Spotlight on Project

Project Management – a phrase banded about more and more in business these days. It is a high-level term becoming increasingly used to describe job roles and business procedures.

Whether you are organising the up-coming company picnic, updating the intranet, building a house, planning a home move or restructuring the whole organisation - you are a project manager.

Have you ever jotted down a ‘to-do’ list on paper or in a software package?
Have you felt the need to create a solid plan, against which you can track your stage along the process at any given time?
Have you thought about expected durations, costs and staff assignments?
Are you working towards set deadlines and within a budget?
Does upper‑management require progress reports at regular intervals?
Does your team need to know exactly what their individual tasks are and when they are expected to complete each one?
Once your plan is created do you need to know if you are progressing to schedule, and, if not, how to reign in that unwanted extra time?

If you have answered “Yes” to one or more of the questions above you will benefit from a software package that ties in all these functions, with others, to plan your projects.

Enter Microsoft Project. While there are many ‘project management’ packages around Microsoft Project has been the industry standard for many years, and increases its hold on the market by the day. Without Project you may have a combination of lists in Excel, tables of necessary resources in Word, post-it notes on a board, flow-chart drawings on paper or a drawing package and your own mental recall to complete your projects. With any project beyond a couple of weeks this can fast become unfeasible.

Creating the Plan

As a package Project can help you plan all your schedules, resources and costs. It can track your actual progress and costs against your original estimates. It can generate numerous tabular reports and also produces a number of visual reports, most commonly known being the Gantt Chart shown below.

If you need to know how many staff you need and the amount of materials you will use you can enter both, along with holidays, rates of pay and extra notes, within its Resource Sheet view.

You can then add these to your project plan and from there assess resource allocations, produce ‘to-do’ lists, reorganise the plan where necessary and create a baseline plan on which to track the progress of your project.

Reports

Once your project is underway there are numerous reports which can show overallocated Resources, overbudget or slipping tasks, overall progress and in‑progress tasks.

Tasks In Progress

Overbudget Tasks

Slipping Tasks

Tracking your Project

If you have the need to compare actual dates, costs and resource schedules against your original plan, and from this compare how complete and on time you are with your project then there are a variety of tools available. As you have seen above there are numerous reports from Should Have Started Tasks to Overbudget Resources. When you start to mark tasks as 0-100% complete the Gantt Chart also shows your progress visually.

There are various tables and filters that allow you to hone in on slipping tasks and highlight problem areas.

Learning Project

There is no denying that Microsoft Project is a technical tool and in order to use it to its full potential you do require an amount of dedication to the learning process. However, if you are a manager of any project large or small it is the package that you will ultimately come across more and more. There are literally millions of books, handouts, websites and companies that are focussed on Project Management as a work area and Microsoft Project as a specific software tool.

I would recommend my two day Project Introduction course to give you a firm understanding of the software, and we also offer a two day Project Advanced course if you wish to take Project further by customising the many features or if you have multiple on-going projects.