As a component of our Contractor Project Solutions suite, this workshop is the perfect partner for our Project Planning Foundation workshop and as an ideal prerequisite for our Planning and Execution workshop.

• Be able to find and use day-to-day Microsoft Project commands with ease.
• Be able to create new projects and apply realistic calendar settings to these projects.
• Understand the importance of work resources and how best to define them at project level.
• Be able to list, scope and schedule tasks that describe and match a project’s objectives.
• Understand the fundamental concepts of resource assignment and allocation.
• Be able to review a project’s criticality and produce stakeholder-friendly reports.
• Understand the importance of a project’s baseline and how to track basic project progress.
• Be able to review project performance to help meet key objectives.

This first workshop section explains Microsoft Project from first principles; the database, the scheduling engine, the views & tables & reports, together with the ribbon-based command structure. Within this section, you will also learn how to create a new project, set its fundamental options, define project calendars and resources, and create the project’s top-level structure of key deliverables.

• Understanding Project’s user interface
• Ribbons, tabs, groups and commands
• One database with multiple views
• Multiple views and shared tables
• Projects and Excel-friendly dashboards
• New projects, existing projects and templates
• Adding definitions at the project level
• Saving your project
• Defining your project’s working day
• Adding nonworking time to your project
• Defining your project’s resource pool
• Reviewing your project’s options

Section two is all about creating a well-defined and realistic project plan. You will learn how to expand a project’s outline into tasks and milestones, which in turn you will specify and schedule. You will review and optimise your project, in preparation for reporting this data to your stakeholders with insight and clarity. As work and cost are key tenets of a workable project, you will also gain an understanding of how your project’s plan can best model the real world.

• Breaking down your project’s outline
• Managing key project events with milestones
• Scoping tasks with duration values
• Scheduling tasks with dependencies
• Managing dependencies between manually-scheduled tasks
• Reviewing task structure and sequence
• Finding critical tasks that drive end dates
• Finding tasks with spare time
• Communicating your project to its stakeholders
• Assigning people to tasks
• Entering task cost values

Section three is all about managing the course of a project during its riskiest phase, execution. You will learn how to set realistic targets with baselines, update progress around as-of dates and fix work and tasks to stakeholder-driven schedules. You will also learn the importance of rescheduling remaining work into the future and how your project’s current work/cost/time model can be analysed and (where necessary) replanned.

• Using baselines to create project targets
• Creating and displaying update boundaries
• Updating task progress
• Fixing tasks to dates
• Rescheduling incomplete work
• Reviewing schedule performance

The final workshop section closes off a completed project. You will learn how views, tables, filters, and reports can be used to analyse project performance, thus gaining invaluable lessons that can be applied to future projects.

• Analysing your project’s successes