Scenarios for OLAP Extensions

The Portfolio Analyzer OLAP Extensions Solution Starter includes three scenarios for extending the online analytical processing (OLAP) cube and implements the three solutions for those extensions. The solution starter enables project managers to add a pay period dimension to the cube and to create a cube with Task Earned Value and Task Issues and Risks. Following are descriptions and use cases of the scenarios.

Adding a Pay Period Dimension

There are many cases where a project manager may want to add a dimension to the OLAP cube to include additional Project Server data in the Portfolio Analyzer views of a set of projects. The Portfolio Analyzer view in Microsoft® Office Project Web Access enables interactive access to create charts and reports that show variations in the added dimension when it is compared with other dimensions such as projects, assignments, and resources.

The sample for adding a pay period dimension is a general case that shows how to extend the cube with data that already exists in Project Server. Adding a pay period dimension could be useful, for example, to show how resource costs vary with pay period and project.

Task Issues and Risks

With a Task Issues and Risks cube, a project manager can create a report of all the issues and risks in a project portfolio or compare issues and risks with standard cube parameters in the portfolio analyzer such as projects by region or date.

Use Case for the Task Issues and Risks OLAP Cube

Scenario for A. Datum Corporation   John is a project manager with 15 projects, and his team has a fairly high awareness of project management techniques. Team members enter risks and issues for projects and tasks, whenever it is appropriate, in their project site on Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint™ Services. About once a week, John looks at all the risks and issues his team has entered and reviews the associated measurements. Risk data includes estimates of the cost to mitigate the risk and of the probability that a risk outcome will occur.

Currently, there are two approaches that John uses to try to understand the list of risks and issues. Sometimes, he prints the list of all risks and issues and their associated measures for all projects and tries to find the most important of them by reading through the list armed with a highlighter and a pen. At other times, John exports everything in a spreadsheet and manually edits the data from multiple projects to create reports that make sense to him.

Fortunately, John read in a Project newsletter that he can now retrieve risk and issue information from Windows SharePoint Services and integrate that into Portfolio Analyzer to create rich, interactive reporting. All John needs to do is to have Project Server get the additional risk and issue information into the cube staging tables; from there, it is a straightforward process to get the added data into the Portfolio Analyzer cubes. Once the task issue and risk information is in the cube, John can continue to update the Portfolio Analyzer cube as usual. The next time he uses Portfolio Analyzer he will be able to interact with all of the new information.

After John creates the cube with the new risk information, he proceeds to explore the data with the interactive Office Web Component graphing in Portfolio Analyzer and creates some interesting reports. John discovers that he can create a risk view that can replace his printouts. John makes one bubble chart of risks for all of the projects he manages. The two axes on his chart are probability of the risk happening and the impact of the risk. The bubble size represents the cost to mitigate the risk.

The risk bubble chart is much easier to evaluate than doing manual risk analyses, and the conclusions are easier to explain to executive management. By extending the Portfolio Analyzer cube to include the task risk information that his team enters in their Windows SharePoint Services site, John saves several hours per month and is able to better understand and demonstrate the business impact of project issues and risks.

Task Earned Value

With a Task Earned Value cube, a project manager can show a graph or table of earned value calculations for a portfolio of projects. The cube also enables comparing earned value by task outline codes, in addition to comparisions of earned value with the standard cube parameters.

Use Case for the Task Earned Value OLAP Cube

Scenario for A. Datum Corporation   After looking at the risks for all his projects, John wants to make sure that the projects he manages will be on schedule. He uses Earned Value analysis as one way to measure the effectiveness of project schedules.

John also created an enterprise task outline code to categorize tasks in the project. Now John can not only view his earned value analysis, he can also use the task outline code as a dimension for his Portfolio Analyzer reports on task earned value. Using the steps described previously to create the issues and risks OLAP extension, he was able to generate a cube that contains enterprise task outline code information and earned value calculations. From the earned value view that John created in Portfolio Analyzer, John can easily see whether the set of tasks he has selected by task outline code within any set of projects is ahead or behind schedule and over or under budget.

If John sees any significant discrepancies, he can quickly rearrange the chart view to show different dimensions, such as project versions, or to see how additional data such as task overtime work, task fixed cost, task actual work, and other measures vary over time. John quickly finds that the task earned value OLAP extension of Portfolio Analyzer is an indispensable project management tool.