We managed to boost our Forensic Analysis capability by thinking outside the box.

Lets face it, we all have a love hate relationship with Microsoft Project. If you compare MS Project side by side with other products it has some strengths but also some failings. One of those is the ability to walk through a network of activities and understand activity information.

So to help us out, we spent time writing a pretty slick VBA tool, leveraging the Project Object library.

Check it out in action below. 

So why is this important to us?

Imagine you have a poorly built schedule (like the sample above) that has thousands of activities. Typically, products such as Primavera P6 enable you to navigate back and forth through a sequence of activities. Doing this enables you to understand the drivers behind activities and dates, but also flag and then filter on the information to present to project teams.

MS Project has very limited functionality in this space. In fact it is not robust enough to drill down into a schedule with thousands of tasks. At best it only lets you see driving predecessors.

We're pretty proud of this utility!