Project management is a critical aspect of any Six Sigma initiative, particularly in the context of DMAIC projects. Black Belts and other Six Sigma project managers need to track resources, including those dedicated to the project and those with short-term involvement. Estimating timeliness and costs properly requires a detailed elucidation of the many tasks and dependencies. And as these projects tend to evolve over time, the ability to amend details throughout the life cycle of the project is a necessity.
Even with a systematic approach such as DMAIC, whereby Define precedes Measure, Measure precedes Analyze, and so on, there are instances of tasks within one phase that can be initiated before the prior phase has been completed. Detailing the dependencies and resource requirements provides an effective means of leveraging resources and speeding up project progress.
Using a project management software program is essential for doing all this effectively, and Microsoft Project is of course the standard.
Project easily handles all the required project management elements such as tasks, resources and costs as well as milestones and slack. Its calendar features allow easily scheduling of working and non-working time, with a variety of basic calendars included.
Report options include overview, current activities, costs, assignments, and workloads. New in this version are "visual reports": a means of creating graphs, pivot tables, and various diagrams that can be opened using Excel or Visio. These include reports for task usage, resource usage, assignment usage, task summary, resource summary, and assignment summary.
There is even a quick project management history lesson for those who are interested, oddly placed in the "What's new" section of Help. The Microsoft web site's comparison of Project 2007 versions lists "automated e-mail notification" and "Outlook 2007 integration to its calendar and To-Do Bar" as well, although I gave up searching for the means of implementing either of these options both in the program and in the Help section after what should have been more than enough time to find these features. The program does allow exporting of pictures to Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
Since Project is designed specifically for detailed tracking of all aspects of project management, it has a full set of features beyond the basics and gives a project manager a robust means of managing projects.