Microsoft Project 2010: A Comprehensive Introduction

Course Overview

Project managers often work within short time frames and with limited resources to successfully complete projects on time, within budget and according to requirements. Microsoft Project 2010 provides a flexible and intuitive solution to help you gain control of your projects. In this course, you learn to effectively create a project plan, track progress, adjust resources and generate dynamic reports in a hands-on learning environment with Microsoft Project 2010.

Hands-on exercises provide you with practical experience using Microsoft Project 2010 and include:

• Customising the ribbon interface
• Creating project plans, tasks, summary tasks and milestones
• Constructing and changing task dependencies
• Deploying manual and automatic scheduling techniques
• Controlling project, task and resource calendars
• Setting baselines and tracking progress
• Generating basic and dynamic reports

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Related Courses

• Microsoft Project 2010: Introduction
• Microsoft Project 2010: Advanced
• Microsoft Project 2010: Intermediate
• Microsoft Project 2007/2010: Introduction
• Microsoft Project 2007/2010: Level 2
• Microsoft Project 2010: Level 2
• Microsoft Project 2010: Introduction Level 1
• Microsoft Project 2010 Level 1 & Level 2
• 50413; Mastering Microsoft Project 2010

Audience

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

Skills Gained

• 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

Course Outline

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