Managing Projects with Microsoft Project (70-343)

Microsoft Project

This section gives information about Microsoft Project 2013 which is latest offering by Microsoft into the software realm of PMIS (Project Management Information Systems). It covers number of software tools used for initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling and even closing project.

Create a New Project

This section covers Microsoft Project 2013 and shows some of the tools for creating templates, using templates, and creating a project plan from other applications.

Calendars

This section gives information about Microsoft Project 2013 which is latest offering by Microsoft into the software realm of PMIS (Project Management Information Systems). It covers number of software tools used for initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling and even closing project.

Custom Fields

This section demonstrates one of the most powerful features in Project such as Custom fields. Custom fields allows to show customized data. This tool provided in Project allows to display a calculated field, a lookup field or even just a string field that project didn’t specifically create by default.

Settings Options

This section walks through some of the different customization to change default settings within project.

Set Up Project Information

This section covers most important options found within the Project Information dialog box and explain the importance of each setting.

Creating Tasks

This section covers creating tasks manually within a project plan. It demonstrates how to rearrange the tasks within a project plan, create milestones and set a task as active or inactive.

Task Relationships

This section discusses different ways to control the project schedule using date constraints and dependencies. It demonsrates how to link task together so that Project 2013 can use it’s scheduling engine to put things in proper order.

Creating a Schedule

This section covers creating a manually controlled scheduled. This type of scheduling gives the user the most direct control over each task and resource. It demonstrates how to do PERT analysis to manually estimate task durations.

Managing Multiple Projects

This section takes a look at how to work with multiple related projects using a single pool of resources. Project 2013 provides the ability to create Master Project Plans and to link those projects together. It also covers how multiple projects can connect and use a shared resource pools.

Resource Information

This section shows how to add resources to a project plan. It demonstrates all the fields associated with resources and how the resources can be created in the project plan.

Resource Assignments

This section dives into assigning resources to tasks. It explains the actions that connects tasks and resource together to see how the project engine starts to change the schedule.

Team Planner

This section takes a look into one of the most useful views that shows resources and allocation. It covers how to manipulate the resources visually and see the resource conflicts and over allocations.

Model Project Costs

This section shows how to model the project cost of a project plan. It covers how to enter cost to a plan and how to center cost for a baseline cost model.

Model Material Resource Costs

This section shows how to model the material resource cost of a project plan. Materials are normally resources that we consume during our project. It covers materials that are used over a time and materials that may cost all at one time. It also explains how to account for both possible types of material resource modeling.

Setting Baselines

This section covers using baselines within a project plan. Baselines allow us to create a snaphot of project start and finish dates, scope , cost and duration data. It also shows how to track the progress of the plan without losing track of the original project plan data. A Project manager can compare against to baseline to measure whether the current project is on schedule, on budget and on goal or not by using baselines.

Update Progress

This section shows how to update progress within a project plan. It covers multiple ways for task progress to be recorded. It also discusses how to reschedule uncompleted task.

Baseline Variances

This section talks about the need to track variance within the Project Plan. It explains that changes to the plan not only need to be updated but seed a variance to the original plan so that good decisions can be made to keep the project on schedule.

Resolve Schedule Issues

This section demonstrates some of the tools that are built into Microsoft Project 2013 that alerts, identifies and even helps in resolving scheduling issues.

Display Critical Path

This section takes a look at displaying critical path information. The critical path is the string of tasks linked together in which every task must finish on schedule.

Applying Custom Views

This section walks through the options to customize how Project 2013 will project data. It shows the simple filtering options and the data display options . It also covers how to reuse project information by using organizer to share specific items between different project plans.

Sharing Project Data

This section covers how to get Project data available in other applications besides Project. Project 2013 has made it easier to make the project information available beyond the application itself.

Reports and Dashboards

This section discusses Projects Reporting tools. Microsoft Project provides common reports readily available and gives the ability to create custom reports.

Project Extensions

This section explains different way to make Project 2013 extend it’s capabilities by using applications, saving to one drive and using VBA to complete repeating tasks. It shows how to make Project 2013 a extensible tool to manage any project.