A 3-day Advanced course/workshop

(Project Planning, Budgeting, Execution and Tracking with MS Project)

Course Description

Project managers must plan, execute, manage their projects within the constraints of defined by scope, time, budget and quality and successfully complete their project by delivering the intended product or services to the customer.

MS Project is a powerful tool for project managers to plan, execute and keep track of projects by breaking the project work into small, manageable activities.

This course is designed for individuals who want to learn and/or improve the use of Microsoft Office Project Professional (2003 or 2007) features to assist them in managing their projects.
The advanced course starts with uncovering how project management methodologies are implemented in Microsoft Project. It progresses with the skills necessary to create and modify a project plan that contains tasks, task scheduling, resources, resource assignments, schedule improvement techniques and cost estimation. Finally, how to track a project with MS Project is demonstrated to see whether it is on course while in execution and how to take necessary corrective steps when there are variances between the plan and actuals is shown.
This course is designed to give a comprehensive insight into the use of MS Project in your projects. The course is based on MS Project 2003, the new features in Project 2007 are also demonstrated.

The student materials will contain MS Project features and details which can be used as reference after they complete the course.

Hands-on exercises on individual computers, during the course, will give the students practical experience on several features of Microsoft Project.

Who should attend?

This course is intended for project managers who have familiarity with project management principals and terminology and wish to use the powerful features of MS Project to extend their knowledge and practice.

MS Project Advanced Course Syllabus

Introduction

• Introduction and overview of project management standards, terms and methodology
• Project management processes and their implementation in MS Project

Setting up MS Project for your project

• New project file creation and use of project templates
• MS Project features, menus, toolbars and views
• Setting up scheduling based on the start or finish date
• Customising project options for your project
• Creating a project calendar and defining working and non-working time

Project Planning

Building a project plan
• Analysis of project scope and creation of work breakdown structure
• Identifying project phases
• Reproducing the WBS and creation of a task list and milestones

Scheduling tasks
• Importing task information from Microsoft Excel
• Entering and sorting tasks
• Defining task types
• Defining task constraints
• Identifying, creating and customising task calendars
• Establishing dependencies between tasks
• Estimating task durations and entering into project plan
• Use of lead and lag times for task scheduling
• Outlining and creation of tasks, sub-tasks and summary tasks
• Creating WBS Codes

Creating and assigning resources
• Establishing project resource requirements
• Defining work, material and cost resource types
• Identifying, creating and customising resource calendars
• Entering resources
• Assigning resources to tasks

Cost calculation and budgeting
• Entering cost details for work, material and cost resources
• Defining fix and other costs
• Assigning cost resources to tasks
• Calculating total project costs

Schedule compression and optimising project schedule
• Establishing and optimising critical path
• Schedule crashing: fast tracking and schedule compression
• Adjusting leads and lags
• What-if scenario analysis
• Resource over allocations and resource levelling
• Finalising project plan for stakeholders’ approval

Project Execution, Monitoring and Control

Baseline and Interim plans
• What is a baseline and what is an interim plan?

Tracking the project execution
• Creating a baseline for the approved project plan for tracking
• Regularly updating project plan for work progress and costs
• Comparing baseline schedule with actual schedule and identifying variances
• Monitoring task progress, manipulating and rescheduling tasks
• Identifying factors affecting task schedules using task drivers
• Comparing baseline costs with actual costs
• Monitoring resource progress
• Identifying change creep and impact of change implementation on the project plan

Communicating project information to multiple project stakeholders

• Filtering tasks and resources to identify specific data
• Using groups to categorise information
• Sorting tasks and resources
• Using cell shading to highlight specific data
• Displaying data with custom views
• Creating visual reports with Microsoft Excel
• Generating standard and customised reports

Project Closure

• Creating project template from the completed project plan
• Archiving project plans

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