Scheduling Team Projects Using Microsoft Project 2010

  • Article

You can use Microsoft Project 2010 to plan team projects, schedule tasks, assign resources, and track changes to data that is stored in Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012. By using Project 2010, you can access many tools and functions through the simplified graphical menus and Office Ribbon. The Team tab menu, as shown in the following illustration, displays the same functions that are available from the Team tab in Microsoft Excel.

Project 2010 Team Tab Ribbon

Team Menu ribbon

  

Project 2010 supports several new project fields and functions. Depending on how you use Project to schedule team tasks, you may want to update the task work item form to display some of the new fields. To maintain new Project fields in both your project plan and in Team Foundation, you have to customize the task work item type and the Microsoft Project Field mapping file for the team project.

The following table describes several of the new task-related features that you can use to manage team projects. For more information, see the following page on the Microsoft Web site: Project 2010 New Features.

Project

Related content on the Microsoft Web site

Schedule tasks manually or automatically. By using Task Mode, which is accessed through the following Ribbon menu, you have more flexibility in the way you and team members schedule tasks.

Task mode scheduling ribbon menu options

By using manually scheduled tasks, which are indicated by the Pinned task icon icon, you can manually schedule the duration and the start and finish dates for a task. Team members can place a manually scheduled task anywhere in their schedules, and Project 2010 will not move it.

Important

In order for team members to manually schedule their tasks, you will have to add the necessary project fields to the task work item, as described in Adding Project Fields to Team Foundation later in this topic.

Start and finish dates for autoscheduled tasks (Auto Update Task Mode icon) are determined by the scheduling engine based on task dependencies and the project calendar, as in previous releases of Project. Project managers who are accustomed to automatic scheduling with past versions of Project can turn the new manual scheduling feature off for specific tasks or the entire project.

Perform what-if analysis by inactivating select tasks (Project 2010 Professional Edition  Project Professional 2010 only). By using Active Mode, you can determine the impact to the schedule when you specify some tasks as inactive. When you mark a task as inactive, you maintain all the data that is associated with the task, but you remove it from consideration in the schedule and resource allocation.

Important

When you inactivate a task in Project 2010, you do not inactivate the task in Team Foundation. Inactive tasks are published and refreshed according to their Publish and Refresh assignment in the Project plan.

  

Scalable 64-bit support. With 64-bit compatibility, Project 2010 provides performance improvements to support creation of very large and complex projects.

Adding Project 2010 fields to Team Foundation

For team members to be able to view or modify new Project 2010 fields from a Team Foundation client, you must customize both the definition file for the task work item type and update the Microsoft Project Mapping file. By making these changes, you maintain the data fields in both the Project plan and in the Team Foundation database. You can make these fields read-only or modifiable. You can use them to find work items by using queries and construct reports. Specifically, you can add fields that enable team members to specify their start and end dates for pinned tasks. By adding these fields to the task work item form, you can view and modify the start and end dates from a Team Foundation client.

The following table provides the sequence of tasks to perform and related topics for completing these tasks.

Tasks

Related topics

Determine the Project fields to add to your team project. If you want team members to schedule tasks manually from a Team Foundation client, you must add the Project fields that store the manual date and duration for tasks to the work item form and project mapping file. You can use the following information to determine which of these Project scheduling fields to add:

  • To support manually scheduled tasks, add one or more of the pjTaskStartText, pjTaskFinishText, or pjTaskDurationText fields to the mapping file. You must map pj*Text fields to String fields in Team Foundation. These fields accept text strings only.

  • The pjTaskStart, pjTaskFinish, and pjTaskDuration fields contain the scheduled committed dates and duration of a task.

    Tip

    By default, these fields are mapped based on the process template that was used to create your team project.

  • The scheduling engine uses the pjTaskScheduledStart, pjTaskScheduledFinish, and pjTaskScheduledDuration fields to store the calculated dates and duration of an autoscheduled task.

  • The pjTaskManual, pjTaskPlaceholder, and pjTaskWarning fields indicate whether a task is scheduled manually or automatically, whether a manual task has insufficient information to be scheduled, and whether a Project has identified a potential scheduling conflict with the start date, finish date, or duration, respectively, of a manually scheduled task.

Add fields to the task work item type. To update a work item type, you add a FIELD element for each new field you want to track and a CONTROL element for each field you want to display on the work item form. You use the witadmin command line tool to export and import the definition file for each work item type.

Note

You can create and modify work item types by using Process Editor, a power tool for Visual Studio. For more information, see the following page on the Microsoft Web site: Team Foundation Server Power Tools.

Update the Microsoft Project Mapping File. The project mapping file determines how the fields in each task are mapped to fields in Team Foundation and how each field is published and refreshed. Each team project is associated with its own mapping file. You use the TFSFieldMapping command-line tool to download and upload the project mapping XML file.

See Also

Concepts

Create your schedule, backlog, and tasks using Microsoft Project