This course will allow you to pick up Microsoft Project as a new user and progress through the course in a similar fashion to developing a project schedule. At the end of the course you will be ready to create and manage your own project in Microsoft Project. My goal is to provide you with the knowledge, and a few tips and hints to make you a productive user of Microsoft Project to ensure that you are ready to develop a realistic schedule and then keep it current. Completing this course is a big step towards being a successful project manager and I believe that you are now equipped with the knowledge to do that.
This video is focused on understanding how to interact with the Project interface and how views and time phased data can help manage the complexities of a project schedule.
An in-depth review of the Ribbons in Microsoft is shown and tips and hints are provided to teach how to quickly adapt to the way the functionality is distributed across the eight ribbons.
Options required to configure MSP to create and manage projects based on individual requirements are shown. Microsoft Project is a powerful but configurable tool, so it is important that it is configured appropriately. Each of the seven core pages of settings will be reviewed to ensure an understanding how MSP functions.
Setting the default calendar is critical to ensuring that project schedules are accurate. Out of the shrink wrap, MSP is not aware of local, national and corporate holidays. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the calendar is set to define the work week and all holidays to ensure that the project finish dates are realistic and achievable. ​
Setting the foundational settings by choosing the appropriate template and then defining the start date and calendar help ensure that the new project gets started correctly.
Tasks are the core element of any Microsoft Project Schedule. However, there are many types of tasks: detail tasks, summary tasks, milestones and re-occurring tasks. Understanding how each of these tasks can add value to a project schedule helps ensure a highly functional project. This movie reviews both the types of tasks and how they can be added to a schedule.
This movie explores the six tabs of the Task Information Dialog to ensure that you have a complete understanding of the core data that can be maintained for a task in your project schedule.
Outline levels provide readability, usability and most importantly, reportability to a project schedule. Understanding the principles of, and how to create outline levels is key to creating an effective project schedule. While the summary tasks that define the outline level of your project do not drive or impact the finish date, they allow you to expand and collapse the level of detail presented to make the plan more readable and ensures that you can always present the schedule to management at an appropriate level of detail.
This video reviews the ways that task details can be maintained: task information dialog, view columns, and split view, and provides a number of tips on when each method is most effective. As well, this video provides additional tips on the most effective methods for moving, cutting, pasting and deleting tasks within your schedule.
Task dependencies are critical to ensure the work on the project is completed in the proper order. This video starts with a review of the types of dependencies and then provides an in-depth review of the various ways that dependencies can be added to a project schedule.
Adding deadlines and constraints to a project schedule allows the project timeline to be fully controlled and allows key dates to be defined which are critical to project success.
Microsoft Project defines multiple types of resources: work, material, cost and budget resources. In this video, the characteristics of each are covered to ensure an understanding of when and where each type of resource can be used in the project schedule. ​
This video reviews how to create work resources. Work resources, often defined as human resources, or the project team, typically identify the core of the project resources. Work resources are defined as having limited availability. For example, a human resource is available for project work for only eight hours a day, five days a week. Work resources can also include equipment and facilities, which also have limited availability, but in these instances, it can be 24 hours a day and seven days a week if they can operate unattended. Work resource availability is defined by a calendar which specifies the details about when the resource can complete project tasks.
Non-work resources are defined as having unlimited availability and are further defined as material and cost resources. Material resources have unit costs and are used by the project by the "purchased units". Cost resources allow all other costs to be allocated to the project. Non-work resources do not impact the project schedule, but do impact the project cost and budget. This video reviews how to create non-work resources.
Resources are assigned to project tasks to define the project schedule and allocate costs to the tasks. Work resources, based on their availability, define when the task work can be completed and all resources allocate costs to the project to define the overall project budget. This video reviews the various methods that can be used to assign resources to the tasks and provides tips on which method is most effective depending on the specific project state: creation versus maintenance.
As work resources have limited availability, it is important that the project schedule ​is based on this availability and isn't based on an unrealistic resource load of 16+ hours a day. In this video, we review the functionality available to level resources to ensure that the project schedule is based on a realistic workload.
This video reviews the Team Planner which allows viewing of the task assignments from a resource viewpoint. This allows the understanding of what tasks each team member is working to help better manage assignments and workload.
Although Microsoft Project automatically calculates the project costs by multiplying the resource rates times the usage, most organizations consider these project costs to be different from the budget, as the budget may include contingency or other costs not associated with the tasks and resources. This video explores how the budget can be set and maintained independently of the costs to allow the management of both parts of the project's financials, based on organizational policy.
Setting the baseline is simple as pushing a button in Microsoft Project. But the baseline is an important final step in defining a project schedule as it records the starting or approved point for a project and is used to calculate work, schedule and cost variances during delivery.
Updating the project schedule with actual work completed and any updates to the estimate to complete, by each team member, on a regular basis (typically weekly), is key to ensuring the schedule remains accurate and always reflects the most likely finish date.
While Microsoft Project will automatically mark tasks as complete when the remaining work becomes zero, most project managers actively manage the completion of tasks, summaries and specific milestones to ensure that project status is accurate and that there aren't tasks kept open for "just in case" a change is needed.
After tracking actuals and updating remaining work, the project may be behind schedule and require remedial action to bring it back on track. In this video, we review a number of techniques that can be used to bring a project back on schedule, including a specific tip for viewing and updating the tasks on the critical path. ​
With the recognition that change is inevitable, even on the most well managed projects, this video explores how we can introduce changes into our projects, obtain approval for the new work and then update project baselines, to preserve existing variance while adding the new approved work to the baseline.
This video continues the review of how to effectively manage the details of the project schedule, and focuses on sorting and grouping to allow, for example a focus on the longest tasks by sorting the task by duration. A specific tip for sorting without displaying summary tasks is reviewed to allow sorting of the entire project without being constrained by the summary tasks. ​
This video concludes our review of techniques to allow yu to management of the project details, providing a review of other commands on the Format ribbon, specifically focusing on viewing and understanding the Critical Path.
The Timeline is a very powerful communications tool used to select the specific components of a detailed project schedule. Typically, these are summary tasks and key milestones which create a visual overview to keep project stakeholders informed at a level of detail appropriate to their roles in the project.
Microsoft Project has a wide range of built-in dashboards and reports allow communication of project status to the stakeholders. In this video, we review the range of reports available, as well as provide an overview of how to easily "tweak" the built-on reports to address specific organizational or project reporting requirements.
This video continues the exploration of the reporting functionality available in Microsoft Project and reviews the steps required to create a new report from scratch. It reviews the types of reports, report components and control of the data displayed to ensure the reports address specific requirements, both in terms of presentation and data reported/summarized. ​
While Printing is really as easy as "File/Print", this video provides some tips and hints to make printed reports work for by configuring the printout to print all, and only the information required.
While most tasks in a project schedule are discrete tasks focused on completing a specific project deliverable, there is often a requirement to have support tasks to cover overhead details such as producing status reports and attending weekly team meetings. In this video, we review how to create long running, but small effort tasks, as well as re-occurring tasks that can be used for these overhead details.
This video does a deep dive into the Task Information Dialog and reviews the remaining fields, such as Priority, WBS Codes, Earned Value, that have not been discussed already in this series.
This video reviews how to configure Microsoft Project to calculate Earned Value based on the organization​'s requirements and then demonstrates how to view the earned value information.
Custom fields can be added to Microsoft Project to store, calculate and display additional information not available with the built-in fields. Custom fields can have lookup tables to control the data stores, apply formulas and display results using graphical indicators, such as red/yellow/green traffic lights to report on the "health" of the project.
The Global Template allows control of which customization, fields, table, views, etc., should be specific to a single project and which are universal and should be available for any project managed.
Data can be imported or exported from Microsoft Project to other tools using a wide variety of formats such as XLS, CSV, XML, etc. This video will review the wizard which will go through each step of creating the mapping to determine how the external data maps to specific Project fields.
Master projects allow the combination of individual projects (sub-projects) into a single master project. This is often done to allow individual project manager to manage schedules in parallel, which still allows all the projects to be combined for overall management and reporting. Master projects can also be used to create resource pools and level resource allocations across multiple projects.
This video provides an overview of how Microsoft Project can be deployed in an enterprise using an additional product project from Microsoft called Project Server (for on premises installs) or Project Online (for cloud deployments).