Microsoft Project The Missing Manual [Book]

Looking for:

Free Microsoft Project Training Course (9 Best Tutorials) - Project Online Quick Start Guides 

Click here to DOWNLOAD

     

MS Project - Quick Guide.MS Project - Quick Guide

 

The discussion forums tend to be very active, which make them a great resource for finding others who may have worked through similar issues, or encountered the same situation. Table of contents. Project Online Quick Start. Project Online Quick Start Article. Next: Project for the web Quick start. Table of contents Project Online Quick Start. Project training. Get Started. Project Online. Project Online More Need more help? Expand your skills. Get new features first. Was this information helpful?

Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Resolved my issue. Clear instructions. This date is now scheduled as a non-working day for the project. You can also verify the changed color indicated in the calendar within the dialog box as below. Click Ok to close. Just like you can change a Standard Base Calendar , you can change the work and non-working time for each resource.

You can modify the resource calendar to accommodate flex-time, vacation time, training time, etc. Also remember, Resource Calendar can only be applied to work resources and not to material and cost resources.

By default when we create the resources in a plan, the resource calendar matches the Standard base calendar. And any changes you make to the Project Calendar, gets reflected automatically in resource calendars, except when you create an exception in the resource calendar.

In that case even if you update the project calendar, the exception in resource calendar is not affected. You can record some top level information for your. Click File Tab. Under Info Tab go to Project Information.

Click arrow near Project Information to click Advanced Properties. A dialog box opens, you can type in the changes as required. WBS identifies the deliverable at the lowest level as work package.

So a task is action-oriented, and the work package is the deliverable or a result of one or more tasks being performed. There is a significant amount of confusion between what constitutes an activity and what constitutes a task within the project management community. But for MS Project, a task is the effort and action required to produce a particular project deliverable. This is simple. Enter the task name.

In the following screen, we have entered 5 different tasks. A duration of the task is the estimated amount of time it will take to complete a task. As a project manager you can estimate a task duration using expert judgment, historical information, analogous estimates or parametric estimates. You can enter task duration in terms of different dimensional units of time, namely minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months.

You can use abbreviations for simplicity and ease as shown in the following table. Remember, Project default values depend on your work hours. So 1 day is not equivalent to 24 hours but has 8 hours of work for the day.

Of course, you can change these defaults anytime you want. One of the neat tricks MS Project possesses is, it considers duration of the task in workday sense. So if you have a non-working day in between, it accommodates this and ensures a task that takes 16 hours to complete to end on the 3rd day.

In other words, if you have a task that needs 16 hours to complete starting on Monday AM if this is the time your work day starts, and 8 hours being total work hours in a day , and Tuesday being a holiday, the task will logically end on the evening of Wednesday. This is simple in Gantt Chart View, click the cell below Duration column heading. Enter the duration. Task 1 in the following screenshot.

Task 2 in the following screenshot. Task 3 and Task 4 in the following screenshot. So essentially, one would believe that with these 3 days Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the duration calculated would be 3 days. But MS Project calculates it as 4 days. So one needs to be careful when choosing the start date of the task.

Because for any successive operation, MS Project considers that Task 6 will take 4 days. The next time, you change the start date, the Finish date changes to reflect this 4-day duration. Elapsed Duration is the time that elapses while some event is occurring which does not require any resources.

Elapsed duration for a task can be used in instances where a task will go on round-the-clock without any stoppage. A normal workday has 8 hours, and an elapsed day duration will have 24 hours.

The task also continues over non-working holidays and vacations and working days. So 1ew is seven hour days. And it takes 4 days for this to happen. It does not need a resource or a work effort, and all you are doing is waiting for it to dry. You can use 4ed as the time duration, which signifies 4 elapsed days, the paint can dry regardless of whether it is a weekend or if it falls on a holiday.

Here in this example, the drying occurs over 24 hours over the weekend. In Project Management, Milestones are specific points in a project timeline. They are used as major progress points to manage project success and stakeholder expectations. They are primarily used for review, inputs and budgets. Mathematically, a milestone is a task of zero duration. And they can be put where there is a logical conclusion of a phase of work, or at deadlines imposed by the project plan.

In Method 2, a task was converted to a Milestone of Zero duration. But one can also convert a task of non-zero duration into a Milestone. This is rarely used and causes confusion.

There can be a huge number of tasks in a project schedule, it is therefore a good idea to have a bunch of related tasks rolled up into a Summary Task to help you organize the plan in a better way. It helps you organize your plan into phases. In MS Project , you can have several number of sub-tasks under any higher level task. These higher level tasks are called Summary Task. At an even higher level, they are called Phases.

Remember because summary task is not a separate task entity but a phase of the project with several sub-tasks in it, the duration of the summary task is from the start of the first sub-task to the finish of the last sub-task. This will be automatically calculated by MS Project.

Of course, you can enter a manual duration of the summary task as well which could be different from the automatically calculated duration. MS Project will keep track of both but this can cause significant confusion. In most cases, you should ensure that there is no manually entered duration for any task you will be using as a Summary Task. Let us use the following screenshot as an example. If you would like to group Task 4 and Task 5 into a Summary Task 1.

You can do it in two ways. You can rename the Task. Here it is renamed as Summary Task 1. Once you have a list of tasks ready to accomplish your project objectives, you need to link them with their task relationships called dependencies.

For example, Task 2 can start once Task 1 has finished. These dependencies are called Links. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK Guide does not define the term dependency, but refers to it as a logical relationship, which in turn is defined as a dependency between two activities, or between an activity and a milestone.

In MS Project, the first task is called a predecessor because it precedes tasks that depend on it. The following task is called the successor because it succeeds, or follows tasks on which it is dependent.

Any task can be a predecessor for one or more successor tasks. Likewise, any task can be a successor to one or more predecessor tasks. Most used. One does not have to finish collecting survey response before starting the tabulation.

Select the two tasks you want to link. In the following screenshot taken as an example, we have selected names, Task 1 and Task 2. In this method, you will select a group of task, and link them all with Finish-to-Start relationship.

All tasks get linked. To select non-adjacent tasks, hold down Ctrl key and select each task separately. If you are in Manually Scheduled mode, any change in duration of the predecessor task will not reflect on Start date of Task 4. Now when we change the Duration of Task 3 from 5 to 7 days, the start date is not automatically updated for Task 4 in Manual Scheduling. MS Project by default sets new tasks to be manually scheduled. Scheduling is controlled in two ways.

It calculates values such as task durations, start dates, and finish dates automatically. It takes into accounts all constraints, links and calendars. For example, at Lucerne Publishing, the new book launch plan has been reviewed by the resources who will carry out the work and by other project stakeholders. Although you expect the plan to change somewhat as you learn more about the book launch, you now have enough confidence in the overall plan to switch from manual to automatic task scheduling.

If you want to change the mode for a particular task, say Task 5 in the following example. Click on Task Mode cell in the same row. Then, click the down arrow to open a dropdown box, you can select Auto Scheduled. Toggle the scheduling mode of the plan by clicking the New Tasks status bar at the bottom-left and then selecting Auto scheduling mode.

Go to File tab and click Options. In project management terminology, resources are required to carry out the project tasks. They can be people, equipment, facilities, funding, or anything except labor required for the completion of a project task. Optimum Resource Scheduling is the key to successful project management. Travel expenses, food expenses, etc.

For example, paint being used while painting a wall. People resources will have limited work hours, say 6, 8 or 12 hours. Equipment resources have different working capacities of 2, 8 or 24 hours and could have maintenance breaks as well. Also note, that it is possible multiple people resources might be using one equipment resource, or one equipment might be accomplishing multiple tasks.

Max Units field represents the maximum capacity of a resource to work on assigned tasks. The resource is available full-time on each workday. If a resource does not represent an individual person but a job function, where a group of people with the same skill set can work on the task, we can enter larger Max Units to represent the number of people in the group.

Units would mean you expect the resource capacity to be lower than a full-time resource. You can enter standard rates and costs per use for work and material resources. You can also enter overtime rates for work resources. Standard rates are calculated on per hour basis. Costs per use on the other hand are costs that do not vary with task.

Cost per use is a set fee used up to complete a task. Like paint being used while painting a wall. People resources will have limited work hours say 6, 8 or 12 hours. Equipment resources can have different working capacities of 2, 8 or 24 hours and could have maintenance breaks as well. Also note that it is possible multiple people resources might be using one equipment resource, or one equipment might be accomplishing multiple tasks.

Cost resources do not use pay rates. Remember cost per use and cost resources are two different things. Cost resources are financial cost associated with a task, like travel expenses, food expenses, etc. The cost value of cost resource is only assigned when you assign cost resource to a task.

You can then see the cost per resource and cost per task as well as costs rolled up to summary tasks and the entire plan. MS Project will not automatically apply overtime calculations. In the following example, the resource Rasmus is left at zero. Hovering over it will make the note appear.

You can use a cost resource to represent a financial cost associated with a task in a plan. Examples of cost resources are travel, food, entertainment and training. So it is obvious that cost resources do no work on a task and do not affect scheduling of a task. Once the task and resource list are complete, resources need to be assigned to tasks in order to work on them.

With MS Project you can track task progress, resource and tasks costs. After assigning resources to tasks you can view the cost, duration and work required for the plan to complete. In the Gantt Chart view, you can also look at the project summary task, to note the duration, start and finish dates of the plan. In the following example, Assign Resources is the project summary task identified as Task 0. Cost for each task gets rolled up into summary tasks, and then ultimately to project summary task.

Once your project plan is ready in MS Project, it becomes essential for a project manager to measure the actuals in terms of work completed, resources used and costs incurred and to revise and change information about tasks and resources due to any changes to the plans.

A Project Manager should not assume that everything is progressing according to plan and should always keep track of each task. Resistance to formal tracking of project management data is normal. You can overcome resistance to tracking by explaining your expectations, explaining the benefits of tracking, and training people to track the task themselves. To evaluate project performance you need to create a baseline against which you will compare the progress.

One needs to save the baseline, once a plan is fully developed. Of course, due to rolling wave planning or progressive elaboration needed to manage projects one can always add new tasks, resources, constraints and costs to the plan. Also note, it makes sense to save the baseline before entering any actual values such as percentage of task completion. These multiple baselines seem contrary to the definition of baseline.

You are preparing for a risk event. You want to develop separate baseline plans for risk response and recovery. You are accommodating a big change request, you might still want to keep the original plan for future reference when communicating with a stakeholder.

As time and work progresses on a project, you might need to change the baseline as well. This does not affect the baseline values for other tasks or resource baseline values in the plan. You can save up to 11 baselines in a single plan. The first one is called Baseline, and the rest are Baseline 1 through Baseline It can be used as a project marker. It is visually easy to see how off-track or on-track the project progress is. Because it only specifies dates, it is simple, clear and easy information.

If all tasks have started and are finished as scheduled, you can record this in the Update Project dialog box. But sometimes this approach might be fine when the actual work and cost values generated are close enough to your baseline schedule. Check marks will appear in the indicators column for tasks that have been completed.

On the right in the Chart portion, progress bars are generated in the Gantt bars of each task.