using excel to manage, measure and track various aspects of project. These posts represent few of the things related to project management using excel that I have learned over the years. Part 1: Preparing & tracking a project plan using Gantt Charts Team To Do Lists Project Tracking Tools Project Status Reporting Create a Timeline to display milestones Time sheets and Resource management Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project Progress Excel, because of its grid nature provides a great way to prepare and manage project plans. In this part of the project management using Microsoft excel series we will learn how to prepare and track a project plan using gantt chart in excel.

Preparing a project plan

Not all project plans are same. But most of the project plans have a list of,

All activities / phases of project Planned start date of the activity Planned duration of the activity
From tracking perspective, we can add the following,

Actual start date of the activity Actual duration of the activity % of the activity completed as of date
As you can see, excel provides a great way to manage such plan. Look at an example project plan made in excel.

But the above plan is more or less static. Using Excels features we can make a dynamic gantt chart that can,

Update the Gantt chart when dates change

Display a separate bar that will grow based on the % completion of each activity Highlight current week / day in a subtle way
In essence, we will create something like this:

Steps for preparing an Gantt Chart

1. First make the above layout in a new excel sheet 2. Then we will add several columns in the end, one for each day (or week or month) of the project 3. We will also designate 3 cells say $N$5, $Y$5, $AL$5 where we will maintain the following values, 1. In cell $N$5, a selection option that will change the plan between planned and actual dates 2. In cell $Y$5, a symbol that we can use to display finished portion of work 3. In cell $AL$5, where we can enter the current week (or day or month) 4. Now we will do some conditional formatting (ahem!) that will highlight a particular cell in the grid, 1. If $N$5 has Planned and cell is between planned date and planned date + planned duration 2. Else, cell is between actual date and actual date + actual duration 5. We will also write formulas in all the cells (same formula pasted over the entire range) which displays a symbol like solid rectangle. For finding out if we should fill in the symbol or not, we use the % completed column of the gantt chart. Figuring out this formula is part of your home work. 6. Finally we will adjust formatting like column widths, fonts, colors etc. and freeze top row so that it is easy to scroll and still know what you are looking at. Once you prepare such plan it is easy to track, find out the status of individual activities and take necessary corrective actions as needed.

Why Team To Do Lists as a Project Tracking Tool?

Projects are nothing but a group of people getting together and achieving an objective like building system or constructing a bridge. While it is important to have a overall project plan and vision, it is equally important to understand how various day to day project activities are going on. This is where to do lists can help you a lot.

How to create a team to-do list to track project progress using Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel has a very good way to share a workbook with a team of people. We can use this feature to create a team to-do list. Here is a step by step tutorial to create a team todo list: 1. First we will create a to-do list in excel in the following format:

Note, depending on the type of project and the kind of activities involved, your team to do list can look differently. 2. In order to facilitate tracking, we have the following features: 1. A column where the team member can specify his / her name. This should be done when the activity is done. A simple alternative could be to automatically load users name based on windows login ID. For more on this, see this article on DDoE. 2. Another column where we generate a time stamp when the user enters the name. Please read this article to generate time stamps in excel 3. The formula for time stamp is like this: =IF(AND(D6<>"Not Done",D6<>""),IF(E6="",NOW(),E6),""). As you can guess, it is a circular formula. So we should enable iterative calculations from calculations options in Excel. Learn more about circular references here. 4. Using above 2 columns, we can track and measure how team members are working various activities and who has done what.

5. When we are done, the todo list for project tracking looks like this:

3. Once the list is created, first we should save it a network location where the list can be accessed by everyone. 4. If your team is spread across the globe and cannot access one network, try the following options, 1. Use Office Live Workspace. This is an online workspace that can be accessed anyone (once you share the files with them) 2. Use google docs spreadsheets. Google docs spreadsheets is a free alternative to MS Excel with several collaboration and team features. It is very intuitive and simple to use. 3. If your company runs Sharepoint Server, you can export the excel to do list as a list in Sharepoint site and have it accessed by everyone in the team. 4. You can create multiple copies of the to do list and share it with your team members and consolidate all the spreadsheets on frequent basis. This is a painful process as any format changes can create problems to your consolidation process. 5. Once you place the file on network, we should enable sharing of the workbook. See the below screenshots to understand how to share a workbook.

6.

Now go get some work done.

7. When you finish the task, just open the shared workbook and mark the task as done by entering your name. Excel will automatically fill in the time stamp when you marked the activity as done.

Download the To Do List Template and Use it to track your projects

Go ahead and download the excel team to-do list template [.xls version here] and use it as a project tracking tool. Download 24 Project Management Templates for Excel

Next Steps
You can use VBA macros to automatically remove the finished to do items. I have written an article on simple to do list app using excel sometime back. Check it out to get some ideas. In the next installment, learn how to prepare a project time line that can display various key project milestones. If you havent already, read the previous part of the project management using excel series Project Planning using Gantt Charts.

Why Create Project Timeline Chart?

There are 2 key elements in all the successful projects I have been part of.

They had exceptional individuals who are also exceptional team players The communication and collaboration is really good.
While there is little that project management software can do when it comes to first point, the second point can be addressed by using right tools and visualizations. In this installment and the part 5 and 6 of this series, we will learn some excel based visualizations / charts that can help you to communicate about the project status and progress to your team and stake holders. Project milestones can be shown in a simple time line chart in excel. While the chart doesnt look complicated, it can provide good amount of information on project progress in a simple and understandable chart. We will learn to create a project milestone chart like this:

Steps to create a project milestone chart in excel

1. In order to create a project milestone chart, we need to have the milestone data. The simplest format for milestone data is Date and the milestone. But since our chart requires the milestone to be displayed at a certain height on the chart, we will add the third column height.

PS: the height column can be easily calculated using formulas. I leave it to your imagination. 2. Once you have the data in the above format, we will add 2 more helper columns named DUMMY and Milestone. The Dummy column is used to create the timeline (where Y axis value is zero). The milestone column is a more cleaned up version of milestones (see how it is showing #NA where the milestone is blank.)

3. Now, select the date and dummy columns and insert a line chart.

4. To this chart, we will add one more data series Height column.

5. Now select the height data series and change the chart type to a bar chart. Also set the height series to be plotted on secondary axis. Learn more about combining 2 chart types and adding secondary axis in excel.

6. We will also set the horizontal / axis labels for the height series as the milestones. We need to do this so that when we set the data labels for the height series, we will see the milestone instead of month.

7. At this point our chart should look like this:

8. Now, we will add data labels to the height series. Set the label type as category 9. We will also add error bars to the height series (the bar chart). We will configure the error bar in such a way that they are shown 100% on the negative side only. 10. After doing this, the chart should look like this:

11. Finally we will do some formatting like, 1. Removing fill color / line from height series by setting them to None / transparent. 2. Changing the error bar color to a dull shade of gray. 3. Adding chart title and aligning it. 4. Removing vertical axes and gridlines. 5. Formatting horizontal axis changing label orientation, removing tick marks.

After all this is done, our project milestone time line chart should look like this:

12. That is all, we now have a cool looking project milestone chart ready. Now go and achieve a milestone.

Download the Project Milestones Time Line chart template:

I am sure you are overwhelmed reading the above tutorial. You are probably thinking if it is easier to work towards the project milestones than creating this chart. Well, dont worry. You can download the time line chart template [download .zip version] and play with it to suit your needs. Download 24 Project Management Templates for Excel

What next?
Project timelines are a great way to tell the story of project to strangers and new people joining your project. They are a good addition to project status meetings and reports. In the next installment of this series, we will learn how to use Excel to manage timesheets and resources. If you are new, please read the first 2 parts of this series: Project planning using gantt charts, Tracking day to day project progress with team todo lists.

Timesheets are like TPS reports* of any project. Team members think of them as an annoying activity. For managers, timesheets are a vital component to understand how team is working and where the effort is going. I will not get in to the merits and pitfalls of timesheets. However, I feel that by using Microsoft Excel capabilities you can create a truly remarkable timesheet tracking tool and still leave your team members un-annoyed. In this tutorial we will learn 3 things about timesheets and resource management using Excel 1. How to setup a simple timesheet template in excel? 2. How to make a more robust timesheet tracker tool in Excel? 3. How to use the timesheet data to make a resource loading chart?

1. Make a Simple Excel Time Sheet Template

According to Wikipedia, timesheets are used for Timesheets may record the start and end time of tasks, or just the duration. It may contain a detailed breakdown of tasks accomplished throughout the project or program. This information may be used for payroll, client billing, and increasingly for project costing, estimation, tracking and management. By defining a simple and straight forward template in Excel and using it to track time (or efforts) in your projects, you can easily consolidate the data, compare efforts and make any necessary analysis. At its simplest form, the timesheet is nothing but list of team members and list of activities in a matrix. Look at the below example:

You can easily create such template in excel.

2. A More Robust Excel Timesheet Tracker

While the time sheet format shown in the above section is good, it is a wrong format if you need to analyze the timesheet entries of a 100 member project. Also in large projects usually members do few activities at a time. That means the above format (in section 1) will result in a sparse matrix. Using a tracker log format is much more convenient to both record and analyze timesheet entries. Look at the example below:

We can use excel features like data validation drop downs, shared workbooks to make the timesheet entry and management a breeze.

3. Create a Resource Loading Chart Project Management

Resource loading charts are a good way to show how busy the team members are in a project. At the outset the resource loading chart is nothing but a heatmap. Look at an example resource loading chart below:

You can make a resource loading chart in MS Excel by following the below steps: 1. The pre-condition for the resource loading chart is that we have clear data available to make one. This is where the robust timesheet tracker shown in section 2 of this post comes handy. 2. First create a blank table in excel with team member names in first column and week numbers in first row. (Please note, you can make other types of resource loading charts by changing the Row and Column headers. For eg. You can show resource loading by Project and Team member) 3. Assuming we have the time sheet data in the format shown in Section 2, 4. Assuming log_member_names refers to the member name column and log_weeknum refers to the last column in the timesheet, we can write a simple SUMPRODUCT formula like this: =SUMPRODUCT(--(log_member_names="John Galt"),--(log_weeknums="3")) to calculate the count of activities John Galt has done on week 3. Learn more about using SUM and SUMPRODUCT to calculate sumif with multiple conditions. 5. Once we calculate values for all team members using the above formula, we can apply conditional formatting to make the heat map. In Excel 2007, this is one step. In earlier versions of excel, you need to specify 3 conditions to make the heatmap look hot enough or use a macro

to get over the 3 conditional formats limitation.

6. That is all.

Download the Excel Timesheet & Resource Loading Chart Templates

You can download the excel time sheet template, timesheet tracker log template and resource loading chart template from here. Click the below links:

If you have Excel 2007 and above, download the .xlsx template If you have Excel 2003 and earlier, download the .xls template If you are not sure, download both in a .zip file Download 24 Project Management Templates for Excel

What Next?
Timesheets are a great way to understand how the effort is spent. Even though project estimation models have become more and more effective, still lots of projects are overshooting budgets and timelines. And this is where timesheets can help you as a manager. While estimation looks in to future, timesheets look at past. Timesheets give feedback to your estimation models. This can help you in making better estimates in future. Tracking issues and risks is where most of the project management time goes. Once the project planning and organizing activities are in good shape, most of the project management activities are around risk management and issue tracking. In this installment of project management using excel, we will learn how to create a simple issue tracker template using excel and how to analyze issues using excel.

Issue Tracker Template

Excel is perfect for making an issue tracker template. Its grid structure and easy interface makes it totally easy to create and maintain an issue log. Here is a simple issue tracker template you can create in less than a minute.

The above template becomes very easy to manage with excel features like data validation, filters and tables (lists in 2003 and earlier).

More Robust Issue Log Template

While the above issue tracker template is good for most project needs, often you might need something little more robust. Of course, doing this is just a matter of adding few columns. For eg. it is common for project managers to keep track of the various types of issues and who is logging them, who is closing the issues. Here is an issue log template that is more robust.

Analyzing and Reporting Issue Status

Issues are part of everyday project management. It is important to keep track of various issues in the project and understand their progress. There are various ways to monitor the progress of issues using excel charts and pivot tables. In this tutorial, we will learn how to make the open vs. closed issues chart (see below).

1. To make the chart, we will use the issue tracker data from the template shown above. 2. We need to generate issue counts for the last 30 days from a chosen date like this:

3. The counts can be easily generated by using the COUNTIF Excel formula [tutorial] like this:=COUNTIF(issueOpenDates,Date) 4. We can easily make the counts cumulative. 5. Finally select the 3 columns above and make a line chart with 2 series. Adjust the chart formatting you have a simple open vs. closed issues in the last 30 days chart 6. The above chart can be a great way to start discussion about issue run rate.

Risk Management using Excel

We can use similar ideas to prepare a risk management plan using excel. The risk log is similar to issue log. But when it comes to risk analysis, the usual practice is to make a risk matrix to highlight key risks. This can be easily done in excel with the help of heat maps. This is your home work to figure out.

Download the Issue Tracker Templates

You can download the excel issue log template from here. Click the below link based on your excel version and the file type you prefer.

Download Issue Tracker Template [Excel 2003 and earlier] Download Issue Tracker Template [Excel 2007 and above] Download Issue Tracker Template [Both files in a zip] Download 24 Project Management Templates for Excel

What next?
The ideas presented here can be extended to do more complex analysis of issues and risks in your project. However the issues tracker systems can only go so far if we dont ask right questions. Often when the project is going through a rough patch, it might be better to keep the issue trackers simple and focus on the work. In the next installment of project management using excel, we will combine all the five parts and build aproject status reporting dashboard. If you are new to the series, please read the first 4 parts as well.

Preparing & tracking a project plan using Gantt Charts Team To Do Lists Project Tracking Tools Project Status Reporting Create a Timeline to display milestones Time Sheeet Templates and Resource Management using Excel While at it, also check out the bonus post about Burn Down Charts.

What is your experience with issue tracker systems

Share your ideas and opinions on using issue trackers. What is the best and worst you have seen? In one project, we have used a very complicated issue log (actually a defect log) that took almost 5 minutes to create an issue. The system would produce nice looking 3d bar and 3d pie charts depicting the issue distribution, ownership and status. Our morning scrums were a disaster when someone choose to present these. What about you? Communication is a very important aspect of project management. Communicating with stakeholders, sponsors, team members and other interested parties takes up quite a bit of project managers time. In almost all the projects I have been part of, the first and foremost question anyone used to ask us is, how is the project going?. There is no one line answer to this. A project status dashboard or project status report can help us express the project status in a crisp yet effective manner. In todays installment of project management using excel series, we will learn how to make a project management dashboard using Microsoft excel. [related: Making Dashboards using Excel]

To make the project management dashboard, you must answer the following questions,
o o o Who is the audience of this dashboard? Top management or project sponsors or team members or other departments? What are they interested to know? Day to day issues or High level stuff or Plans or Budgets? What is the frequency for updating the dashboard? Weekly, Bi-weekly or Monthly or Once in a blue moon?
The answers to these questions will determine what goes in to the dashboard and how it should be constructed. For our example, I have assumed the following scenario, but you can easily change the dashboard constituents based on your situation.

Audience of the report: Project Sponsorship Team Interested to know: Project Progress wrt Plan, Blocking issues, Overall timeline and Delivery Progress

Frequency: irrelevant (could be weekly or bi-weekly)

Step 1: Make an outline sketch of the dashboard

Based on the above answers, we vaguely know what should go in to the dashboard. Based on this, we should make an outline sketch of the dashboard. This will help you structure the dashboard on an excel spreadsheet. For our example, this is the outline I have prepared.

the finalized dashboard will look like this: (click here for a bigger version)

Step 2: Get the data to be placed on dashboard

Making a dashboard in excel is a complex and intricate process. Knowing the outline of the dashboard is only the 10% of work. Getting your data to calculate the dashboard metrics (or KPIs) is the most vital part of any dashboard construction. In our outline, the sections 1,2 and 3 are purely data and 4,5 and 6 are charts prepared from data. To facilitate this, first, let us create a worksheet named data where we can capture user inputs. These inputs can be further manipulated to make the dashboard. For our dashboard, we need the following inputs,

Overall project status and progress List of ongoing activities and issues
We will derive other inputs from the following,

Project Plan Gantt Chart discussed in Part 1 will provide us the project plan Project Timeline Chart in Part 2 will give us the timeline chart Burn down chart will give us the project deliverable status Issue Tracker discussed in Part 5 will give us the metrics related to issues

Step 3: Put everything together and make a dashboard

[PS: I have greatly simplified the process of dashboard construction to keep the article readable. Please note that this step usually takes a few of hours and has lot more detail] Now that we have all the bits of our data ready, we just need to bring them together to make a dashboard. We will use the following excel concepts,

Excel Camera Tool to get a live snapshot of the project gantt chart Conditional Formatting to show Red, Green or Amber traffic light to depict the project status Thermo-meter chart to show the project progress against 100% total We will create a stacked bar chart of outstanding issues by using sumproduct() formula [examples] tosummarize using multiple criteria [counts for issue status="open" and issue priority="high", issue status="open" and issue priority="medium", issue status="open" and issue priority="low"]
Let us place the remaining pieces of dashboard from already constructed charts and available data,

Burn-down chart to show the project deliverable status Project Time line to show the project milestones over a period of time

We will create references to the issue and activity data and show only the first 5 items.
See the below illustration to understand how each part of the dashboard is constructed.

That is all, our dashboard is ready now.

Download the project management dashboard excel file

Unlike other downloads on Chandoo.org, this file is locked. You can purchase unlocked version along with 23 other project management templates Click here to buy it.

To download the locked version of project management dashboard excel file click these links: excel 2003,excel 2007 To get an unlocked version of the dashboard along with 23 other templates, click here.

Tell us about your Project Management Dashboard / Status Report

Tell me about your project management dashboard, project status report formats and how it is constructed. Do you use excel or some other tool (like powerpoint, word) to prepare the report? How the report / dashboard generated? Is the process automated or manual? What have you learned from using / making such status reports?

Resources for Project Managers

Check out my Project Management using Excel page for more resources and helpful information on project management.

What next?
This is the last installment of project management using excel series. I am looking for ideas to extend this series in useful manner. Please use comments to tell me what other activities of project management can be made easy using Microsoft Excel. I will try to write follow up posts if the topics are interesting. Thanks a lot for reading the series and suggesting valuable inputs to make it better. I have learned a lot about project management and excel writing this series. I hope you have picked up few concepts too. Tell me your feedback using comments. his is a bonus post in the project management using excel series. Gantt charts are very good to understand a project progress and status. But they are heavy on planning side. They give little insight in to what is happening. A burn down chart on the other hand is good for understanding the project progress and how deliverables are coming along. According to Wikipedia, A burn down chart is graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal. That is, it is a run chart of outstanding work. It is useful for predicting when all of the work will be completed.

An Example Burn Down Chart:

Making a burn down chart in excel

Step 1: Arrange the data for making a burn down chart
To make a burn down chart, you need to have 2 pieces of data. The schedule of actual and planned burn downs. As with most of the charts, we need to massage the data. I am showing the 3 additional columns that I have calculated to make the burn down chart. You can guess what the

formulas are. (Hint: there is a NA() too)

Step 2: Make a good old line chart

Just select the Balance Planned and Balance Actual series and create a line chart. Use the first column (days) in the above table for x-axis labels.

Step 3: Add the daily completed values to burn down chart

Select the daily completed column and add it to the burn down chart. Once added, change the chart type for this series to bar chart (read how you can combine 2 different chart types in one)

Step 4: Adjust formatting and colors

Remove or set grid lines as you may want. Adjust colors and add legend if needed.

Step 5:
There is no step 5, just go burn down some work.

Download the excel burn down chart template

Click here [.zip version here] to download the excel burn down chart template. Use it in your latest project status report and tell me what your team thinks about it. Download 24 Project Management Templates for Excel

What Next?
This is a bonus installment to the project management using excel series. We will revisit the burn down charts during part 6 of the series Project Status Reporting Dashboards. Meanwhile, make sure you have read the remaining parts of the series: