Each one of you might be using a different setting for MS Project To ensure the results are not different from what is shown in this tutorials, ensure the settings as follows. Remember all these are the default settings you will have when you first install MS Project on your computer. Microsoft Project is a project management software program developed and sold by Microsoft, designed to assist microsoft project management quick reference guide for project 2010 free project manager in developing a schedule, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget, and analyzing workloads.

Project creates budgets based on assignment work and resource rates. As resources are assigned to tasks and assignment work estimated, the program calculates the cost, equal to the work times the rate, which rolls up to the task level and then to any summary task, and finally to the project level.

Each resource can have its own calendar, which defines what days and shifts a resource is available. Microsoft Project is not suitable for solving problems of available materials resources constrained production. Additional software is necessary to manage a complex facility that produces physical goods.

MS Project is feature rich, but project management techniques are required to drive a project effectively. A lot of project managers get confused between a schedule and a plan. MS Project can help you in creating a Schedule for the project even with the provided constraints. It cannot Plan for you. As a project manager you should be able to answer the following specific questions as part of the planning process to develop a schedule.

MS Project cannot answer these for you. What tasks need to be performed to create the deliverables of the project and in what order? This relates to the scope of the project.

What are the time constraints and deadlines if any, for different tasks and for the project as a whole? This relates to the schedule of the project. What kind of risk do we have associated with a particular schedule for the project?

This might affect the scope, cost and time constraints of your project. Strictly speaking, from the perspective of Project Management Methodology, a Plan and Schedule are not the same. A plan is a detailed action-oriented, experience and knowledge-based exercise which considers all elements of strategy, scope, cost, time, resources, quality and risk for the project.

Scheduling is the science of using mathematical calculations and logic to generate time effective sequence of task considering any resource and cost constraints. Schedule is part of the Plan. Of course the schedule is linked with resources, budgets and dependencies. This is because of two reasons. One, MS Project does more than just create a schedule it can establish dependencies among tasks, it can create constraints, it can resolve resource conflicts, and it can also help in reviewing cost and schedule performance over the duration of the project.

So it does help in more than just creating a Schedule. This it makes sense for Microsoft to market MS Project as a Plan Creator rather than over-simplifying it as just a schedule creator. Two, it is due to limitation of generally accepted form of English language, where a schedule can be both in a noun as well as verb form.

As a noun, a Schedule is like a time table or a series of things to be done or of events to occur at or during a particular time or period. And in the verb form, schedule is to plan for a certain date. The distinction is important for you as a project manager, but as far as MS project is concerned the noun form of Schedule is a Plan.

Of course, a project manager should also be able to answer other project-related questions as well. Here you have options to open a new plan, some other plans, and even a new plan template. The screen should have the MS Project interface displayed. Toolbar controls have heterogeneous sizes and are classified in visually distinguishable Groups.

Groups are collections of related commands. Each tab is divided into multiple groups. Each microsoft project management quick reference guide for project 2010 free contains several commands.

If you point at a command you will see a description in a tooltip. Active view is the one you can see in the main window at a given point in time. The View label just tells you about the view you are using currently. Project can display a single view or multiple views in separate panes. When working with MS Project you either specify a start date or a finish date.

Because once you enter one of the two, and other project tasks, constraints and dependencies, MS Project will calculate the other date. It is always a good practice to use a start date even if you know the deadline for the project. MS Project will display microsoft project management quick reference guide for project 2010 free list of options.

In the list of available templates, click Blank Project. A dialog box appears. Click the arrow on the Current Date dropdown box. A list appears containing three base calendars. Select a Standard Calendar as your project Calendar. Exceptions are used to modify a Project calendar to have a non-standard workday or a non-working day.

You can also allot unique working hours for a particular resource as well. Here is an example to create a non-working day, which could be because of a holiday or office celebrations or events other than the standard office work effort. Change Working Time dialog box appears.

This date is now scheduled as a non-working day for the project. You can also verify the changed color indicated in the calendar within the dialog box as below. Click Ok to close. Just like you can change a Standard Base Calendaryou can change the work and non-working time for each resource. You can modify the resource calendar to accommodate flex-time, vacation time, training time, etc.

Also remember, Resource Calendar can only be applied to work resources and not to material and cost resources. By default when we create the resources in a plan, the resource calendar matches the Standard base calendar. And any changes you make to the Project Calendar, gets reflected automatically in resource calendars, except when you create an exception in the resource calendar.

In that case even if you update the project calendar, the exception in resource calendar is not affected. You can record some top level information for your. Click File Tab. Under Info Tab go to Project Information. Click arrow near Project Information to click Advanced Properties. A dialog box opens, you can type in the changes as required. WBS identifies the deliverable at the lowest level as work package. So a task is action-oriented, and the work package is the deliverable or a result of one or more tasks being performed.

There is a significant amount of confusion between what constitutes an activity and what constitutes a task within the project management community. But for MS Project, a task is the effort and action required to produce a particular project deliverable. This is simple. Enter the task name. In the following screen, we have entered 5 different tasks. A duration of microsoft project management quick reference guide for project 2010 free task is the estimated amount of time it will take to complete a task.

As a project manager you can estimate a task duration using expert judgment, historical information, analogous estimates or parametric estimates. You can enter task duration in terms of different dimensional units of time, namely minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months.

You can use abbreviations for simplicity and ease as shown in the following table. Remember, Project default values depend on your work hours. So 1 day is not equivalent to 24 hours but has 8 hours of work for the day. Of course, you can change these defaults anytime you want. Microsoft project management quick reference guide for project 2010 free of the neat tricks MS Project possesses is, it considers duration of the task in workday sense.

So if you have a non-working day in between, it accommodates this and ensures a task that takes 16 hours to complete to end on the 3rd day. In other words, if you have a task that needs 16 hours to complete starting on Monday AM if this is the time your work day starts, and 8 hours being total work hours in a dayand Tuesday being a holiday, the task will logically end on the evening of Wednesday.

This is simple in Gantt Chart View, click the cell below Duration column heading. Enter the duration. Task 1 in the following screenshot. Task 2 in the following screenshot. Task 3 and Task 4 in the following screenshot. So essentially, one would believe that with these 3 days Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the microsoft project management quick reference guide for project 2010 free calculated would be 3 days. But MS Project calculates it as microsoft project management quick reference guide for project 2010 free days.

So one needs to be careful when choosing the start date of the task. Because for any successive operation, MS Project considers that Task 6 will take 4 days. The next time, you change the start date, the Finish date changes to reflect this 4-day duration.