Project Management with Microsoft Project (3 day)

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Course Overview

Project managers must work within tight schedules, manage resources across the organisation and deliver results on time and within budget. Microsoft Project is a powerful tool to help you break a project down into manageable parts, identify potential bottlenecks and keep your project on track. In this course, you learn how to solve typical project and business problems using the planning, controlling and reporting features of Microsoft Project.

Audience

Anyone who needs to use Microsoft Project to plan, manage or control a project. Familiarity with project management terminology such as tasks, resources and critical path is helpful.

Skills Gained

You Will Learn How To:

• Plan, build and manage project schedules and budgets using Microsoft Project Professional
• Build a project plan, enter tasks and develop calendars
• Establish task constraints and deadlines, and create task dependencies
• Forecast and allocate human and material resources
• Track progress, update plans and monitor variances between target and actual project deliverables
• Create dynamic 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 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 calendar
• Configuring Project to accurately calculate working and non-working 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 over-allocations 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

Hands-on Training

Hands-on exercises provide you with practical experience using Microsoft Project and include:

• Customising the user interface
• Creating project plans and templates
• Defining activities, costs, risks and overall project scope
• Assigning resources and resolving over-allocations
• Optimising & fine-tuning project plans to finish on time
• Tracking & recording progress and responding to updates
• Gauging project performance and identifying problems
• Placing tasks and projects back on schedule
• Creating a customised table, view, graphical indicator and crosstab report

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