Microsoft Project

A two-day course that helps participants understand how project-management software fits into the overall project-management process, with practical, hands-on techniques for planning, tracking and reporting in Microsoft Project.

What we cover

• MS Project overview and setup The environment, views, working with a project, creating tables and views, sharing custom tools with the Organizer, and defaults for optimum performance.
• Creating a new project Properties, standard calendar work hours, non-working days.
• Plan input Task names, durations, predecessors and successors, resources and fixed costs, formatting the critical path.
• Constraints, dependencies and calendars Task constraints, dependency types, task calendars.
• Resources and costs Adding resources, resource costs, cost rate tables, task costs.
• Formatting the plan Summary tasks, hyperlinks and objects, Gantt bars, text boxes, custom ribbons, custom tables and single or combination views.
• Locating and resolving over-allocations Automatic and manual resolution, and setting a baseline.
• Tracking project progress Tracking tools, updating remaining schedule, splitting tasks, baseline versus actual, status dates.
• Filtering, reports and printing Highlight, AutoFilter, interactive and custom filters; customizing predefined reports, visual reports, headers, footers and legends; printing Gantt, PERT and other views.
• Multiple projects and resource pools Consolidating projects, linking tasks across projects, working with resource pools.
• Additional features Sorting and grouping views, importing and exporting, rollup task bars, recording macros, custom WBS codes.

What you will leave able to do

• Input your plan flawlessly, including tasks, dependencies and resources
• Create resource calendars, and find and resolve resource over-allocations
• Customize tables and views to present project data on screen and in print
• Add and track costs for resources and tasks, and print cash-flow forecasts and reports
• Track every aspect of your project, from task duration to costs, and print re-projections
• Work with multiple projects, linking tasks and sharing resources between them

Every session is customized to your organization's needs. The final agenda is confirmed with your facilitator before delivery.