Combine Microsoft Project and Visual Studio Team System for a One-two Punch of Productivity

icrosoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) provides tools for every role in a typical software development team: Architects, Project Managers, Developers, and Testers. It enables project managers to use the tools they know well—Microsoft Project and Microsoft Excel—to store project management data in Team Foundation Server, the collaboration server that is part of Visual Studio Team System. This article explains how to use Microsoft Project to work with VSTS data and describes the benefits of doing so.

In software development projects, project managers and project leads usually face the following problems:

• They spend a lot of time in tracking project management data such as project plans, tasks, issues, risks etc. They need to do frequent status meetings with other team members to get up-to-date data. Time spent in these meetings affects team productivity.
• This data is generally captured in Microsoft Project or Microsoft Excel and shared with other team members. This creates multiple copies of the data, which makes it difficult to get a consistent and synchronized view of the project status.
• Because the project data exists in multiple documents, creating project reports becomes a manual and time-intensive process.

The project management tools in VSTS help solve the preceding problems. Project Managers create tasks and other project management items, such as issues and risks, using MS Project, and save them to the Team Foundation Server (TFS). Other team members can view and update these items in their development environment itself i.e. Visual Studio.