MS Project..... How I loathe thee!

Being a Consultant a lot of my work is tracked and entered in a little tool called Microsoft Project. For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, thats ok because most of us that use the tool see little value in it as well, at least I do. A lot of projects I've been on have tried tracking what we are supposed to do in MS Project and to a certain degree we are successful. The only thing I don't like about it is that projects are fluid, they change from day to day or even hour to hour so it almost makes everything impossible to track. I had the fun duty of creating a project plan and made it nice and high level so that it will be easy to track stuff. Now whether or not people want to do it that way is not my problem yet. I just know that after I create this project plan, a few updates will be made and then I won't touch it ever again until maybe the end of the project.

I just know that its going to get worse as my career progresses because I will be the one making the updates or requesting others to create project plans. People just love seeing these things with all the fun lines and what not. The one I created in Excel is prettier than anything you can get in Project, it just can't give you reports and what not. If I'm lucky, Microsoft will come up with a more automated or simple tool that I can use. That would be the ultimate! For now I guess I'll suffer along and curse the program as I continue to use it throughout my career.

I wish I could think of what my next rant will be but my brain is kinda turned off today. Till the next blog post!