What this book covers
Chapter 1, Project Management – the Essential Primer, explains the project management principles and concepts that are essential for this book with minimum fuss.
Chapter 2, Fundamentals of Microsoft Project, introduces Microsoft Project through a simple, hands-on project. We start by making sense of the complex user interface.
Chapter 3, Initiating projects with Microsoft Project, reviews the project plan schedule and examines the characteristics and components of a project schedule.
Chapter 4, Underlying Concepts of Microsoft Project, explores the logic that makes Project work. This will demystify the automated behavior of Project.
Chapter 5, Resource Management with Microsoft Project, explains how to manage the people and machinery required to execute our project. This is an important prerequisite to costing a project.
Chapter 6, Work Breakdown Structure – the Single Critical Factor, concerns the most important project management process to succeed with Microsoft Project (WBS the Work Breakdown Structure!).
Chapter 7, Tasks – under the Microscope, proceeds from a WBS-based task list to a well-designed project schedule. We will also learn how to import data, organize schedules, and a whole lot of special tasks, all with a new hands-on project.
Chapter 8, Mastering Link Dependency and Constraints, creates schedules that are realistic for projecting ground situations through four classic types of task relationships. We also explore the flexibility of time in a schedule represented by date constraints.
Chapter 9, Extended Customization – Tasks and Gantt Formatting, explores Project's tools that allow you to fine-tune the textual and graphical aspects of your schedule. Practically every parameter is customizable, as you will see, but you can get by without needing any customization most of the time.
Chapter 10, Executing Agile Projects with MS Project, is the beginning of the execution phases of a project. We begin with a discussion of Agile and Kanban supported in Project.
Chapter 11, Overallocation – the Bane of Project Managers, discusses overallocation of resources, which is the most common issue that is faced by users of Microsoft Project. You'll learn how to avoid, diagnose, and resolve overallocation using a plethora of tools and techniques.
Chapter 12, Baselines – Techniques and Best Practices, is a deep dive into the baselining features of Project. You'll learn how to create, maintain, and analyze schedules with the help of baseline best practices.
Chapter 13, Project Tracking Techniques, helps us learn to precisely track the status of your project while adapting to your own ground situations by using a wide spectrum of tools, techniques, and best practices.
Chapter 14, Views, Tables, and Customization, helps us gain an advanced understanding of view architecture in Project. You'll learn which views are used when, as well as sort, filter, and group data. You will also learn how to create your own views.
Chapter 15, Resource and Cost Management, is a deep exploration of Project's resourcing and costing techniques through a new hands-on project.
Chapter 16, Critical Path Monitoring and Advanced Techniques, explains how to work with the foundational methodology used in Project; Critical Path Method (CPM). You'll learn techniques to shorten a project, advanced overallocation techniques, and strategic approaches to resolving scheduling issues.
Chapter 17, Project Reports 101, discusses the many powerful predesigned reports, broad dashboards, and more than a dozen other analytical reports for export that are all shipped with Project out of the box.
Chapter 18, Reviewing Projects and Creating Templates for Success, explains how to identify the most common error patterns within project schedules, use different tools to review projects, and create templates that will help you succeed with future projects.
Chapter 19, Advanced Custom Reports and Templates, explains the logic of Project's reporting architecture to modify existing prebuilt reports and create new custom reports. You'll also learn how to share your customized entities (reports, views and so on) with the world.
Chapter 20, Book Conclusion and Next Steps, is a final big-picture view of Microsoft Project applied to project management. We will tie up the project phases and process groups to everything that you have learned about Microsoft Project. Overall best practices, pitfalls, concepts, and techniques will be mapped to a project life cycle.
Appendix A, Using this Book as a Textbook provides the details of the topics as they are bifurcated in the book in the chapters for quick referencing.
Appendix B, Available Fields Reference explains the types of fields of Project, explained in the various chapters in tabular format. This is beneficial as the tables provide quick reference at a glance.
Appendix C, Keyboard Shortcuts provides a list of shortcuts for the various functions we perform in MS Project 2019. They help provide an ease of access and better user experience.
Appendix D, Glossary has the list of the names, words, phrases which are unique or specific to this book. This helps to provide an easier understanding of the concepts.