Learning Objectives

As this is a hands-on workshop participants will learn by doing. Through a series of class exercises students will be able to:

General navigation and terminology

  • Define a Microsoft Project table and differentiate it from a view
  • Demonstrate the ability to create custom tables and views
  • Identify ways to share or reuse custom tables and views

Calendars

  •  Practice updating the project calendar
  • Create task calendars and apply them appropriately
  • Show, through your class schedule, the impact of the project and task calendars on your schedule
  • Demonstrate the effect of changing the working time settings on your schedule

Tasks and Task Relationships

  • Practice entering tasks including creating summary and hammock tasks
  • Demonstrate how to create a recurring task
  • Identify four precedence types and show when to use each
  • Define the difference between automatically scheduled and manually scheduled tasks
  • Identify task type approaches and determine when each is important to use (i.e fixed duration, fixed work)

Constraints and Deadlines

  • Show how to display task constraints
  • Create and display deadlines
  • Be able to recite the significance of the calendar icon in the indicator column and what to do about it

Resources

  • Identify the three resource types and employ each type appropriately in your schedule
  • Identify the different cost types available for each task and demonstrate their use in the schedule.
  • Practice assigning resources to tasks
  • Demonstrate how to replace generic resources with concrete resources (i.e. job titles vs. actual people).
  • Identify at least two ways to show whether a resource is overallocated and demonstrate how to resource level

Baselining and Tracking

  • Demonstrate how to set a baseline
  • Show a couple of different ways to highlight the critical path
  • Learn and demonstrate how to update the project status date
  • Learn and practice adding actual data to the schedule
  • Demonstrate how to re-plan the schedule once actuals have been entered
  • Show a view that displays current progress against the baseline

Reporting

  • Practice viewing your schedule with different filters and sorts applied
  • Demonstrate how to create a group and show its effect in a schedule
  • Practice creating several different types of reports with Visual Reports
  • Demonstrate how to both import and export between MS Project and Excel

And more!

Note: Depending on time and class experience, this curriculum may be adjusted to accommodate additional advanced topics.

Prerequisites

  • Participants should be familiar with project management concepts such as the triple constraint, Work Breakdown Structures, network diagramming, critical path, and slack.