Project Management with Microsoft Project (3 day)

Scheduled Dates (sort by: location | date)

Course Overview

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, you learn how to solve typical project and business problems using the planning, control and reporting features of Microsoft Project.

Audience

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.

Skills Gained

• Plan, build and manage projects, schedules and budgets using Microsoft Project
• Develop a project plan, add tasks and designate calendars
• Plan for and assign work, as well as material resources
• Track progress, update plans, and monitor variances between target and actual project deliverables
• Create powerful reports and custom views to communicate project information

Course Outline

Introduction

• Overview of project management standards and terms
• The role of Project in the Microsoft Enterprise solution
• Configuring Microsoft Project and customising the user interface

Building a Project Plan from Scratch

Planning activities

• Identifying the goals, assumptions and limitations
• Outlining stages, tasks and milestones
• Analysing 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
• Optimising 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 levelling
• Designing resource calendars

Calculating cost and budgeting

• Analysing cost structures
• Defining task and resource costs
• Monitoring total project costs

Keeping Your Project on Track

Optimising the schedule

• Examining significant scheduling factors
• Selecting task types
• Establishing the critical path
• Finalising 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

Organising and summarising reports

• Sorting and filtering tasks and resources
• Categorising 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
• Examining Project Server
• Setting up Project standards and templates

Project Management with Microsoft Project (3 day) / MPR-PMI3