FROM ‘EXCEL HELL’ TO ‘PROJECT HEAVEN’!

ERIC UYTTEWAAL, PMP

From ‘Excel Hell’ to ‘Project Heaven’!

How an engineering firm switched from Microsoft Excel to Project Online.

Excel seems to be the tool-of-choice for many engineers; they know it well and they can typically make it
sing and dance.

I was hired by an engineering firm that specializes in creating high-speed production lines for drywall.
Dwayne is the manager of all their controls-engineers. Dwayne is responsible for avoiding any mess
created in such a production line, such as:
◆ Water pouring out over the floor in this wet-production process that floods the plant and destroys the
stacks of finished product, or
◆ Drywall sheets piling up into one big pile of crushed drywall sheets halfway through the production
line where they were never meant to pile up and certainly not meant to come out in pieces rather than
in whole sheets.

Dwayne had coded all his projects using a four-letter coding system: Two letters for the name of the client
and two letters for the location of the subsidiary site. Dwayne has been planning his projects with an
Excel spreadsheet for years: He uses a spreadsheet with his team member names as row-headings and a
timescale with weeks as column-headings. Dwayne then creates bars in the spreadsheet to model who will
do what work on all projects that need to be scheduled by writing the project code (like SAON) inside
each activity bar. All other engineers involved, mechanical engineers and electrical engineers, are also
using Excel. They all create similar spreadsheets as Dwayne’s. Then they create another spreadsheet to
plan all onsite work in more detail to avoid the resources are scheduled to be in two places at the same
time. There are also several cost management spreadsheets around that all need to be kept in sync with the
schedule spreadsheets, which is a real challenge, simply because Excel will not help in this syncing effort.
There is no single repository for all projects in Excel. There is no shared resource pool with all resources
when you use Excel to manage your business: Excel will not automatically aggregate the total workload
for resources across all their projects.

All engineering managers have been working hard for an entire Monday afternoon trying to make sure
that all their Excel spreadsheets were aligned. At about 5PM, they feel they had created order in the chaos
of their professional lives. Joe enters the meeting room abruptly; he had meant to be in this coordination
meeting but was pulled away to do some trouble shooting in one of his projects. Joe looks at the
schedules and soon exclaims: Project X is now only finishing in December of this year?! It needs to be
done in September: We promised that to the client! Dwayne, our controls-engineer, is losing his control:
Are you really asking us to re-do all of our spreadsheets because of your f******* client? Dwayne is
now facing another late night at work and missing his daughter’s soccer practice again (!), not to talk
about the scorn he will harvest from his wife: He becomes emotional and loses his composure: ‘Why
didn’t you stay in this G** D*** meeting!!’. Nobody is happy in ‘Excel Hell’!

Listening to this story, I realized that Project Online can do a much better job AND much quicker than
what they currently do in Excel. It will also keep all schedules in sync because Project Online has a
central repository for all projects that will use one, single shared pool of resources that will aggregate the
workloads.

I asked how much time Dwayne was wasting on keeping his spreadsheets in good order and in sync with
all other spreadsheets; he said: ‘About 8 hours a week!’. I gasped: ‘Really, 8 hours per week?’ and I
turned my head to the manager of all mechanical engineers ‘How much time are you spending on your

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FROM ‘EXCEL HELL’ TO ‘PROJECT HEAVEN’! ERIC UYTTEWAAL, PMP

Excel spreadsheets?’. His answer: ‘About 6 hours a week!’. The electrical-engineering manager repeated
the same number.

‘Did you know that if you spent more than 30 minutes a week in Project Online to keep your schedule up-
to-date, you are not doing it right?’, I confronted the engineering managers. I captivated their attention
now but got some push back as well: ‘Do you mean that even in a really-large Design-
and-Build-a-new-Plant project schedule of two years long, I should only spend less than 30 minutes a
week?’, the control-engineer inquired. I said: ‘Yes! 30 minutes a week, that is all, even in a really-large
schedule with 2,000 tasks! That schedule may be big, but you still have on average only 20 tasks in
progress per week: 2,000 tasks divided by about 2 years or 100 weeks. Can you keep 20 tasks up-to-date
in less than 30 minutes per week and have Project Online update the rest of the schedule through the
dependencies you entered?’. Now, I had finally captured the attention of this herd of cats: ‘Ok, tell us
how!!!’.

At this point in the process, we could finally start moving in a certain direction, a direction they actually
hated as black-and-white thinking engineers: Naturally they would not trust a scheduling engine like
Microsoft Project’s engine to quickly sort out all over-allocations and present a way forward for their
entire portfolio of projects that had all over-allocations smoothed out while trying to stay within
contractual deadlines as much as possible. If a deadline could not be met, the scheduling system had to
allow for efficiently finding a solution that was acceptable to all stakeholders, including the VP of Global
Sales and all engineers on the work floor of this engineering firm. Engineers tend to think they are
smarter than any algorithm and that they can do this faster manually in Excel. That may be true for 20
tasks, but not for 6,000 engineering task they face every year.

Also, they had never worked with generic resources (or ‘roles’: A role is a set of related skills). They had
always put the names of actual people in their Excel spreadsheets. I explained to them that by using roles
rather than actual resource names, we would create expand the number of feasible schedules for the
scheduling engine to figure out what the optimal schedule is for all projects. The engineers also insisted
that, if the scheduling engine could not meet one of the contractually agreed-upon dates, it should flag
these projects in red! We could do this by using the Deadline feature in Project Online.

‘Ok, but what about the next few weeks, we don’t want the scheduling engine to re-assign any tasks within
that time-frame!’, a nervous engineer observed. ‘Ok, so we need a short-term look-ahead window of
about one month and a long-term look-ahead window of about 6 months! In the short-term, we have only
individuals assigned, the actual resources. In the long-term look-ahead window, we have only generic
resources assigned, the roles!’

‘Ok, so Eric, you are proposing to use the automatic resource leveling engine to produce a schedule for
all our projects?’. ‘Yes!’ I said. Then he continued: ‘I have heard that you cannot trust the resource
leveling engine in Microsoft Project; people are saying that it creates a mess and you should not be using
it!’

‘Yes, I have come across hundreds of those people in my 25-year career saying the same thing, and I will
show you that Microsoft Project is indeed able of creating one big mess. Here, I am creating three
deliverables: Foundation of 4 days duration, Walls of 5 days and Roof of 6 days and I assign one
resource to all of them, the General Contractor; we will ignore all the trades to keep it simple. Now I
level all workloads and see what a beautiful schedule Microsoft Project has created: It suggests building
the Roof first, then build the Walls beneath the roof and, last but not least, pour the Foundation under the
Walls. What is wrong with this picture?’ They all laugh! Gravity is not your friend when you try building
a house in reverse order!

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FROM ‘EXCEL HELL’ TO ‘PROJECT HEAVEN’! ERIC UYTTEWAAL, PMP

I then ask them: ‘What is missing from this schedule?’ They had no clue, after all, Excel-hell had never
taught them what dependencies are! Excel does not have a dependencies feature. They wanted to switch
to Project Online but had found its feature of dependencies too abstract and too hard-to-use; they decided
to not bother with it. What they did not realize is that it is exactly the feature that would transfer them
from their hell into heaven!

I asked them what dependencies we would need in this house example and they quickly realized that
Foundation should be linked Finish-to-Start (FS) to Walls. The walls would need to be linked to Roof.
I created the two dependencies quickly, within two seconds. With the dependencies set, all
overallocations were also resolved in this project schedule for House 1, so I suggested: ‘Let’s add
House 2 to the mix: A large, detached family home with: Foundation: 8 days, Walls: 10 days and
Roof: 12 days. The same General Contractor with one resource needs to do this project as well and as
soon as possible. We need to instruct the scheduling engine what the dependencies are in this project to
avoid output that does not make sense: foundation first, then walls and, finally, the roof. Otherwise, the
dumb scheduling engine will have no clue about that and do dumb things! Let’s create the same
dependencies for this project. Now, I am going to ask the scheduling engine to level the workloads and
tell me what the earliest possible finish dates are for House 1 AND House 2. The scheduling engine can
decide if we should do House 1 first or House 2: The engine tells us that House 1 could be finished on
4+5+6 = day 15 and House 2 will be started after that and take 8+10+12 = 30 days to be finished on day
45.

One of the engineers smirked and said: ‘Yes, that all looks good, but that is not what happens here.
Sometimes, our VP of Sales barges in and says: ‘Ok, I can get this contract signed today if we do finish
this job by December 1st!’ How could Project Online possibly handle that situation?’

I demonstrate to the group that you can enter Priority numbers for each project: If you want a project
done earlier, it needs a higher priority number. ‘So, let’s create House 3, the new project proposed by the
VP of Sales, and let’s see if that House 3 can be completed by day 60? Now, I level all workloads in the
Leveling Order called Priority, Standard, which will force the scheduling engine to start taking these
priorities into account; it will first resource the high-priority project and delay the lower-priority
projects. Let’s give House 3 a high priority, because we already know that it has the most challenging
deadline. Let’s see if that deadline can be met while still hitting the other deadlines as well? Looking at
the result, you can see that the deadline for House 3 can be met, but House 2 will now be delivered one
week late: Is that acceptable perhaps? Do we think the client will go along? If not, could we hire another
outside general contractor to take care of House 3? What would be the risk of hiring another general
contractor that we do not know as well as our go-to contractor? Would we still make a profit?’.

They all had their mouths slightly open at this point; partially from surprise and partially from admiration:
They realized they had just entered ‘Project Heaven’. They also realized that they would never return to
their ‘Excel Hell’ again!

It was now easy to get all engineering managers to commit to Project Online and to really learn its
dependencies feature to model the practically-necessary relationships: I delivered them a two-day training
on Project Online. I gave them a 76-point checklist for their workload models and encouraged them to use
our ProjectPro Forecast Scheduling App (PFSA) to regularly audit all their project schedules to verify if
all managers were still creating proper Workload Models of their projects: One bad apple could rot the
entire crate. They happily paid for the PFSA licenses and my consulting: I configured Project Online for
them in two weeks and trained their Project Online administrator on-the-job as I went along. He would
keep the lights on in this new system.

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FROM ‘EXCEL HELL’ TO ‘PROJECT HEAVEN’! ERIC UYTTEWAAL, PMP

Then I went onto my next client, another medium-sized engineering firm, where I repeated, essentially,
the same story.

I love my job!

Eric Uyttewaal, PMP

President ProjectPro Corp.
www.ProjectProCorp.com

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