We’re Speaking at Project Conference 2014

Well, after delivering three presentations on consecutive days at the last Project Conference in 2012, I swore to never again do so, and to keep my presentations at any conference down to a manageable number somewhere between zero and two.  You can see how well that worked as I proudly announce I will be presenting (and/or co-presenting) the following sessions in Anaheim in February:

Enhancing Value Through Socializing Your PMO: Yammer for Project Management (with the Christophe Fiessinger – now accepting candidates for mildly off color French jokes if anyone has them)

Enterprise Reporting – Business Intelligence Overview in Project Online and Project Server 2013 (with longtime partner in crime, Mr. Mike McLean)

The Epistemological Adventure: Best Practices in Enterprise Tool Deployments

I figure two co-presentations count for 1 actual presentation as Mike and Christophe will be doing all of the heavy lifting.  That still gets me in the ballpark of 2ish total presentations at one conference….sort of.   Luckily, no Earned Value this time around.  I may rue saying this, but I’ll take the Enterprise Social zealots over the EVM zealots any day of the week.

Other UMT folks will be around and presenting as well:

Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis – Going Beyond PPM and to Effectively Run the Business of IT (Ben Chamberlain and Gartner’s Donna Fitzgerald – of whom I am quite the fan)

PPM 2.0 – 4 Things You Did Not Know You Could Do With Project Server to Realize Even More ROI (Ben Chamberlain & Catalin Olteanu)

…as well as co-presenting a number of case studies with our clients.  It should be fun….

PMO Symposium 2013 Content Available For Download

Lest you missed it, the slide decks from the PMO Symposium held a couple of weeks ago in San Diego are available for download here:

http://copevents.pmi.org/pmo-symposium-2013/program/download-presentations

Well worth a perusal….

Bulk Importing Projects into 2013

I feel that I’ve spent a good chunk of my life bulk importing projects into Project Server.  That usually happens as part of an initial data load, when we first populate the system with new projects – or as the output of an external project chartering process that generates a list of projects each quarter or year.

In 2010, we had the Bulk Import tool, which allowed users to convert lists of projects or initiatives into projects.  The Bulk Import tool was nice, but it came with all sorts of arcane limitations which led to an incredibly frustrating user experience.

In the early days of 2013, to build demos, I also found it easy to resort to VBA.  I could use that to export a slew of 2010 projects, and then reimport into 2013.  Luckily, as my colleague reminded me recently, there’s a Bulk Import tool built into 2013 – sort of.  This blog post talks about how to activate that feature on a SharePoint list – thereby enabling the bulk import of projects.  Unfortunately, it looks like Bulk Edit is not possible through this feature – although there’s actually an App in the App Store that supports that.

Anyway, to get started on a bulk import list, go ahead and create a new site underneath the main PWA site.

Within Site Settings, activate the feature for the Project Proposal Workflow.

Create a custom list to capture your list of projects.  Add fields as appropriate.

Now select the projects to import, and select the Create Projects button from the Items tab.

That kicks off the import wizard.

And from there….we have new projects.

Didn’t quite get it right?  Add the Bulk Edit tool and fix the details.