Microsoft Project 2010 Introduction

Anyone interested in Microsoft Project 2010. Familiarity with project management terminology, such as tasks, resources and critical path, is helpful.

• Leverage Microsoft Project 2010 to plan and manage project schedules and resources
• Build and optimise your project plan through best practice principles
• Create, modify and organise calendars in order to control the project schedule
• Track progress, update plans and monitor variances between target and actual project deliveries
• Assign resources to tasks and troubleshoot overallocation conflicts
• Structure dashboards and reports to effectively share project data

Introduction to Microsoft Project 2010

• Overview of project management terms and standards
• Navigating and customising the ribbon and user interface
• Identifying collaboration possibilities with other toolsets

Creating a New Project Plan

Initiating a project

• Outlining phases, activities and tasks from project goals
• Identifying and gathering prerequisites for the project plan
• Producing a work breakdown structure (WBS)

Planning essentials

• Working through the differences between manual and automatic scheduling
• Conceptualising and identifying the critical path
• Analysing and managing slack in the project plan

Building a project plan

• Identifying the relationships between tasks
• Estimating and entering task duration
• Sequencing and linking tasks
• Entering normal tasks, summary tasks, subtasks and milestones
• Adjusting the project schedule to target specific dates

Optimising the project plan

• Working with task link types
• Implementing lag and lead
• Applying deadline dates to the project plan
• Setting, locating and removing task constraints

Controlling Your Project Plan

Creating and modifying calendars

• Identifying types of calendars
• Revealing the calendar architecture at project, task and resource levels
• Updating existing calendars
• Configuring Project to accurately calculate working and nonworking time
• Changing default calendar options

Applying calendars to projects, tasks and resources

• Assigning calendars appropriately
• Determining updates to your project plan as a result of deploying calendar changes

Sharing project calendars

• Saving calendar changes to the global template
• Sharing and organising calendars

Keeping Your Project on Track

Preparing for tracking

• Validating the project plan
• Establishing the baseline

Tracking task progress

• Identifying key steps in the tracking process
• Updating the project plan with tracking data
• Analysing variance against the project plan

Troubleshooting schedule problems

• Reviewing project task updates for timeline problems
• Resolving issues with the project scheduling plan

Managing Project Resources and Assignments

Creating and assigning resources

• Defining work, material and cost resources
• Reviewing cost and budget tracking options
• Handling work resources and assigning them to tasks
• Creating and managing a resource pool

Tracking with resources

• Calculating and managing work effort
• Tracking resource assignments
• Troubleshooting resource assignments
• Predicting task behaviour
• Investigating and resolving resource overallocation

Analysing Project Data and Preparing Reports

Identifying communication needs

• Defining stakeholder groups
• Producing a project communication plan

Creating reports

• Examining basic and dynamic report types
• Selecting data for output
• Designing dashboard indicator reports
• Reporting on deadlines

Interacting with other applications

• Sharing data with the timeline view
• Importing and exporting project data