World-renowned project management consultants QuantumPM help you improve Project planning, scheduling, resource assignments, budgeting, collaboration, workload analysis, progress reporting, completion, closure, and more. Get comfortable with Project , leverage its immense power, and tailor it to your unique needs—no matter how large or complex your project may be! Real solutions, new techniques, innovative shortcuts!
But learning the software is only half the battle. What you really need is real-world guidance: how to prep your project before touching your PC, which Project tools work best, and which ones to use with care. This book explains it all, helping you go from project manager to project master. Get a project management primer. Discover what it takes to handle a project successfully Learn the program inside out. Get step-by-step instructions for Project Standard and Project Professional Build and refine your plan.
Jump in wherever you need answers—brisk lessons and informative screenshots show you exactly what to do, step by step.
Other Project users will want to grab this book as well. A guide to Microsoft Project that focuses on developing a successful project management strategy across the organization to drive better decisions Making Effective Business Decisions Using Microsoft Project goes far beyond the basics of managing projects with Microsoft Project and how to set up and use the software.
This unique. World-renowned project management consultants QuantumPM help you improve Project planning, scheduling, resource assignments, budgeting, collaboration, workload analysis, progress reporting, completion, closure, and more.
Get comfortable with Project , leverage its immense power, and tailor it. This title features step-by-step instructions on using Microsoft Project and Project Server to best utilize and manage scarce resources devoted to project portfolios. Experience learning made easy-and quickly teach yourself how to manage your projects with Project With Step By Step, you set the pace-building and practicing the skills you need, just when you need them! Topics include building a project plan and fine-tuning the details; scheduling tasks, assigning resources, and managing dependencies;.
Conquer Microsoft Project —from the inside out! You're beyond the basics, so dive right in and really put your project management skills to work! This supremely organized reference packs hundreds of timesaving solutions, troubleshooting tips, and workarounds. It's all muscle and no fluff.
Discover how the experts tackle Project —and. A comprehensive reference on the latest version of the leading enterprise project management software: Microsoft Project Microsoft Project allows users to manage business activities effectively by sharing project information, performing modeling and scenario analyses, standardizizing reporting processes, and more.
This soup-to-nuts reference covers both the professional and standard versions of. Microsoft Project Step by Step.
More broadly, what are called tasks in Project are sometimes also called activities or work packages. As you might expect, Project focuses primarily on time. Remember that Project is not just merely a static repository of your schedule information or a Gantt chart drawing tool; it is an active scheduling engine. Before a major change to the scope of a project is allowed, it must be evaluated and approved by the people managing and implementing the project.
Even though this is an important project manage- ment activity, it is not something done directly within Project. In this exercise, you create a microsoft project 2010 book pdf free project plan, set its start date, and save it. Click the File tab. Project displays the Backstage view. Click the New tab. Project displays your options for creating a new project plan. For this exercise, you will create a new blank project plan.
Under Available Templates, make sure that Blank project is selected, and then click the Create button on the right side of the Backstage view. Notice the thin orange vertical line in the chart portion of the Gantt Chart view.
On the Project tab, in the Properties group, click Project Information. For more information about Project Server, see Appendix C. Tip In the calendar, you can navigate to any month and then click the date you want, microsoft project 2010 book pdf free click Today to quickly choose the current date. Project Standard users do not see this portion of the dialog box. Click OK to accept this start date and close the Project Information dialog box.
On the File tab, click Save. Because this project plan has not been previously saved, the Save As dialog box appears. Entering Task Names In the File name box, type Simple Tasks. Click Save to close the Save As dialog box. Here are some guidelines for creating good task names:. Click the cell directly below the Task Name column heading.
Your screen should look similar to the following illustration. The indicators in this column tell you whether a task is manually or automatically scheduled. Product scope describes the quality, features, and func- tions of the deliverable of the project.
Project scope, on the other hand, describes the work required to deliver such a product or microsoft project 2010 book pdf free. In our scenario, the project scope includes microsoft project 2010 book pdf free tasks relating to generating publicity and advance reviews for the book. Entering Durations In this section, you begin to work with task durations—the amount of time you expect it will take to complete the task. If you estimate that a task will take 16 hours of working time, you could enter its duration as 2d, to schedule work over two eight-hour workdays.
With manually scheduled tasks, you can enter regular duration values using the abbre- viations shown previously; for example, 3d for three days. Entering Durations Project uses standard values for minutes and hours for durations: 1 minute equals 60 seconds, and 1 hour equals 60 minutes. With a setting of 8 hours per day, entering a two-day task duration 2d is the same as entering 16 hours 16h. With a setting of 40 hours per week, entering a three-week task duration 3w is the same as entering hours h.
Click the cell below the Duration column heading for task 1, Assign launch team members. Enter the following durations or microsoft project 2010 book pdf free phrases for the following tasks:. Project calculates the duration as seven days. Project also draws the Gantt bar for the task to span these working days plus the nonworking days the weekend between them, as shown here. You should consider two general rules when estimating task durations:.
In general, you should measure task dura- tions at the lowest level of detail or control that is important to you, but no lower. For the projects you work on in this book, the durations are usually supplied for you. For microsoft project 2010 book pdf free projects, you will often have to estimate task durations.
Good sources of task duration estimates include:. Because inaccurate task duration estimates are a ma- jor source of risk in any project, making good estimates is well worth the effort expended. Click the name of task 3, Public Launch Phase. On the Task tab, in the Insert group, click Milestone.
Project inserts a row for a new task and renumbers the subsequent tasks. On the Gantt chart, the milestone appears as a diamond. Tip You can microsoft project 2010 book pdf free a task of any duration as a milestone.
For example, microsoft project 2010 book pdf free is common to divide book publishing proj- ects into Editorial, Design, and Production phases.
You create phases by indenting and outdenting tasks. In Project, phases are represented by summary tasks, and the tasks indented below the summary task are called subtasks. When a summary task is manually scheduled, its duration will be calculated based on its subtasks, just like the duration of an automatically scheduled summary task.
However, you can edit the duration microsoft project 2010 book pdf free a manually scheduled task and Microsoft project 2010 book pdf free will keep track of both the manual duration that you entered and the calculated duration.
Select the names of tasks 5 through 7. On the Task tab, in the Schedule group, click Indent Task. Indent Task Project promotes task 4 to a summary task. Or you can think of it as Project demoting tasks 5 through 7 to subtasks; either way, the project plan now includes a summary task.
Summary task Summary task bar in the Gantt chart. Select the name of task 1, Assign launch team members. On the Task tab, in the Insert group, click Summary. Project inserted a row for a new task, indented the task directly below it, and renumbered the subsequent tasks.
With the name of the new summary task selected, type Planning Phase microsoft project 2010 book pdf free press Enter. Select the names of tasks 3 and 4. You will indent these tasks under the summary task 1. Likewise, any task can be a successor to one or more predecessor tasks. Although this might sound complicated, tasks can have one of only four types of task relationships. Tip You can adjust the schedule relationship between predecessor and successor tasks with lead and lag time.
For example, you can change task durations or add or remove tasks from a chain of linked tasks, and Project will reschedule tasks accordingly. Linking Tasks You create microsoft project 2010 book pdf free relationships by creating microsoft project 2010 book pdf free between tasks. Select the names of tasks 2 and 3. On the Task tab, in the Schedule group, click Link Tasks. Link Tasks The change highlighting indicates The link line values that are affected after you indicates a task make a change in a project.
Tip To unlink tasks, select the tasks you want to unlink, and then click Unlink Tasks in microsoft project 2010 book pdf free Schedule group on the Task tab. Select the name of task 4, Planning complete! On the Task tab, in the Properties group, click Information. Click the Predecessors tab. Click the empty cell below the Task Name column heading, and then click the down arrow that appears.
On the Task Name list, click Design and order marketing material. Select the names of tasks 6 through 8. In the chart portion of the Gantt Chart view, point the mouse pointer at the Gantt bar for task 1, Planning Phase, and then click and drag to the Gantt bar for task 5, Public Launch Phase. When the mouse pointer is over task 5, note the link line and icon that appear. Release the mouse pointer. This tooltip can help you The mouse pointer changes to link tasks using the mouse.
The red squiggly line indicates a potential scheduling problem. Select the name of task 4. On the Task tab, in the Schedule group, click Respect Links.
Project reschedules task 4 to start following the completion of its predecessor, task 3. You might have noticed that the start of the Public Launch Phase summary task does not respect its link to its predecessor, the Planning Phase summary task. Switching Task Scheduling from Manual to Automatic In this exercise, you convert some tasks and then the entire project plan to automatic scheduling.
Select the names of tasks 2 through 4. On the Task tab, in the Tasks group, click Auto Schedule. Project switches these tasks to be automatically scheduled. Indicators in the Task Mode column The formatting of automatically tell you that these tasks are now scheduled task bars is different automatically scheduled.