TenForce – Pragmatic Project Management

Our new Ukrainian colleague Dmitry has been working hard the last few weeks to develop an Add-In for MSProject . It allows you to, without leaving the MSP tool, upload work to TenForce and download actual progress.

Follow these steps:

• Download and install the MSP add-in from within the application. This creates a new menu in your MSProject that allows you connect to your TenForce installation.
• Select the set of tasks you like to upload (or update) to TenForce.
• When the task details are updated in TenForce, these changes can be synchronized back to MSProject.
• If you have imported tasks from MSProject to TenForce, MSProject remembered in what project you have uploaded the tasks. So when you have done changes in your plan, you do not need to select again to what project in TenForce you like to synchronize. Just click the upload button in the menu, and changes are uploaded.

So this is at least one good reason to use MSProject: It’s integration with TenForce allows you to plan the work, distribute it to your team, and automate the consolidation back to your plan.

You may remember from previous posts in this blog we really do like MSProject. Because

1. it works,
2. it does what it is supposed to do, namely plan.

If you want to become a planning hero, here is what we have learned:

• don’t try to put too much detail in the plan (limit yourself to max 150-200 tasks)
• structure your plan
• use deliverables rather than activities in your task names
• think about milestones, critical path
• then link the plan to TenForce to distribute and follow-up the work done by the team.

Let us know what you think about this new feature.