Managing Projects with Microsoft® Project

Microsoft® Project is the de facto standard for project management software. Successfully managing projects with this popular tool requires more than just software training; it requires a practical understanding of project management and the ways Project can help you plan, schedule, establish baselines, produce reports and make clear task assignments for a successful project.

You will learn how to navigate Project’s menus and templates to:

• Communicate the project plan clearly and effectively
• Develop realistic schedules
• Correctly track the progress of effort, cost, and schedule
• Model dependencies within and among projects
• Use summary tasks to get accurate, high level views of the project
• “Level” resources within and among projects
• Analyze and apply resource and project calendars correctly
• Integrate information from multiple projects

Seminar Outline

1. Introduction
   • The value of project management software
   • The project lifecycle
   • Buttons / tool bar / general navigation
   • Understanding views
2. Setting up a new project
   • The project calendar
   • Change working time
   • Project statistics
3. Building a work breakdown structure
   • Understanding tasks, summary tasks and milestones
   • Organizing the WBS
   • WBS vs. outlining task outline number
   • Evaluating the WBS
   • WBS templates
4. Establish task relationships
   • Task dependencies: networks and PERT
   • Lag, lead and delay
   • Formatting the network diagram
5. Making work package estimates
   • Duration estimates
   • Effort driven scheduling
   • Effort and task types
6. Creating an initial schedule
   • Critical path analysis
   • Schedule constraints
   • Crashing a schedule
7. Assigning and leveling resources
   • Defining resources
   • Realistic resource planning
   • Resource leveling
8. Managing the Project
   • Tracking field definitions
   • Creating the project baseline
   • The tracking Gantt
   • Entering actual performance data
   • Variance
   • Percent complete
   • Splitting tasks
   • Rescheduling work
9. Formatting output and printing reports
   • Using the Gantt wizard
   • Standard & custom reports
   • Managing multiple projects
   • Integrating multiple projects
   • Consolidating project files
   • Resource pools

This seminar uses Microsoft® Project menus and functions.
Outline © copyright The Versatile Company.