Planning a project or program should be aligned with the defined process. After instantiating a process and tailoring it to the requirements of a project or program, the process data can be exported to planning tools like MS Project. For maximum flexibility, Stages can export the process data via a report to Excel, which can be directly imported into MS Project and similar planning tools.

Data from Excel can be directly imported into MS Project. The information which column holds which attribute can be stored in a MS Project import scheme. You can either create this yourself (see below in Run the MS Project import) or install a pre-defined scheme.

To install the pre-defined scheme into your global MS Project preferences, follow these steps:

• Download a template MS Project plan that contains the scheme
• Open this plan in MS Project
• Go to File > Organizer
• Go to the Schemes tab
• Select the “Import from Stages” scheme on the right side of the screen
• Click on “< < Copy”

Navigate to the workspace and process version you would like to export.

The process data can be exported via the Project Planning report found here. In a typical Stages instance, this report is already installed as Reports > Exports > Project Planning.

Select the processes you would like to export via the Processes to export parameter. You can select multiple processes by holding the CTRL or SHIFT keys during the selection.

MS Project currently only supports importing one predecessor per task. As activities in Stages might have multiple predecessors, the import of those will result in an import error (which can also be simply ignored). With the Use only last predecessor option, you can control if all predecessors should be exported or only the last one.

Then run the report.

Export the report results to MS Excel via the XLSX Export menu.

Open MS Project and select “New from Excel Sheet”. Switch from the “XML Format” to the “Excel Sheet” filter select the file you generated with the Stages report.

Select either “Use Existing Scheme” if you have set up the import scheme (see above) or “New Scheme” if you want to do the attribute mapping yourself.

Select “Tasks” and “Import with titles” in the import assistant “schema options” page.

Check the import preview.

Save the import scheme.

Ignore import errors and click “Yes” to ignore all of them. They show up if your activities have multiple predecessors.

Your imported process will show up in MS Project.

This procedure has been successfully tested with

• Microsoft Project 2016

The concept of exporting data to Excel and importing it should be rather portable. Please let us know when you were able to make it work also with other versions or tools, then we will add those to this list.