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Excel Project Planning Tool

Posted by Kevin Brady on Mon 1st June 2009 at 08:16 PM, Filed in Document Templates & Tools,  Project Management

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What is it?
The attached tool is a totally FREE shareware Project Planning Tool which does not contain Macros or VB so it is easily customisable. This tool allows the creation of simple Gantt charts. This is one of the most important types of project plan for monitoring a projects progress against an established work breakdown structure.

Why should I use it?
In order to achieve the objectives of any project it is essential to look at the details of the work required, which includes identifying specific tasks and estimating time to complete them, estimating associated costs, identifying who will perform the tasks and highlighting areas of risk together with devising appropriate contingency plans.
It is usually part of the responsibility of the project manager to create the project plan and to update it on a regular and frequent basis. This is an important point – project plans are not set in stone! They are dynamic and must reflect the current situation. In most projects there are a number of “unexpected” challenges or events which may affect the timescales, costs and outcomes of the project. With good planning these unexpected events can be dealt with effectively.

How should I use it?

Initial Plan Set-up:-

(1) Enter your project work breakdown structure (tasks and subtasks)
(2) Enter the start and finish dates for each task /subtask
(3) Enter task resources
(4) Make sure that resources do not overlap causing resources to be over allocated to a task.

Plan complete grin

Now update it regularly so progress can be monitored and the plan becomes an accurate representation of current status.
If this tool was of use to you then please can you put a comment on this site. If you believe it could be improved then please detail an improvement so we can continue to keep our templates and tools the best on the internet.

Good Luck.

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READER COMMENTS:

Any chance it could work with Excel 2003?

Posted by Noam  on Tue 2nd June 2009 at 01:39 AM | #

I like what you’ve done here.

You may want to consider using OFFSET for range references in Duration and %Complete? This should make inserting new rows at the top a little easier at least, eg for cell F10 you could use =MAX(OFFSET(E10,1,0):E14)-D10, instead of =MAX(E11:E14)-D10.
Of course this would be more useful if it fixed adding rows at the bottom of the category.

Regards,

Andrew

Posted by AndyRazz  on Wed 3rd June 2009 at 02:45 AM | #

Thanks for the comment Noam. I have added a 2003 version to the zipped download. Big thanks for pointing this out

Posted by Kevin Brady  on Sat 6th June 2009 at 12:33 PM | #

Thanks Andy,

A real help ! I have updated the sheet with your recommendation.

If anyone else has suggestions as to how this bit of shareware can be improved then please make a comment and help the development of this tool for the Project Management community

Posted by Kevin Brady  on Sat 6th June 2009 at 11:18 PM | #

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