A solid project management knowledge is essential for a project manager. But is this enough ? Particularly for managing complex, long-term, and complex projects, managing projects that have many inter-dependencies, frequent resource churn, gaps, resource capabilities, changing needs, and varied reporting requirements ?……. A seasoned project manager may be able to manage the project with minimal effort, but it will require a lot of time and energy to track and control activities, update static charts, and plan for them.
Even the most experienced project manager would struggle to provide the real value-addedservices required by dynamically changing projectenvironments. MicrosoftProject is a Project Management tool that can help you manage your project. It allows you to plan a project in detail by building adynamic schedule model and makes tracking and controlling easier by automaticallyupdating the impacted areas in response to changes and updates you make,highlighting any conflicts. This allows you to use your time for more value-added work like stakeholder engagement, alternative analysis, scanning the environmentfor changes or risks, and other valuable activities.
MS-Project, an industry standard tool, has a huge social presence. It is used by more than 22,000,000 people in both large and small businesses. It was originally used for large-scale project management across large enterprises, but 67% of small businesses use it today. Many companies require their project managers to be proficient with Microsoft Project.
Experts and ProjectManagement professionals have used MS-Project extensively and have seen it evolve over time. They can safely say that it’s one of the best project management software available and well worth the investment.
Let’s take a look at some of the features and capabilities of MS-Project.
You can create and manage project schedules. MS-Project allows for the creation of 11 baselines and 10 interim plans. This will allow you to create snapshots of project schedules to compare.
You can allocate and manage project resources: You can create different types, assign costs to them, and manage their allocation to tasks. MS-Project allows for the creation of a different resource calendar per resource. This is a useful feature for multi-country projects.
You can share resources with a common resource pool. This helps you identify shared resource conflicts early. This allows for central management of Resource data and improves resource management and utilization.
Earned ValueManagement:Helps you to monitor and control integratedperformance of project w.r.t. Work, schedule, cost.
Ability to meet diverse reporting needs using both built-in reports and custom reports:MS Project provides a lot of Out-of-the-box (pre-canned), reports such as task overview, burndown, resource overview, etc. You can save custom reporttemplates to be used on other projects. Also, you can create dashboards for multiple projects using a master project plan.
You can manage multiple projects using a master plan.
You can provide different views that can be customized: You can create a number of views including Gantt, Resource Usage and Task Sheet. To focus on specific areas and analyze the data, you can view it from different angles.
Project timelineview: You can create a customized bird’s eye view of the project, which can be used in stakeholder presentations or email.
You can create customfields to capture specific details. MS-Project allowsyou to add different types of custom fields like text, number, and flag, and then useformulas for populating them. To store information about your team, organization, or team, you can create custom fields. You can also associate images with them. For effective communication within the team, you can use trafficlight indicators with custom fields.
Filters, groups, and highlights to help with taskmanagement:MS-Project provides some very convenient features like Filters,Highlights, and Groups. The features can be used to highlight resources or tasks based upon certain criteria, such as late tasks. To group resources or tasks based on specific criteria, you can use the Groups feature. You can create custom highlights, filters, or groups.
It integrates well with other tools: MS-Project can be used with other tools like MS-Excel, Jira, etc. MS-Project can also be used with Enterprise-based solutions like Project Server or Sharepoint.
Let’s take a look at some of these benefits that can be derived from making effective use of it.