As a base-level component of our Corporate Project Solutions suite, this workshop is the perfect partner for our Programme Planning Foundation workshop and as an ideal prerequisite for our Programmes and People workshop.  This workshop is also the first segment of our Essential Microsoft Project for the Corporate workshop.

• Be able to find and use day-to-day Microsoft Project commands with ease.
• Be able to create new projects and effectively define working and nonworking time for the project.
• Understand the importance of work resources and how best to define them.
• Be able to list, scope the work and time components of tasks, and then schedule them to accurately match a project’s objectives.
• Understand the fundamental concepts of resource assignment, resource scheduling and resource optimisation.
• 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 task and work progress.
• Be able to review project performance and replan a project to help meet its 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.

• Project for the desktop’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
• Planning your project from the top down
• Managing key project events with milestones
• Top-level project reporting for stakeholders

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 these can be manipulated (and where necessary optimised) to ensure your project’s plan can best model the real world.

• Breaking down your project’s outline
• Scoping tasks with duration values
• Scheduling tasks with dependencies
• Managing dependencies between manually-scheduled tasks
• Reviewing task structure and sequence
• Changing timescale displays for charts
• Tasks that drive end dates and those with spare time
• Changing relationships between tasks
• Views and Reports for project stakeholders
• Assignment scheduling choices
• Assigning people to tasks
• Entering task cost values
• Reviewing work and cost values
• Resolving resource conflicts

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) manipulated to best balance the work to be performed against the resources that carry out that work.

• Creating and displaying update boundaries
• Updating task progress
• Setting required task start dates
• Setting deadlines against tasks
• Rescheduling incomplete work
• Exercise D – Managing project progress
• Reviewing baseline performance
• Reviewing work and cost performance
• Getting back on track: Reduce the project’s scope
• Getting back on track: Change how tasks are scheduled
• Getting back on track: Change how work is performed

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