PM Tech Corner: Communicating with Timelines with Visio & MS Project 2016

Welcome to the Technical Corner for PMI Portland chapter.  This section is designed to help Project to Portfolio managers leverage tools, technologies and best practices in your daily work activities.

My name is Tim Runcie and I have spent the last 20+ years working with technologies and methodologies supporting Project, Program and Portfolio managers globally.  You can say it is a passion at our company Advisicon, helping our customers and community achieve better ROI with the blend of both tools and technologies.

As a Gold PPM partner with Microsoft, I welcome hearing requests requests for improvements on Microsoft tools, so feel free communicate those with myself my team anytime! I personally hope you enjoy this and want to encourage people to reach out directly to me for follow up, questions around this and any other technology and methodology topic.  I can always be reached at Tim.Runcie@Advisicon.com.

In this month’s article, I want to help Project and Program Managers who have to communicate timelines and schedules to stakeholders who are looking for some of the best options around for having that rich type of view.  There is even more on our YouTube channel, including this video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOfU5Flmr5U.  These are recorded from our free weekly webinar series called “Webinar Wednesdays” where you can earn free PDU’s, and we teach about different technologies, including Visio, Project, Project Online, SharePoint, etc., all addressing Project, Program and Portfolio management needs.

One of the key features of MS Project is that you have a new feature called the timeline view.  In the latest version of MS Project, you can actually have multiple timelines within a single Timeline view. The idea behind this is that the Gantt chart can be too weighty or busy or in some cases, just too detailed for some audiences.  For years project managers would take and build a separate Visio or PowerPoint view to communicate a high level rollup to different stakeholder audiences.

Well, Microsoft realized that in order to save project managers or the scheduling team time, they could automatically create a timeline view directly within Project.

A value proposition to leveraging the timeline view as seen here is that you can showcase key milestones, dates, tasks or deliverables of your choosing in a manner that is much cleaner and easier to digest.

What is even more exciting is that you can actually link your MS Project Schedule directly with Visio and have even richer, more detailed or expanded timelines, all leveraging your Project Schedule information.

Today, I’m going to showcase how you can build and have multiple timeline views for different audiences so that you can at will change, export, print, .pdf or copy and paste out, but also how to use Visio to supercharge your timeline experience and link Project Schedule Data (Tasks, Summary Tasks, Milestones) to your timeline view(s).

Building Multiple Timelines in Project 2016 or Higher:

The timeline feature allows you to add tasks to your timeline, format them or copy them to PowerPoint or any other application by doing the following:

• Highlight any row or rows and drag them into the Timeline Pane
• Right click on them and select “Add to Timeline” from the shortcut menu
• Highlight the row and on the Task Tab, click the Add to Timeline Button

If you don’t have a timeline view turned on (I hear this question a lot), here is how you turn this on.  On the Format Tab, click on the timeline split view check box.

What’s new in MS Project 2016 is the ability to use the ribbon in the timeline to add multiple timelines to a single timeline view.  This is super helpful as you can tell the story with different tasks from your schedule, all without having to build new views each time.

When you are in a timeline view, on the Format Ribbon, click the Timeline Bar button:

This will add multiple timelines to your schedule. You can now add tasks to each of the timelines (note: you cannot add the same task twice to multiple timelines).

Here is an example of multiple timelines in MS Project that tell the story of key work phases and drill-down activities.

Leveraging Visio for Expanded & Linked Timelines with Project:

Let’s continue by looking at expanding the super powerful capabilities for Visio to also help you expand, format and perhaps have a richer graphic than just what MS Project has, all while leveraging the data from the MS Project Schedule.

With Visio, you can take a project schedules time phased activities and add more formatting and control the detail more clearly, but still don’t have to spend time building it from scratch.

Knowing what to use for a Timeline:

When you go to create a timeline, making sure you are including the right level of detail is important.  This will be especially true when you use the Visio Timeline connector that allows you to pull in MS Project data. In Visio, you can set the level of detail that can come over and limit it from pulling all the tasks from your project Schedule.

This happens when you run the Import Project schedule wizard, which I will showcase next, but as seen in this next graphic, you can choose what level of detail you want to include in the timeline you are building at the time.

Importing MS Project Data to Visio:

So let’s walk through how quick and efficient you can make using Visio with MS Project Data.  First you will need to import the Project Information. This is a technique that is effective at quickly importing data from an existing .MPP file into Visio. You will likely need to edit the diagram that is created in order to make the basic formatting choices more visually appealing and more easily read.

This will prompt you through a series of steps and choices, all of which determine the formatting and visualizations of the Project Data in Visio. Once you click the Import MS Project Data you will need to do the following:

1.     Browse to and select a .MPP file to be imported

2.     In the Import Timeline Wizard, select the amount of information you want imported from your .MPP file. (All, Top level tasks only, Milestones only, Summary tasks only, Top level tasks and milestones).  (As seen in the screenshot above)

3.     Make choices for the format of your timeline, milestones, and intervals (you can select and change individual elements after they are imported), click Next.

4.     Confirm your choices, and click Finish.

Now you can begin the editing or formatting process around the Project Related data.  Edit the automatically generated diagram to make it more visually appealing and more easily readable.

Applying Visio Formatting & Options to Your Timeline:

When you import the timeline, you can expand the timeline, add formatting and even connect other shapes, or 3-D renderings as needed.  What is great about the Timeline in Visio is that the shapes are tied to the timeline (actual time) and the MS Project data as it changes is linked and will update your Visio Timeline, regardless of what formatting or enhancements you have added on top of them.

You may have seen our Visio flowcharts from Mastering Requirements, Technical Project Management or even Practical Project Management classes, where we have put in background logos and linked phased activities or predecessor steps and stage-gates to PMI lifecycle phases. You can really spend a lot or a little time in the formatting, but what this gives you is a richer canvas in Visio to build and expand upon your timeline view, without every losing the connection to the schedule, which will change over time.

This next view is an example of a different format type to a timeline view.  Again, not just squares and boxes, but other formatting can be applied and re-applied depending on how much data you want to expand or present.

As you can see, the combination of what you can do leveraging both Visio and Project together is very powerful and creates an easy to do, easy to manage and much better options for communicating timelines for stakeholders.

I hope you enjoyed this Month’s article and if you use Visio or Project, you can definitely get more bang for the buck using them together.

You can find more on our YouTube Channel covering PM tools, methodologies and best practices, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzcAEnYWfm14KhSv4Y6H3bA, or check out our live webinars on Wednesday ( called Webinar Wednesday at www.Advisicon.com/webinars ), where every Wednesday we are presenting training, free PDU’s on technology supporting Project, Program and Portfolio management.

Again, our goal for the PMI Tech Corner is to supercharge your ability in to produce results with tools, processes or a combination of both for optimization of your project management experience. Warmest wishes for your work and do reach out to me at Tim.Runcie@Advisicon,com for questions or other techniques/tools and blended methodology approaches.  Happy PM’ing!

About the Author

	Tim Runcie is the president of Advisicon (a Gold PPM Company), a 20+ year project, program and portfolio expert and member of the Microsoft Advisory council.  Tim is also the author of over 36 books on technology and project management and a 12+ year nominated and awarded MVP at Microsoft. Tim and Advisicon offer webinars, classes and customized training for all your project management needs.