Microsoft Project

1. Microsoft Project Minder Chen, Ph.D. CSU Channel Islands Minder.chen@csuci.edu

2. Project Management Tool • Track all of the information you gather about the work (tasks), task duration, and resource requirements for your project. • Visualize your project plan in standard, well-defined formats. • Schedule tasks and resources consistently and effectively. • Exchange project information with stakeholders over networks and the Internet using standard file formats. • Communicate with resources and other stakeholders while leaving ultimate control in the hands of the project manager.

3. Gantt with Timeline View • This is the default view. • http://examples.oreilly.com/9780735626959-files/ Practice File

4. Timeline View • Seeing the Big Picture of the project plan. • Zoom: Zoom in or out / Changing the Timescale

5. Resource Sheet

6. Resource Usage

7. Task View and Task Details

8. Key Questions Regarding A Project • With a good project management system in place, you should be able to answer such questions as: • What tasks must be performed, and in what order, to produce the deliverable of the project? • When should each task be performed, and what is the final deadline? • Who will complete these tasks? • How much will it cost? • What if some tasks are not completed as scheduled? • What’s the best way to communicate project details to those who have an interest in the project?

9. Project Basics • A project is a temporaryendeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. (PMBOK) • Temporary endeavor  Every project has an end date • A project is an endeavor. Resources, such as people and equipment, need to do work. The endeavor is undertaken by a team or an organization, and therefore projects have a sense of being intentional, planned events.  Tasks & Resources • Every project creates a unique product or service. This is the deliverable for the project and the reason that the project was undertaken. • When the Great Pyramids at Giza in Egypt were built, somebody somewhere was tracking resources, schedules, and specifications in some fashion.

10. Time, Cost, and Scope: Managing Project Constraints • Project management gets most interesting when you must balance the Project Triangle: time, cost, and scope constraints of your projects. • The project triangle illustrates the process of balancing constraints because the three sides of the triangle are connected, and changing one side of a triangle affects at least one other side.

11. Trade-off: Impacts of Shorten Schedule

12. Impacts of Cost Cutting • As a project manager, you must consider (or, more likely, communicate to the decision makers) the benefits versus the risks of reducing costs.

13. Impacts of Increased Scope

14. Project Management Skills • Many projects, even with rigorous project management oversight, are delivered late, over budget, and with far less than expected scope. • Success in project management requires a rare mix of skills and knowledge in project management practices and tools, as well as in the domain or industry in which a project is executed.

15. Gantt Chart • The Gantt with Timeline view is the default; the Gantt Chart is probably the best-known view in Project, and the Gantt chart is the best-known concept in project management as a whole.

17. Task Ribbon • The Task tab provides buttons for adding, formatting, and working with tasks. From the Schedule group, you can mark the percentage complete, link tasks to one another, and inactivate a task. You can also convert manually scheduled tasks into automatically scheduled tasks from the Tasks group.

18. Use the Project tab to handle advanced project functions involving properties, scheduling, and reporting. For example, you can add custom fields, define WBS codes, insert subprojects, and generate visual reports from the Project tab.

19. View Tab • The View tab is a one-stop shop for selecting the various views available in Project 2010 and for customizing your current view. It is also where you can add a timeline to your view.

20. Format Tab • The Format tab buttons help you customize the text, columns, colors, and other elements of each type of view. The groups and buttons in the Format tab are completely different for each type of view. They change automatically when you change the view.

21. Task Tab

22. Resource tab • The buttons on the Resource tab help you with the often-complex business of managing the resources who do the work on your project. From this tab, you can add resources, assign them to tasks, and level resources that are overallocated. You can also launch the powerful team planner from this tab.

26. Meta Model for Projects Has task relationship (FS, FF, SS, SF) Task Name Work Duration Assignment Units Start Finish Schedule mode Predecessor tasks (Lag time) Resources Milestone (Y/N) Summary task[Phase](Y/N) Calendar Resource Name Type Costs Working Time Assigned to

27. Task Information

28. Project Management Tools • Track all the information you gather about the work, duration, and resource requirements for your project. • Visualize your project plan in standard, well-defined formats. • Schedule tasks and resources consistently and effectively. • Exchange project information with stakeholders in a variety of ways. • Communicate with resources and other stakeholders while leaving ultimate control in the hands of the project manager.

29. Creating a Task List • Create a new task and enter task names. • Estimate and record how long each task should last. • Create a milestone to track an important event. • Organize tasks into phases (Summary Tasks). • Create task relationships by linking tasks. • Switch task scheduling from manual to automatic. • Set nonworking days for the project plan. • Check the project plan’s overall duration. • Record task details in notes and insert a hyperlink to content on the Web.

30. New Project Information

31. Defining the Right Tasks for the Deliverable • Every project has an ultimate goal project deliverable. • Defining the right tasks to create the deliverable is an essential skill for a project manager. • Product scope vs. project scope. • Product scope describes the quality, features, and functions of the deliverable of the project. • Project scope describes the work required to deliver such a product or service.

32. Duration’s Unit of Measure

33. Task Duration Estimates • Two general rules when estimating task durations: • Overall project duration often correlates to task duration; long projects tend to have tasks with longer durations than do tasks in short projects. • You should measure task durations at the lowest level of detail or control that is important to you, but no lower. • Good sources of task duration estimates include: • Historical information from previous, similar projects • Estimates from the people who will complete the tasks • The expert judgment of people who have managed similar projects • The standards of professional or industrial organizations that carry out projects similar to yours

34. Task Duration • Because inaccurate task duration estimates are a major source of risk in any project, making good estimates is well worth the effort expended. • 8/80 rule: This rule suggests that task durations between 8 hours (or one day) and 80 hours (10 working days, or two weeks) are generally sized about right. • Tasks shorter than one day might be too granular, and tasks longer than two weeks might be too long to manage properly.

35. Milestone

36. Phases • In MS Project, phases are represented by summary tasks, and the tasks indented below the summary task are called subtasks. Summary task bar in the Gantt chart

37. Developing Tasks and Phases • Top-down planning identifies major phases or components of the project before filling in the tasks required to complete those phases. Complex projects can have several layers of phases. This approach works from general to specific. • Bottom-up planning identifies as many of the bottom-level detailed tasks as possible before organizing them into logical groups called phases or summary tasks. This approach works from specific to general.

38. Task Relationship  Linking Tasks

39. Link Tasks • Highlight the tasks to be linked and than click the Link icon in the Schedule group under the Task tab.

40. Linking Tasks with Mouse • Point the mouse pointer at the Gantt bar for task x, and then click and drag to the Gantt bar for task y, to link the two tasks. • Double click the link to define the task dependency

41. MS Project requires a numeric time value for every automatically scheduled task’s duration value. BY default “1 day?” (estimated) will be assigned.

42. Project Calendar • The project calendar defines the general working and nonworking time for tasks. Project includes multiple calendars, called base calendars, any one of which serves as the project calendar for a project plan.

43. Elapsed Duration • If needed, you can schedule tasks to occur during working and nonworking time. To do this, assign an elapsed duration to a task. • You enter elapsed duration by preceding the duration abbreviation with an e. • For example, type 3ed to indicate three elapsed days. • You might use an elapsed duration for a task that goes on around the clock rather than just during normal working hours.

44. Timeline View • Project Duration

45. Project Statistics • Project  Project Information  Statistics

46. Task Notes

47. Key Points about Tasks • Essential aspects of tasks in a project plan include their duration and order of occurrence. • Task links, or relationships, cause the start or end of one task to affect the start or end of another task. A common task relationship is a finish-to-start relationship, in which the completion of one task controls the start of another task. • In Project, phases of a schedule are represented as summary tasks. • Tasks can be manually or automatically scheduled. For manually scheduled tasks, you can record whatever information you may have about a task’s duration, start, and finish values. • You use calendars in Project to control when work can be scheduled to occur. • You can document additional details using task notes and create hyperlinks to the Web.

48. Resources • Set up basic resource information for the people who work on projects. • Adjust the maximum capacity of a resource to do work. • Set up cost information for work resources. • Change a resource’s availability for work. • Enter cost resource information for financial tracking. • Record additional information about a resource in a note.

49. Types of Resources • Work resourcesinclude the people and equipment needed to complete the tasks in a project. • Cost resourcesrepresent a financial cost associated with a task that you need to account for. Examples include categories of expenses like travel, entertainment, and so on. • Material resourcesare consumables that you use up as the project proceeds. For example, a construction project might need to track steel or concrete as it is used throughout the project.

50. Work Resource Examples • Work resources are the people and equipment that do the work of the project. • Project focuses on two aspects of work resources: their availability and their costs. • Availability determines when specific resources can work on tasks and how much work they can perform, and costs refer to how much money will be required to pay for those resources.