Microsoft Project Training

This course is designed for students who are new to using Microsoft Project, as well as those with existing experience who want to build on what they already know.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify core project management concepts and navigate the Microsoft Project environment
• Create a new project plan and define its tasks, task relationships, and schedule
• Add and manage resources within a project plan
• Finalize a project plan, including setting a baseline and sharing it with stakeholders
• Update a project plan to reflect real progress as a project moves into execution
• Monitor project progress and adjust the plan to account for delays or changing constraints
• Build project reports to communicate status to stakeholders
• Customize project settings, views, and templates, and share those customizations across other projects

Introduction to Microsoft Project

A quick review of core project management concepts and terminology · Understanding the Microsoft Project interface · Setting common program options · Navigating between built-in Project views

Hands-on exercise: Students review key project management terminology, then explore the Microsoft Project interface as a newly hired project manager preparing to launch their first project.

Starting a New Project

Starting a project from a template or from scratch · Setting the project's start or end date · Creating and applying a project calendar

Hands-on exercise: Students create a project plan from a template for a bank expansion initiative, then build a separate project plan entirely from scratch for a new HR training manual project, set its start date and general project information, and build a custom project calendar that accounts for company holidays and a shortened workday.

Working with Tasks

Inserting and modifying tasks · Linking tasks and setting task relationships · Inserting summary tasks and milestones · Choosing manual versus automatic scheduling

Hands-on exercise: Students enter tasks into a project plan, including a recurring status-meeting task, add duration estimates for each task, organize the tasks into a work breakdown structure, define task relationships between them, and adjust the schedule to account for a real-world scheduling constraint on a specific task.

Creating and Assigning Resources

Adding resources to a project · Working with a resource calendar · Entering resource costs · Connecting resources to tasks and resolving conflicts

Hands-on exercise: Students add people, materials, and a budget as resources to a project plan, build a resource calendar that accounts for a resource's planned absence, enter cost rates for labor and materials, assign resources to tasks and a budget to the project as a whole, and identify and resolve a resource that's been overallocated across too many tasks.

Finalizing the Project Plan

Working with the critical path · Setting a project baseline · Sharing and exporting the project plan

Hands-on exercise: Students identify the critical path in a project schedule and adjust it to accelerate the finish date, save a baseline to measure future progress against, and prepare and print a project plan as a handout for a team meeting.

Tracking Project Progress

Updating task progress · Using progress lines to visualize how a project compares to its plan · Modifying views to display progress

Hands-on exercise: Students update a project plan to reflect completed and in-progress tasks, account for unplanned overtime work on a task, and update the project baseline partway through execution to reflect a revised point of comparison.

Modifying the Project Schedule

Rescheduling tasks · Editing task list options, including inactivating a task without deleting it · Working with multiple baselines

Hands-on exercise: Students inactivate a task that's no longer needed while preserving the ability to reactivate it later, and update cost rate tables to reflect a new rate for a resource partway through the project.

Working with Views

Creating and using custom views · Using the Network Diagram view · Displaying and modifying the project timeline

Hands-on exercise: Students filter and group tasks using view commands to focus on the critical path and organize tasks by resource, add a custom field with visual indicators to flag tasks that are over or under baseline, build a new custom view combining a task list with single-task detail, and format the project timeline for use in a status presentation.

Working with Reports

Using built-in reports · Creating custom reports · Creating visual reports

Hands-on exercise: Students review Microsoft Project's built-in reports to find one suited to a stakeholder request, build a custom report combining a table of completed phases with a chart of remaining work, and create a visual report in Excel to summarize project spending.

Using Additional Features

Working with custom, lookup, and formula fields · Using the Organizer to share elements between project plans · Creating a project template · Working with master projects and sub-projects

Hands-on exercise: Students save a finished project plan as a reusable template for future projects, use the Organizer to copy custom views and a project calendar into a shared template for use by other project managers, and set up a shared resource pool so multiple project plans can draw from the same set of resources.

To ensure success in this class, students should have some familiarity with planning projects, as well as how to navigate in a Windows environment.

Microsoft Project has a reputation for being harder to use than it should be, largely because its scheduling engine works differently than most people expect the first time they encounter it. That's exactly the kind of "why is it doing that" moment that's difficult to resolve through a recorded video, since the answer usually depends on the specific plan in front of the student.

With a live instructor, these moments get resolved on the spot, using the plan the student is actually building. Students also retain up to one year of access to a recording of the class and six months of post-class instructor support, which is especially useful for the common situation where a scheduling issue only shows up weeks later, in a real, live project.