Microsoft Project
(24 Hours)
Series: Project Management
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In addition to delivering projects on schedule and within budget, today's project teams must cope with rapidly changing environments. Microsoft Project is a powerful tool to help you break a project down into manageable parts, identify potential bottlenecks and generate information to keep your project under control.
In this course, participants will learn how to solve typical project and business problems using the planning, control and reporting features of Microsoft Project.
This course is valuable for everyone using Microsoft Project to plan, manage and control a project. Familiarity with project terminology such as tasks, resources and critical path is helpful.
For professionals who want a good overall understanding of the application of project management methodology using MS Project to manage projects, see our PMI Methodology Integration with Microsoft Project 2007 course
Extensive hands-on exercises provide you with practical experience using Microsoft Project, including:
- Customizing the user interface
- Creating project plans and templates
- Defining activities, costs, risks and overall project scope
- Assigning resources and resolving conflicts and over-allocations
- Optimizing and fine-tuning project plans to finish on time
- Tracking and recording project progress and responding to updates
- Gauging project performance and identifying trends and problem areas
- Placing tasks and projects back on schedule
- Creating a customized table, view, graphical indicator and crosstab report
All books and materials are included.
Introduction
- Overview of project management standards and terms
- The role of Project in the Microsoft Enterprise solution
- Configuring Microsoft Project and customizing the user interface
Building a project plan
- Planning activities
- Identifying the goals, assumptions and limitations
- Outlining stages, tasks and milestones
- Analyzing a project with work breakdown structures
- Creating your plan in Microsoft Project
- Reproducing the WBS in Project
- Placing tasks in sequential order
- Calculating task durations
- Designating calendars
- Scheduling a project based on the start or finish date
- Working with default calendars
- Scheduling project tasks
- Establishing relationships between tasks
- Linking and interrelating tasks
- Optimizing the schedule using lead and lag times
- Constraining tasks to target specific dates
- Defining milestones and setting deadlines
Creating and assigning resources
- Assigning staff and material resources to tasks
- Establishing resource needs
- Producing a resource list
- Managing resources
- Reviewing assignments and workloads
- Eliminating resource over-allocations with leveling
- Designing resource calendars
- Calculating cost and budgeting
- Analyzing cost structures
- Defining task and resource costs
- Monitoring total project costs
Keeping your project on track
- Optimizing the schedule
- Examining significant scheduling factors
- Selecting task types
- Establishing the critical path
- Finalizing the project plan
- Updating a project and recording progress
- Setting the baseline
- Incorporating actual progress
- Identifying existing and potential schedule problems
- Manipulating and rescheduling tasks
- Monitoring resource progress and balancing workloads
Communicating and reporting project data
- Organizing and summarizing reports
- Sorting and filtering tasks and resources
- Categorizing information with groups
- Distributing project information
- Displaying complex data with custom views
- Setting up and printing views and reports
- Publishing project data to a Web site
- Integrating Microsoft Project with other applications
Moving beyond the basics
- Managing multiple projects
- Linking and consolidating projects and subprojects
- Sharing resources between projects
- Setting up Project standards and templates