How can I use Excel for project management?

Question

Joel often talks about using MS Excel for lightweight project management, but I'm curious about actual implementations of this idea. I've seen some templates that seem to clone MS Project via macros, which would be overkill for a lightweight project. Anyone have any useful templates?

Answer 1

It's not excel, but I saw scrumy and liked it's demo. For a small project recently, I just generated a project plan using 'Cross Functional Flowchart' under Business Process with some flow/process stuff in Visio.

Answer 2

try

    feature    task       estimated hours actual hours current %
    ---------- ---------- --------------- ------------ ---------

if estimated hours times current % is greater than actual hours, you are behind schedule

update the actual hours and current % on a daily basis

see also joel's old excel template

Answer 3

Maybe a bit off-topic, but you might want to consider testing Google Docs. There is a Gantt chart widget provided by Viewpath in the "Insert->Widget..." menu option.

Answer 4

Much simpler: some Gantt graph in Excel ,as illustrated here.

Answer 5

Edward Tufte - aka "the man" when it comes to data representation has done a lot of work on Gantt charts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart) has some good information on this topic, but basically it boils down to using Excel as a Gantt chart creator, the advantage being that it's simple and won't get in your way much:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000076

Answer 6

You could consider using a Sprint Backlog. You estimate the time for every tasks of your project and your update the estimated remaining time every day or so. Then you have a burndown chart that shows the remaining effort to complete the project.

If your project is too large for a daily tracking, you could either do the tracking every week, or manage a product backlog of the things to be done in your project as a coarse-grained level of planning and then choose the most prioritized one for the finer-grained planning level.

You might want to look at Scrum(1) or any other agile methods for lightweight development methods for further details.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)

Answer 7

The columns I use are

1) Task Name 2) Budget Hours 3) Total Hours 4) Remaining Hours

The Key is column (4). Rather than getting the person to estimate a percent complete; get them to re-estimate from this point forward. Its a subtle change but the mindset is much different. Otherwise you almost always end up stuck at 90% complete.

Answer 8

If you like using spreadsheets and not getting involved with too many fancy tools, have a look at The One Page Project Manager - it's exactly as described, a nice, lightweight way to keep track of all your important project info on a single worksheet.

Answer 9

I use EasyProjectPlan which is an Excel Project Plan that syncs with Outlook and MSProject.

www.EasyProjectPlan.com

I use the Outlook and Calendar sync features to distribute and collect task information to my team members.

I distribute the EPP Excel file to all team members either by email or I post it in a shared folder.

My team members can edit the EPP excel file and send the changes back to me.

Most of the companies I work for have no PM task management system so EPP allows me to walk onto any project and immediately distribute and collect task information to all team members. Considering that most companies use Excel and Outlook, there is nothing to install on any computer.

In my experience, team members prefer to view task information in Excel and Outlook.