Course Objectives:Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:• Build a project plan and fine-tune the details.• Schedule tasks, assign resources, and manage dependencies.• Monitor progress and costs—and keep your project on track.• Format Gantt charts and other views to communicate project data.• Explore enterprise project management systems
Hands-On TrainingHands-on exercises provide you with practical experience using Microsoft Project and include:• • Customizing the ribbon interface• • Creating project plans, tasks, summary tasks and milestones• • Constructing and changing task dependencies• • Deploying manual and automatic scheduling techniques• • Controlling project, task and resource calendars• • Setting baselines and tracking progress• • Generating basic and dynamic reports
COURSE CONTENTMicrosoft Project: A Comprehensive Hands-On
Introduction to Microsoft Project• Overview of project management terms and standards• Navigating and customizing the ribbon and user interface• Identifying collaboration possibilities with other toolsets
Creating a New Project PlanInitiating a project• Outlining phases, activities and tasks from project goals• Identifying and gathering prerequisites for the project plan• Producing a work breakdown structure(WBS)
Planning essentials• Working through the differences between manual and automatic scheduling• Conceptualizing and identifying the critical path• Analyzing and managing slack in the project plan
Building a project plan• Identifying the relationships between tasks• Estimating and entering task duration• Sequencing and linking tasks• Entering normal tasks, summary tasks, subtasks and milestones• Adjusting the project schedule to target specific dates
Optimizing the project plan• Working with task link types• Implementing lag and lead• Applying deadline dates to the project plan• Setting, locating and removing task constraints
Controlling Your Project PlanCreating and modifying calendars• Identifying types of calendars• Revealing the calendar architecture at project, task and resource levels• Updating existing calendars• Configuring Project to accurately calculate working and nonworking time• Changing default calendar options
Applying calendars to projects, tasks and resources
• Assigning calendars appropriately• Determining updates to your project plan as a result of deploying calendar changes
Sharing project calendars• Saving calendar changes to the global template• Sharing and organizing calendars
Keeping Your Project on TrackPreparing for tracking• Validating the project plan• Establishing the baseline
Tracking task progress• Identifying key steps in the tracking process• Updating the project plan with tracking data• Analyzing variance against the project plan
Troubleshooting schedule problems• Reviewing project task updates for timeline problems• Resolving issues with the project scheduling plan
Managing Project Resources and AssignmentsCreating and assigning resources• Defining work, material and cost resources• Reviewing cost and budget tracking options• Handling work resources and assigning them to tasks• Creating and managing a resource pool
Tracking with resources• Calculating and managing work effort• Tracking resource assignments• Troubleshooting resource assignments• Predicting task behavior• Investigating and resolving resource overallocation
Analyzing Project Data and Preparing ReportsIdentifying communication needs• Defining stakeholder groups• Producing a project communication plan
Creating reports• Examining basic and dynamic report types• Selecting data for output• Designing dashboard indicator reports