All articles with 'project management' Tag

Few months ago, we learned how to create a project valuation model in Excel as part of our series on Financial Modeling in Excel.

My Project Evaluation Model had a limitation!! In one of the personal comments that I received, the reader pointed out an important problem!

This is a guest post written by Paramdeep from Pristine. Chandoo.org runs Financial Modeling School program in partnership with Pristine Careers. Visit Financial Modeling School to learn more and sign-up for our newsletter.

Greetings!

It’s been long time since we interacted on Chandoo.org. Actually I was very busy teaching the 105 awesome students for financial modeling in Excel. We all worked together to create some easy and some complex financial models. I found the journey to be quite exciting and enriching (From the feedback that I got, my students too didn’t find it bad either 😉 )

During the interaction, I found that a lot of students were looking for financial modeling around the project financing as well. So we thought why not introduce financial modeling for project finance.

In this post I will speak about some of the key aspects of a project finance model and why it can be different from modeling a normal company.

Last week I announced Reader Awesomeness Week to celebrate the passion, attitude and knowledge of our little community here. I got 9 interesting and beautiful entries from our readers. In this post you can see 9 tips & downloads submitted by our readers. These include a project management template, a macro to remove blanks, a technique to make Google Earth maps using Excel and several other interesting tips & tricks.

Go ahead and read them, download attached workbooks and become awesome in Excel. 🙂

On Firday, we proposed a new chart for showing project plans. I chose an ugly name for it and called it Gantt Box Chart. Essentially, a gantt box chart is what you get when a gantt chart and box plot go to a bar, get drunk and decide to make out. It shows the project […]

Traditional project plans use Gantt Charts to depict the plan. While gantt charts work great and provide instant picture of overall plan, they fail to communicate the uncertainty in the plan. In most real world projects, the plans always change. Most of the management energy is spent on controlling and communicating about this plan uncertainty. This is where a project plan like gantt box chart can help. This chart (as shown above) clearly shows the variance in end dates of project tasks thus giving a clear picture of uncertainty in the plan. Read more to find out how this chart can be used in project management.

It has been quite a while since we had an excel links post. It doesn’t mean that I am not reading anything new on excel or charting. I have been reading lots of awesome articles and useful content and sharing it on my google reader recommendation list. But it is just that I have been […]

Some of you know that I sell a bundle of Project Management Excel Templates. The bundle includes 24 ready to use templates for Gantt Charts, Timesheets, Project Dashboards, Status Reports, Time Line Charts, Issue Logs, To do Lists and more. Launching these templates is one of the best moves in my life. They have been […]

In Excel Gantt Charts part of our project management series, we have discussed about how using Conditional Formatting and Formulas we can make a gantt chart like this: But when you have large project plans, gantt charts like above can get pretty intense and hard to read. So a better approach is to group various […]

As of yesterday, the project management templates have crossed 100 customer milestone. That is right my friend, one hundred project managers have chosen to manage their projects better using our templates. I have asked our customers to share their feedback and this is what they say: I think that the templates are excellent. A million […]

Check out an implementation of project dashboard along with tweetboard by our reader Fernando. He says, it “turned out to be a great success”. I am so happy for him.

Btw, the post includes a link to download the workbook so that you can see the dashboard and tweetboard in action.

I have a super exciting news for all our members. During the last several weeks, I have been working on making 24 strikingly remarkable and easy to use excel templates for better project management. Finally the bundle is ready. You can get a copy of the bundle starting today.

Project management dashboards, project status reports help stakeholders, project sponsors and team-members can understand project status very quickly. In the last installment of project management using excel, learn how to make project management dashboard using excel in this tutorial. Also download the excel project status dashboard template.

Tracking issues and risks is where most of the project management time goes. Once the project planning and organizing activities are in good shape, most of the project management activities are around risk management and issue tracking. In this installment of project management using excel, we will learn how to create a simple issue tracker template using excel and how to analyze issues using excel.

Timesheets are like TPS reports of any project. Team members think of them as an annoying activity. For managers, timesheets are a vital component to understand how team is working and where the effort is going. By using Microsoft Excel capabilities you can create a truly remarkable timesheet tracking tool.

In this installment of project management using excel series, we will learn 3 things about timesheets and resource management using Excel
1. How to setup a simple timesheet template in excel?
2. How to make a more robust timesheet tracker tool in Excel?
3. How to use the timesheet data to make a resource loading chart?

A burn down chart is a good way to understand the progress of a project. It is like a run chart that describes work left to do versus time. In this tutorial we will learn how to make a burn down chart using excel. This is a bonus installment to the project management using excel series.