In some cases, rollup reporting can have it’s issues especially when dealing with resource assignments and cost rollup reporting for metrics such as Earned Value.

When a Project starts it’s planning process, the Work Breakdown Structure is defined. Many users prefer to use the “indentation” method to give the plan a structure and to allow rollup reporting. But what if you want to perform different roll ups? MS Project allows you to define outline codes to achieve this.

Navigate to Tools > Customize > Customize Fields and click on the “Custom Outline Code” tab. This allows you to create a new Outline Code:

Clicking on the “Define Code Mask” field allows users to define the code structure. Here we have defined a code structure with the first level being “any length” of characters and the second level only 2 numbers. This provides consistency:

You then edit the lookup table and define the codes that are allowed to be selected within a Gantt chart. Here we have defined a Work Breakdown Structure for the “My House” project:

We then insert the new Outline Code into the Gantt View and allocate the Code to each activity. Note that we are not assigning the code to any “summary” activities. This is because we want the child activities to rollup into the code structure not any parent summary tasks, thus ensuring that the rollup reports reflect the activities themselves.

We then create a Group (under Project > Group By) to allow the Gantt View to group all the activities by their code. For each level we are colouring the group band as a yellow. We can change this colour but more importantly, we can group by the Outline Code we created and then group by another field:

The end result shows each activity rolled up into it’s own outline code: