Book Image

Learning Microsoft Project 2019

By : Srikanth Shirodkar
Book Image

Learning Microsoft Project 2019

By: Srikanth Shirodkar

Overview of this book

Microsoft Project is one of the most popular project management tools for enterprises of all sizes thanks to its wide variety of features such as project scheduling, project budgeting, built-in templates, and reporting tools. Learning Microsoft Project 2019 will get you started with the basics and gradually guide you through the complete project life cycle. Starting with an overview of Microsoft Project 2019 and a brief introduction to project management concepts, this book will take you through the different phases of project management – initiation, planning, execution, control, and closure. You will then learn how to identify and handle problems related to scheduling, costing, resourcing, and work allocation. Understand how to use dynamic reports to create powerful, automated reports and dashboards at the click of a button. This Microsoft Project book highlights the pitfalls of overallocation and demonstrates how to avoid and resolve these issues using a wide spectrum of tools, techniques, and best practices. Finally, you will focus on executing Agile projects efficiently and get to grips with using Kanban and Scrum features. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with Microsoft Project and have the skills you need to use it effectively in every stage of project management.
Table of Contents (32 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Iron Triangle – a Quick Primer for Project Management
3
Section 2: Project Initiation with Microsoft Project
8
Section 3: Project Planning Like a Pro!
13
Section 4: Project Execution – the Real Deal
15
Chapter 11: Overallocation – the Bane of Project Managers
18
Section 5: Monitoring and Control with Microsoft Project
23
Section 6: Project Closure with Microsoft Project
Appendix A: Using This Book as a Textbook
Appendix C: Keyboard Shortcuts
Appendix D: Glossary

Maintaining baselines

Everything we discuss in this section applies to both baselines and interim plans. For the sake of brevity, we will refer to only baselines, though you should suitably extrapolate to interim plans too. Just like other features of Project, there are multiple ways to maintain your baselines.

Updating a baseline

Sometimes, you may prematurely save a baseline while design changes are still underway. At such a time, you will want to update your baseline again after all the changes have been done. The correct way to do this is to just overwrite the baseline in question, exactly as if you were creating a fresh baseline, but now you select the existing baseline that you want updated.

Optionally, you may want to select only a few tasks to be updated into the baseline. For example, in the following screenshot, Baseline 3 is being updated only for selected tasks:

Figure 12.18 – Updating a baseline with selected tasks

There are two...