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

Simple techniques for project tracking

Project provides a wide array of methods you can use to track your project. You should choose a tracking method best suited for your project based upon the accuracy requirements of your project, time expendable on project updates, and complexities involved in both the project and updating techniques.

Percentage completion is an important concept to know about for the discussion that follows. It indicates how much of the task has been finished so far. We will use different techniques to tell Project the percentage completion of individual tasks. In other advanced situations, Project can algorithmically deduce percentage completion based on the other clues that we provide.

Let's suppose that you are handling a 10-person, 10-month, ten-million-dollar project with 200 tasks in your schedule. With a weekly status update cycle, you can normally expect between 20 to 40 updates to the schedule every week. Unless the update cycle is well planned...