Microsoft Project - Why do you need Project

Why do you need Microsoft Project?

Project Management is about planning, organising and managing information. The information can be about the things or tasks that need to be done and who or what will be used to carry them out, when are they available for this project and what will it all cost?

The project manager has to ensure that the project is running as planned within the parameters of the project. Microsoft Project will help you to do this, but will not do it for you.

Microsoft Project is a planning and tracking tool that will allow the user to access and present information about the project quickly and in relation to any or all aspects of the project.

Microsoft Project will allow you to enter information about the tasks involved, the relationships between them, the resources allocated to particular tasks and their availability according to their calendars and will then work out a schedule for the project according to the constraints involved. As any of the information is changed the schedule will be altered to reflect the amendments.

Information available on a project being monitored by Microsoft Project...

•      How long will it take?

•      What will it cost?

•      Which tasks are critical?

•      Are enough resources available?

•      Who is doing what? When?

•      Is the project running to as planned?

•      What happens if a particular task is delayed?

Decisions can be made with the information available and alternative scenarios can be considered if necessary.

Once the project is in progress it can be monitored against a baseline (planned) schedule

and comparisons can be made to the original schedule in relation to dates and costs involved.

What Information do you wish to extract?

Before using Microsoft Project, you need to decide what sort of information needs to be extracted from the project plan.

Microsoft Project can be used at several different levels, but it depends on what level of information needs to be extracted as to how it should be used in any particular case.

•      General information as to when particular parts of the project start and finsh.

•      Who is doing what when.

•      Exactly how much time each person is spending on each task of the project and how much each task is costing.

It is very important that you know which of those options is appropriate for your requirements as each option has varying degrees of effort associated with setting up the plans to be able to extract that data.

What data do you need to provide?

In the project life cycle, Microsoft Project provides you with an instrument that will allow you to set up the plan and then to track the progress made to monitor how far you are with it.

To set up a plan the information that you need to provide is:

•      Start/End Date of Project

•      Calendars

•      Summary tasks

•      Tasks

•      Milestones

•      Durations

•      Links / Predecessors

•      Resources

•      Costs

•      Constraints / Deadlines

This should allow you to set up the project plan as required.

Once the project has started, you need to provide the information to monitor the progress made at any point in time. How detailed the information is depends on the information that you need to extract from the plan.

Do you need to just specify when tasks have started and finished, or do you need to specify how much time each person has spent on each task. (There are other options in between these two extremes.)

The project completion should not be the end of the process. By using Microsoft Project, you will have a lot of data that can be analysed. By studying how the actual project went, in comparison to the planned project, future project plans can be improved.