Microsoft Project: What You Need To Know

Microsoft Project, also known as MSP, was primarily made to help project managers however it can help a wide array of people in their personal lives, too. For business use, it can be applied to handle budgets, organize and analyze work, assign resources to tasks and keep track of their progress.

In order to be a great project manager you must complete projects on time, all the while keeping within budget constraints and ultimately turning out a product or service your clients will be are happy with. Microsoft Project can help with all of this, and is particularly useful if you are in charge of a complex project and need help organizing all your work at the planning level and connect with other workers, making sure everyone is on the same page before anything is carried out.

Microsoft Project is amazing in that it has so many different high-tech features. One of the best features is that MSP is able to create a budget for you based on your rate of resources and your assignments. Microsoft Project does this by cleverly calculating when your cost equals your estimated assignment work times at the rate at which you can get things done, and many project managers will and do attest to its accuracy. Another great feature is that resources such as people and materials can be shared in a resource pool which allows them to be shared by different projects; needless to say this is a boon to anyone with multiple (and unrelated) workloads.

MSP also provides the ability to create a calendar for each resource, making it efficient to see when certain resources will become available. MSP has now joined with Microsoft Office Project Server and Microsoft Project Web Access. The implications of these connections are that Project Server provides a place to store project database in a central database, and Project Web Access provides a place for users to display and update their data across the Internet. Included with Web Access is the ability to use timesheets, administrative tools and graphical analysis of workloads, and Authorized Web Access users can also access a project server database on the Internet. All in all, these appliances create so many avenues for operation that if you can’t find a particular function, it probably isn’t worth doing!

MSP acknowledges that all users are the same, but also intuitively knows that it has different types of users so that each worker has tailored access levels to each project, bringing with it the ability to access different data as set by the project manager.

For the first-time user, it can be admittedly tricky to navigate and get to grips with first time around. As with anything, any time spent learning the basics in order to set up the framework for your project effectively is time certainly not wasted, so play around on a practice session for a while to get your bearings without the fear of breaking anything. That said, there is very little that can go wrong in Microsoft Project that cannot be fixed easily, so get stuck in!

To get you started, the very first thing you’ll want to do in MSP on creating a new project is to set the start date and working hours. To do this:

Click on define the project in project manager tasks pane. From here, go into the calendar date picker and set the project’s start date. Click on continue to step 2 at the bottom of the guide, which will lead you into the Project Server options. Assuming you’re not using Project Server at this stage, so click continue once more which will give you the option to save and finish.

Now that’s sorted, it’s necessary to set the working hours for each day of the project. These general hours will be defined and displayed in the main project calendar,  but it’s handy to know that individual project workers can have custom calendars with different hours, reflection days off, shift patterns etc. To set working hours:

There are three default calendars available, which are viewable by selecting define general working times to see a preview of the default set hours. Obviously things aren’t ever that simple, so hit continue to step 2 where you can use the tick boxes to select days in conjunction with the I want to adjust… option. Going into the step 3 dialogue, you can define other aspects of the working schedule such as holidays and time off. Follow the click boxes through to finalize your selections and save the changes.

Of course, that’s just the basics. But if you work in a large corporate environment, you’ll probably have no difficulty coming across someone already well-versed in all aspects of Microsoft Project (hit up fellow project managers or someone in the IT department). Another well-penned resource on Microsoft Project is, predictably, the …for Dummies guide which is worth keeping on your desk whether you’re an amateur or expert on the application.

Michael Jenson has written about a whole host of IT applications, including Access, Outlook, iOS development and this guide to Project which has been provided freely. Michael is also an amateur interior designer and occasionaly writes on behalf of sofasandsectionals.com