This one- to two-day, hands-on workshop covers project management basic and intermediate skills and addresses how to develop a project plan and manage execution of the project using the Microsoft Project™ software. This workshop is specifically oriented to product development projects. The workshop illustrates the project management process with an actual project and then reinforces understanding with a series of exercises using MS Project™. The standard exercises can also be adapted to plan the participant’s projects to create more immediate value. The workshop can be be adapted to cover the features available in MS Project 2000™, or MS Project 2003™.
1. Introduction to MS Project™
- Why use MS Project™?
- Screen layout
- Menus and toolbars
- Wizards – the Planning Wizard
- Wizards – use the Gantt Chart Wizard to change the format of your Gantt chart
- Gantt and PERT charts
- The Gantt chart – a time line representation
- The PERT chart – a task flow representation
- MS Project Gantt charts show task flow and timeline simultaneously
- A PERT chart and the equivalent Gantt chart
- A sample project
2. Project Planning Basics with MS Project™
- Creating a project plan and schedule
- Entering summary information
- Outlining your project – defining and entering tasks
- Enter task start/finish dates
- Display formatting – time scale and grids
- Entering task durations
- Establishing task relationships – linking tasks with predecessor relationships
- Viewing link details
- Adding a new task – scenario walk-through
- Modifying links – scenario walk-through
- Moving tasks – scenario walk-through
- Deleting tasks and un-doing deleted tasks
- Entering project milestones Customizing task information in the Gantt chart
- Creating a summary task and summary views
- Exercise 1: Creating the basic project plan – tasks, task durations, predecessor relationships, and assigning resources
- Printing and reporting
- Printing charts
- Adjust the divider
- Reduce the bar height
- Add headers, footers and legends
- Print preview
- Adjust the time scale to fit
- Inserting page breaks
- Print the chart
3. Project Resources and Costing with MS Project™
- Working with resources
- Entering and assigning resources
- Changing working time
- Managing resource workloads
- Applying filters and sorting
- Centralized resource assignment and analysis using resource pools
- Identifying the critical path
- Developing a project budget
- Entering or modifying resource costs
- Entering fixed costs
- Reporting the project budget
- Exercise 2: Develop the resource plan and cost estimates
4. Monitoring and Reporting Project Progress
- Sharing the project plan
- Tracking and updating project progress
- Capturing project time and costs
- Reporting project schedule and budget status
- Responding to project problems
- Exercise 3: Updating project status