Introduction

• Overview of project management standards and terms
• The role of Project in the Microsoft Enterprise solution
• Configuring Microsoft Project for local use and the enterprise
• Customising options and the user interface

Building a Project Plan from Scratch

Planning activities

• Standardising and documenting the project plan, charter and network diagram
• Outlining project phases, activities, tasks and milestones
• Analysing a project with work breakdown structures

Creating your plan in Microsoft Project

• Scheduling a project based on the start or finish date
• Reproducing the WBS in Project
• Entering normal tasks, summary tasks and subtasks
• Placing tasks in sequential order
• Calculating task durations
• Creating accurate project schedules

Designating calendars

• Investigating Project's three default calendars
• Creating and customising project, task and resource calendars
• Configuring Project to accurately calculate working and nonworking time
• Creating and sharing organisation-wide project calendars

Scheduling project tasks

• Establishing dependencies and relationships between tasks
• Linking and interrelating tasks
• Optimising the schedule using lead and lag times
• Constraining tasks to target specific dates
• Defining milestones and setting deadlines
• Selecting the most appropriate task types

Creating and Assigning Resources

Assigning human and material resources to tasks

• Establishing resource needs
• Creating work and material resources
• Producing local and shared resource pools
• Sharing resources throughout the organisation

Managing resources

• Reviewing assignments and workloads
• Distributing project work evenly
• Eliminating resource overallocations with levelling
• Designing resource calendars

Calculating cost and budgeting

• Defining task and resource costs
• Managing arbitrary project costs by assigning multiple cost resources to tasks
• Monitoring total project costs

Keeping Your Project on Track

Optimising the schedule

• Examining significant scheduling factors
• Establishing the critical path
• Refining and finalising the project plan

Updating a project and recording progress

• Creating primary and multiple baselines and interim plans
• Initiating Microsoft Project plans and incorporating actual progress
• Identifying factors affecting task schedules using tasks drivers
• Implementing change highlighting to show the impact to a project plan
• Manipulating and rescheduling tasks
• Comparing baseline (budgeted) costs and actual costs
• Monitoring resource progress and balancing workloads
• Completing and archiving project plans

Communicating and Reporting Project Data

Organising and summarising reports

• Sorting and filtering tasks and resources
• Categorising information with groups
• Highlighting specific data with cell shading

Distributing project information

• Displaying complex data with custom views
• Creating visual reports for display and analysis using Microsoft Excel and Visio
• Generating dynamic reports using active project data
• Publishing project data to a Web site
• Integrating Microsoft Project with other applications