Microsoft Project Course And Certification

What is Microsoft Project? 

Microsoft Project is a powerful management software application designed for project management and administration, developed and sold by Microsoft Inc. 

The Microsoft Project application is designed and developed to aid project managers in developing project plans, assigning resources to various tasks, tracking the progress of various projects, managing the allocated budgets and analyzing the workloads. 

With the Microsoft Resource tool, Resource definitions of people, equipment and materials that are involved in a project can be easily shared across various projects using a shared resource pool. Each project resource comes with its own calendar that shows what date and time a resource is allocated to. Resource rates are used in the project to calculate the cost for the allocation of resources which are finally rolled up and then fully summarised at the resource level. 

Each individual resource can be assigned to various tasks in multiple plans and each task can be assigned to multiple resources. Microsoft Project schedules task work based on resource availability as defined in the resource calendars. All resources can be described in an enterprise resource pool.

The Microsoft Project tool can produce budgets that are based on assignment work and resource rates. As various resources are distributed to various tasks and assignment works are fully estimated, Microsoft Project fully calculates the cost that equals the work times the rate of the work. This sums up to the level of the task and finally totals it up to the project level.

Microsoft Project has been further extended with the Microsoft Office Project Server and the Microsoft Project Web Access. The Project server usually stores all project data in a secure central database. 

Features of Microsoft Project

1. Reporting: Monitor project progress, generate reports, customize data, view pending tasks, tasks completed, and upcoming tasks.

2. Collaboration: Collaboration is a necessary ingredient for any project. Since every activity involves a lot of people, it would be ideal to connect all of them together on a common platform for easy information sharing, capabilities such as file-sharing, team dashboard, and sharing client data all make collaboration possible.

3. Planning and Scheduling: This arguably constitutes the most important stage of project management. They form the backbone of the entire project and can either make or break the whole thing. The ability to prioritize project tasks, a shared team calendar is needed for the success of a project.

4. Project Timeline View: Everything concerned with the project can be viewed on the timeline, changes can be tracked, task alignment, project preview, formatting options.

5. Manage Resources: With this facility, you can also create a pool of resources and tap into them to complete tasks as your project comes together. This tool allows you to properly assign and order your tasks based on resource availability and demand, with the added option of committing specific resources full time or part-time, as needed.

6. Different Views: Allows for different project views, you can view the project by charts like Gantt chart, resource usage chart, calendar.

7. Work On Multiple Projects: Allows project managers to work on multiple projects at the same time on the same platform.

Benefits of Microsoft Project

1. Full Visibility: The Microsoft Project software provides you with full visibility even if you are handling multiple projects. It presents you with familiar scheduling tools such as Gantt charts and prepopulated pulldown menus to hasten and simplify the project planning stage.

2. Great Integration: Microsoft Project connects you to a broad range of Microsoft software and team collaboration products. It makes use of Skype to enhance your project communication and works with Office and Office 365 to work with a list of popular Microsoft apps like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Furthermore, Microsoft Project & Portfolio Management works with the Power BI Pro tool to offer your project high-level business intelligence analytics.

3. Ready to Use: You get to use its built-in templates that are also easily modifiable to your needs, and this is a great way to get the project up and running fast. Besides, the templates are the product of best project practices, so there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel.

4. Experienced-based UI and Feature set: Microsoft Project is designed and developed by people who have managed real-life projects and know that some processes and ways of doing some things are regularly changing. Thus with this tool, adding new tasks or improving the organization of a project halfway through will be an easy thing to do.

5. Easy Collaboration: Designed to do much more than just tracking progress, Project works with Teams to support collaboration and make it easy to manage all aspects of a team project, including file sharing, chats, meetings, and much more. Team members in scattered locations can even edit tasks simultaneously, so they can get more done together, no matter where they are. To help teams stay on track, Project offers an automated scheduling engine based on effort, duration, and resources.

Why Study Microsoft Project

Studying Microsoft Project helps you gain the following skills: 

1. Be able to monitor critical tasks.

2. Easily handle reports and printing reports.

3. Enables you to update forecast schedule regularly. 

4. Work on dynamic model option to check what-if scenarios and decide upon a new deadline. 

5. Enables you Identify slippage and its rectification. 

6. Allow resource allocation based on funds. 

7. Identify the relationships between processes and tasks involved in them, using a tool called scheduler. 

8. Enables assignment of resources to a task; optimum resource utilization and expenditure like project budgets, resource costs, and task costs. 

9. Manage task duration. 

10. Have an understanding of all tools required to run multiple projects simultaneously, irrespective of the complexities involved. 

11. Gives you an insight into various IT tasks; develops task outlines; calendar confirmation, and importing data from different sources. 

12. Comprehension of deadline creation based on the constraints. 

13. Create and forecast models based on tasks. 

14. Create and handle of templates; custom views; formulas; fields and filters. 

15. Job opportunities and career advancement. 

Microsoft Project Course Outline

MS Project - Introduction

MS Project - Settings

MS Project - Introduction

MS Project - Getting Started

MS Project - Create A New Plan

MS Project - Set Up Resources

MS Project - Resources To Task

MS Project - Plan Duration Cost

MS Project - Track Progress

MS Project - Advance Schedule

MS Project - Status Reporting

MS Project - Video Lectures  

MS Project - Exams And Certification