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4009- Setting Up Projects for Success Using Microsoft Office Project 2003

Duration: 2 days

Prerequisites:

• Experience participating in project teams as a project manager, manager, supervisor, team leader, or consultant. Note that students do not have to carry the title of project manager or possess a degree or certification in project management.
• Basic understanding of project management concepts, such as task lists, work breakdown structures, Gantt charts, task dependencies, scheduling constraints, and resource allocation.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Project, including the ability to:
• Create tasks and subtasks to build a project schedule.
• Link tasks to create dependencies.
• Assign resources to tasks.
• Change task properties.

Introducton: Even experienced project managers need help making the most of the tools at their disposal. Project managers at every level are asked to manage projects with short schedules, tight budgets, and scarce resources. This hands-on course focuses on the critical planning stage of a project and how to set a project up for success. Hands-on exercises with Microsoft Word and Project will demonstrate effective and easy-to-implement techniques to better plan, schedule and allocate resources. The goal of this course is to enable project managers to increase their productivity, which means they have more time to stay on top of the critical project management tasks that increase the chances of project success.

At Course Completion:

• Explain how effective project plans facilitate project success.
• Quickly set up project plans that communicate key project information to the entire project team.
• Develop schedules in Microsoft Project that communicate the project tasks effectively and accurately.
• Assign resources to tasks to obtain the desired results.

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Project Planning

• Why Project Plans Are Important
• Components of a Project Plan
• Expert Video: Jump-Start Project Success with Planning
• Discussion: What Makes Projects Succeed or Fail?
• After completing this module, students will be able to:
  • Describe the components of project plans and their purposes.
  • Explain how project plans contribute to the success of projects.
  • Identify factors that contribute to project success or failure.

Chapter 2: Preparing an Effective Project Plan

• Why Effective Communication Is Important
• Techniques for Communicating Effectively
• Demonstration: Using the Outline View in Word to Organize Project Plans
• Walkthrough: Communicating Project Information
• Demonstration: Creating a Project Plan Template
• Building Project Budgets
• After completing this module, students will be able to:
  • Recognize why effective communication is important to project success.
  • Examine techniques that effectively communicate project plans.
  • Organize project plans by applying the Outline command.
  • Explore techniques that effectively communicate project information to all stakeholders.
  • Create a project plan template to facilitate the creation of future project plans.
  • Improve project communication by applying the features of Microsoft Office applications in creative ways.

Chapter 3: Building Better Project Schedules

• Building an Effective Overall Schedule
• Building an Effective Gantt Chart
• Exercise 1: Clearly Communicating Phases, Tasks, Milestones, and Deliverables
• Best Practices for Communicating Task Detail
• Exercise 2: Documenting Work Packages
• Exercise 3: Linking a Task to a Work Package Document
• Demonstration: Preventing Inadvertent Schedule Constraints
• After completing this module, students will be able to:
  • Explain how easy-to-understand project schedules help team members contribute to project success.
  • Create a project schedule with tasks that emphasize the phases, deliverables, and key milestones of the project.
  • Create a project schedule that makes it easy to identify the deliverables that result from tasks.
  • Differentiate tasks that represent work from tasks that represent tangible results.
  • Choose effective methods for communicating the details of work associated with project tasks.
  • Avoid unintentional schedule constraints and remove any that may have been added by mistake.

Chapter 4: Allocating Resources to Project Tasks

• Problems and Opportunities in Resource Allocation
• How Microsoft Project Calculates Task Values
• Exercise: Mastering Tricky Resource Assignments
• How Microsoft Project Levels Resources
• Putting It All Together: Presenting Project Plans More Effectively
• After completing this module, students will be able to:
  • Recognize why reasonable resource assignments make it easier to manage projects during project execution.
  • Evaluate which Project task fields to modify to obtain the resource allocations you want.
  • Assign resources to tasks without changing the desired characteristics of the tasks.
  • Describe the algorithm that Microsoft Project uses to level resources and how that can lead to unexpected leveling results.
  • Apply different techniques in Microsoft Project to resolve resource overallocations.