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Microsoft Project The Missing Manual by Bonnie Biafore - PDF Drive.
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Start with a project management primer. Discover what it takes to handle a project successfully. Build and refine your plan. Put together your team, schedule, and budget. Achieve the results you want. Build realistic schedules with Project, and learn how to keep costs under control. Track your progress. Measure your performance, make course corrections, and manage changes. Create attractive reports. Communicate clearly to stakeholders and team members using charts, tables, and dashboards.
Show and hide more. Table of contents Product information. Project Management: The Missing Manual 1. What Is Project Management? Why Manage Projects? Projects in Action Project Power Tools This would relate to the cost of the project. This might affect the scope, cost and time constraints of your project. Strictly speaking, from the perspective of Project Management Methodology, a Plan and Schedule are not the same.
A plan is a detailed action-oriented, experience and knowledge-based exercise which considers all elements of strategy, scope, cost, time, resources, quality and risk for the project. Scheduling is the science of using mathematical calculations and logic to generate time- effective sequence of task considering any resource and cost constraints. Schedule is part of the Plan. Of course the schedule is linked with resources, budgets and dependencies. This is because of two reasons.
One, MS Project does more than just create a schedule it can establish dependencies among tasks, it can create constraints, it can resolve resource conflicts, and it can also help in reviewing cost and schedule performance over the duration of the project. So it does help in more than just creating a Schedule. This it makes sense for Microsoft to market MS Project as a Plan Creator rather than over-simplifying it as just a schedule creator.
Two, it is due to limitation of generally accepted form of English language, where a schedule can be both in a noun as well as verb form. As a noun, a Schedule is like a time table or a series of things to be done or of events to occur at or during a particular time or period.
And in the verb form, schedule is to plan for a certain date. The distinction is important for you as a project manager, but as far as MS project is concerned the noun form of Schedule is a Plan. Of course, a project manager should also be able to answer other project-related questions as well. Here you have options to open a new plan, some other plans, and even a new plan template. Click the Blank Project Tab.
The following screen pops up. Toolbar controls have heterogeneous sizes and are classified in visually distinguishable Groups. Groups are collections of related commands. Each tab is divided into multiple groups. Each tab contains several commands.
If you point at a command you will see a description in a tooltip. Active view is the one you can see in the main window at a given point in time.
The View label just tells you about the view you are using currently. Project can display a single view or multiple views in separate panes. Because once you enter one of the two, and other project tasks, constraints and dependencies, MS Project will calculate the other date.
It is always a good practice to use a start date even if you know the deadline for the project. In the list of available templates, click Blank Project. A dialog box appears. Click OK to accept the start date. Click the arrow on the Current Date dropdown box. A list appears containing three base calendars.
Now let us add exceptions. Step 3: Adding Exceptions to Calendar Exceptions are used to modify a Project calendar to have a non-standard workday or a non-working day. You can also allot unique working hours for a particular resource as well.
Here is an example to create a non-working day, which could be because of a holiday or office celebrations or events other than the standard office work effort. Change Working Time dialog box appears. 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.
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. Select the resource for whom you want to create an exception.
In example below I have chosen John. The Change Working Time dialog box appears. In the following screen you can see we have chosen John. Double-click the [default] cell below the Name column heading. We have chosen Tuesday and Wednesday. Click Set day s to these specific working times. Change the time.
Select the resource for whom you want to change work schedule. We have chosen John again. Click OK to close the Dialog box. You will now see all Fridays are greyed out in the calendar. You can record some top level information for your. 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. Enter the task name. In the following screen, we have entered 5 different tasks. Enter Duration 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. 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.
You can apply this to all projects or a specific project that you are working on currently. One of the neat tricks MS Project possesses is, it considers duration of the task in work- day 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.
Enter the duration. Task 1 in the following screenshot You can also enter Start and Finish date and MS Project will calculate the duration on its own. Task 3 and Task 4 in the following screenshot Note: In the above screenshot, Task 6 is scheduled to start on Sunday, which is a non- working day and ends on Wednesday.
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 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. 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. There are two ways you can insert a milestone. You can see the milestone appear with a rhombus symbol in the Gantt Chart View on the right. MS Project converts it to a Milestone.
But one can also convert a task of non-zero duration into a Milestone. This is rarely used and causes confusion.
Double-click a particular Task name. Task Information dialog box opens. Create Summary Task 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. If you would like to group Task 4 and Task 5 into a Summary Task 1. You can do it in two ways. Method 1 Select the names of Task 4 and Task 5. Rename it to Summary Task 1.
Method 2 You can click Task 4 row. You can rename the Task. Here it is renamed as Summary Task 1. Now select Task 4 and Task 5. 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. There are only four types of task dependencies, here we present them with examples. Most used. One does not have to finish collecting survey response before starting the tabulation. Least used. Method 1 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.
Task 1 and Task 2 are linked with a Finish-to-Start relationship. A drop down box appears with all Tasks defined in the project. Choose the predecessor task. Click OK. Here I have chosen Task 3. All tasks get linked. To select non-adjacent tasks, hold down Ctrl key and select each task separately. Respect Links If you are in Manually Scheduled mode, any change in duration of the predecessor task will not reflect on Start date of Task 4. Scheduling is controlled in two ways.
Manual Scheduling: This is done to quickly capture some details without actually scheduling the tasks. 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.
Converting Task to Automatic Schedule We have three different methods to convert a task to automatic schedule. Method 1 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. Method 3 To switch completely to Auto Schedule mode: 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.
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. Note: Be aware of the crucial difference between People and Equipment resources.
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. Enter Work Resource Names You can enter resource names according to your convenience. Click the cell directly below the Resource Name heading column. Enter Resources as an individual person, job function or group.
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. Click the Max. Units field for the Engineers resource. Press Enter. Units would mean you expect the resource capacity to be lower than a full-time resource. Click the cell directly below Resource Name heading column. Enter Resource as an individual or job function.
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. There are three types of resources: work, material, and cost. 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.
MS Project will not automatically apply overtime calculations. Click the cell directly below Resource Name heading column to create Resources. Click the Std. Rate field for each resource to costs in hourly default , daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rates.
In the following example, the resource Rasmus is left at zero. Click the Ovt. Rate field to enter overtime rates.
