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How to use MS ProjectBy Sean McEvoy One of the difficulties users of MS Project find is that there is an enormous amount of functionality available, but it is not obvious which is useful and which is not. These are some ideas of how to utilise MS Project to greater effect. The first thing to remember about MS Project is that it is an extremely powerful calculator. You have bought it to undertake calculations for you; therefore you should not have to do calculations yourself when planning or controlling your project using MS Project. If you ever find yourself manually doing calculations e.g. when should a task complete, Stop! You are wasting time and not using MS Project efficiently. An important factor in using MS Project is to enter as few dates as you possible can. The one date you must enter is the project start date. All further dates in your project should then automatically follow from this. MS Project can calculate all other dates based on the duration of each task and on the predecessors of each task. If a date changes because a task completed late, MS Project can automatically recalculate the revised dates for all tasks. If you manually enter a Start or Finish date for a task in MS Project this constrains MS Project from recalculating this date. The date will not change. Display the Constrained Dates table (View menu, Table command, More tables) to spot these tasks. For greatest flexibility the constraint type should be "As soon as possible". Another way of accidentally entering a constrained date for a task is to move or drag the task bar on the Gantt chart using the mouse. Enter tasks in as much detail as you currently understand. As you learn more about your project you can break some of the existing tasks into more detail. To do this, insert the new tasks under the existing task and indent the new tasks. MS Project then automatically turns the existing task into a summary task and highlights it. Use this outlining to structure your project plan into a clear structure. When you use outlining in this manner you can hide the detail tasks (by selecting a summary task and clicking the - button on the toolbar) and only show the summary ones. This can be useful for printing and reporting the plan. Use the Chart Wizard to highlight the Critical Path. For each task on the Critical Path this will highlight the Gantt chart bar in red. The calculation of the Critical Path is the primary algorithm that underpins MS Project. This is what you pay your money for. The Critical Path is the sequence of tasks that determines the end date of the project. It allows the project manager to actively monitor and control the timescale of the project. You can also format the text of the Critical tasks by using Text Styles to format the Critical tasks in red. Many project managers would suggest that every task in the plan should have at least one predecessor and one successor. Tasks are not normally sitting on their own in the task list. A Milestone is a task with a zero duration, a point in time. Use milestones to identify important dates or happenings in the project (e.g. when some thing is being delivered to you or you are delivering something). Let MS Project calculate the date on which the milestone will occur (by having the milestone task dependent on some others) and then check if this date matches what you require. To overcome the problem of the constraint dates mentioned above you could display an additional date column. Insert an additional date field, e.g. Starts, into a table beside the Start date column, and title it "required date' (Insert menu, Insert column command, Field name: = Start, Title: = required date). Enter the required date you need for the milestones into this column, use the Milestone filter (Tools menu, Filtered for: command, Milestones) and you have an immediate view of whether or not the current plan will meet the required dates. Frequently, a Critical Path is not visible in your project plan. This can arise from entering fixed dates for milestones. Enter the dates using the extra column to overcome this problem. When first assigning resources to tasks, it is better to assign generic resources e.g. programmer, rather than a specific resource e.g. Fred Smith. You can then use the Resource Usage view to determine how many programmers you need at any point in your project. Before the task can actually happen however, a specific resource must be found to do it! When working with resources in MS Project a task view on top and a resource view on bottom is a useful combination. MS Project assumes everyone works a 5-day week and takes no holidays (not even Christmas day) during the year. Don't forget to amend the standard Calendar (Tools menu, Change Working time command) to include all public holidays and any standard company holidays. Use the resource calendars to identify periods when resources are not available. |
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