Re: Leveling by ID vs. "Standard"

Excellent Response, Steve. Really quite good.
I really appreciate it.

I would go one step further and say there likely
is a market for an "IT View" of MS Project, a tool
of this trade called Project Management. Perhaps
the stuff under the hood doesn't lend itself to this
adaptation, but this could, in the final analysis, be
a mistake -- not in terms of a response to some
market need for IT links; rather, it is because the
technical disciplines of database design, whether
that be hierarchical, relational, or object oriented,
inherently better serve the goals of developing
software for tools to serve an Enterprise trade.

Let me put it this way. I've been working with IT
types for many years, and especially in recent years,
these people are not very well endowed from an
academic point of view. The "science" of IT is not
very deep compared to software development as a
science (classical data structures and algorithms in
the D. Knuth sense)... or management science (in
the Operations Research sense, as in Production
Scheduling science or even Project Management).

This limited breeding notwithstanding, the IT World
delivers! They have magic powers! They rock! I've
known high school dropouts who learned IT skills and
are now quite successful -- because they add a lot of
value to the Enterprise. They are flexible, effective,
and fast (when management is smart enough to
empower them). They can get the job done.

Applications that are initially developed on classical
data structure techniques (double-linked lists, or
what have you), reflect an approach to perfection
that is not always scalable in the modern "tools of
business" world where perspectives and paradigms
must constantly go through revolutions.

One surely could create a VASTLY superior product
(compared to MS Project) using the more modern
SOA approach: a database for the "Project Tables,"
and dotNet components to perform the data entry,
calculate and render the results (GANNT, etc.), and
so much more, like web links to tutorials. Even a
nice desktop version would be good; still using the
idea of thin client GUIs and RDBMS underpinnings.

Compared to such an approach, MS Project is an
abyssimally bloated (not agile, not flexible) legacy
troll. If only it were even a little more like Excel in
some ways!

We don't even know all the ways it is NOT serving
customers needs because they are all in a class
somewhere, or reading another MS Project book!

Perhaps the biggest (almost tragic) aspect of this
kind of product is the way it affects YOU guys, the
MS Project experts. In an effort to help all of us
get value from this product, and in an effort to
make a living, you have worked your asses off to
give us these courses, these books, and such. In
my humble opinion, it would have been better if
the expert books and courses on Project, per se,
really were just for the IT types and technogeeks.

The market for Project Management education
should be more about Management Science. It
should be about human behavior, logistics, the
variability of processes, ways to enhance group
productivity, ways to look at different kinds of
projects, and HOW TO MAKE DECISIONS! They
would use tools like Project. But they should not
have to burn all these resources just figuring out
MS Project -- just to enter model parameters.

Sure, I guess I'm being severe. And it is not all
that practical to post remarks like these on an
MS Project newsgroup.

Still, as I always am advising clients, we all need
to be far more optimistic. We need never to give
up and settle for the status quo. Whether it is
"how we've always done this" or "you should have
seen how we used to do it" or "nobody is going to
go for that" -- remember, the winners are chosen
only from among those who bought the tickets.

I'd like to see you guys leverage your dual track
of core competencies into twice as many books
and courses.

You know, it's just amazing how far you get once
you start walking! And right now, someone already
is WAY down the road developing the product that is
better than MS Project. I only hope it is Microsoft,
and that the replacement for Project has VBA!

Meanwhile, I intend, nevertheless, to "package" MSP
in a business solution my clients need right now. I
routinely write VB browser scripts -- which are
dynamically written by VB server scripts on IIS. This
way I activate Excel and Word, often in hidden mode,
to write reports on data from the server database.
My MS Project VBA scripts run the schedule model
as a Monte Carlo simulation (N=100) and record the
Finish times of certain milestones in Excel and graph
the results. I have a process dashboard code that
depicts products and processes using DHTML and
CSS as these are datalogging realtime. Now, I can
record simulation results and show them on this
dashboard, too, as if they were really happening.
I can process actual product and process datalog
data and put them into the schedule model -- not
only as task durations, but also as simulations
that can tell me -- "going at this rate" -- what will
the friggin Annual Report look like!

100% pure Microsoft! The Excel and MS Project
always run on the users desktop, but everything
else is server database and IIS -- running DHTML
and CSS pages with both server side and browser-
embedded VB and Java scripts. And when I leave,
a beginner programmer with hopes for the future
can take care of it all. They barely even need an
IT department.

My heroes: Microsoft and Dr.s Goldratt, Deming,
and Taiichi Ohno.

I hope you guys are getting hip to Goldratt. APICS
is already on board with the Theory of Constraints
(TOC), and PMI is getting there.


With my sincerest gratitude for you interest in my
Project problems, and for helping me understand
MS Project...

Cheers,

Jim Rodgers
Senior Consultant

Strategic Planning and
Management of Technology





"Steve House" wrote:

Well, it does in fact track information of those three entities. In a
very real sense, what Project calls "tables" are actually database views
of the underlying tables - filtered views of the underlying table
showing selected fields and selected records of interest same as you
might get as the output of a query in Access. In a simplified
description of what it's doing under the hood, we have a Tasks table and
a Resources table, related to each other many-to-many using the
Assignments table as the join intermediate, very much like the classic
Students, Classes, and Enrollments model I present to my beginning
database students. But it's not just one table each - in fact, you can
save the project as an mdb file and see all the individual tables by
opening the file in Access. And Access is of course an SQL database
product supporting queries created with SQL. But be forwarned - it
normalizes each entity into a total of somewhere around 50 separate
related tables and the meaning of the fields are sometime quite
cryptic - don't have the schema right in front of me but it is
documented on the CD and in the programs folder.

Yes, Project Server runs with SQL Server, in fact SQL Server is a
required component of the install. But AFAIK it doesn't give you direct
access to the table via SQL.- not a server guru so perhaps someone else
can chime in on that.

No offense meant here but I think one of the problems you may be having
stems from approaching MS Project from an IT application frame of
reference in the first place. It's simply not an IT application that
can be 'black-boxed' and deployed to the firm in the same sense that you
might deploy MS Word with a collection of templates and macros as part
of the firm's document preparation standardization initiative. If you
continue the parallel with Word, Word doesn't require you to have the
skills of a professional writer to know everything there is to know
about it's operation. But MS Project is another breed of critter
altogether. The essential skills required in using Project effectively
have nothing whatsoever to do with programming or computer skills or any
of the other Computer Application things that techno-weenies like me
love so much to play with. The essential tools are the human,
strategic, and tactical planning skills of the manager, MS Project is
simply a job aid to help you leverage those skills.
--
Steve House
MS Project MVP
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs


"Jim Rodgers" <JimRodgers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:AE7373CF-B051-4F7C-A539-60477FC53F33@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I tell you what.
I'd be great if Project had a SQL interface !

Suppose there was a table called [Tasks]
and another called [Resources]
and another called [Assignments]
ING
...then to get a list of appointment for both the judges
and the musicians would be a simple 3 minute
GUI exercise in MS Query.

Of course, MS Query is another cool MS product.

"Real" database guys would rather just type in the
SQL query for the view they want. In this case it
would look like this...

"SELECT
Resource_Usage.Resource_Name,
Resource_Usage.Task_Name,
Resource_Usage.Start,
Resource_Usage.Finish,
Resources.Resource_Name AS Room
FROM
(Resource_Usage
LEFT JOIN Tasks
ON Resource_Usage.Task_Name
= Tasks.Task_Name)
LEFT JOIN (Resources
RIGHT JOIN Assignments
ON Resources.Resource_Name
= Assignments.Resource_Name)
ON Tasks.Task_Name
= Assignments.Task_Name
WHERE
(((Resource_Usage.Resource_Name) Not Like "* Room")
AND
((Resources.Resource_Name) Like "* Room"))
ORDER BY
Resource_Usage.Resource_Name,
Resource_Usage.Task_Name,
Resource_Usage.Start,
Resource_Usage.Finish
;"

...where [Resource_Usage] is another view
defined by this...

SELECT
Resources.Resource_Name,
Tasks.Task_Name,
Assignments.Start,
Assignments.Finish
FROM
Tasks
RIGHT JOIN (Resources
LEFT JOIN Assignments
ON Resources.Resource_Name
= Assignments.Resource_Name)
ON Tasks.Task_Name
= Assignments.Task_Name
ORDER BY
Resources.Resource_Name,
Tasks.Task_Name,
Assignments.Start,
Assignments.Finish
;"

Just THINK of what you could do!

:-)

Hey,

1. Does Project Server run on SQL Server?
2. Does Project Server give you SQL access?

If you scrolled down far enough to answer this
question, then I really am proud of you. Still, is
there any way to see Project tables?

Thanks, Jim





.

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