microsoft project 2010 - tips and tricks

Microsoft Project 2010 - Tips and Tricks

Ms. Manmeet ChaudhariMVP, MCTS, MCITP, MCP Sr. Project Advisor – Advisicon Inc

Advanced scheduling options

Setting the deadline dateHandy way to alert you to problems in your scheduleDeadline dates are soft dates and they DO NOT participate in the scheduleAll committed dates should be marked as deadline

Attaching documents to task

Working with Inactive tasksPerform what-if analysisFine tune project scope and resource planningProviding alternative options in a scopeProviding risk mitigation tasks

Manual scheduling versus Auto scheduling

User controlled schedulingCreate manually scheduled task anywhere in the projectTop down approach for schedulingEasy for Excel based scheduling users

Scenarios for automatic versus manual tasks

You begin with a high level list of deliverablesThere are areas in your project that don’t have a well understood scopeWaterfall model – Project lifecycle managementYou are given a timeframe to deliver a project

Resource management

Assigning tasks to generic resources

Generic resources are placeholder resources that are used to specify the skills required for a specific taskUseful in cases you do not know the named/specific resources to be assignedValuable for gauging skillset requirement for a projectYou can vary the resource availability using the resource table

Adding miscellaneous cost to tasks

Cost resources is an easy way of applying miscellaneous or multiple costs to a task, like airfare and diningCost resources are independent of

CalendarsAmount of work done on a task

You can assign different values of the same cost resources across tasks

The Team Planner viewA resource scheduling view that lets you interact with your schedule Drag and drop task from one person to anotherDrag unassigned tasksRe-assign tasks View overallocations and resolve themReduced the pain of manually levelling resources

Sharing project information

Working with the Timeline View

Concise view of entire scheduleEasily add/remove tasks and milestones from timelineCreate summary report of entire scheduleCopy past into email or presentations for quick report

Enhanced copy-paste to Office Applications

Re-using the same Project data

Save projects as templatesStandard set of tasks or resources that can be used as starting point for creating new projectUseful for organizations implementing similar projects

Sharing view and filters using Organizer

Collaborating information using SharePoint

Upload your file to SharePoint libraryUse the new Sync to Task list feature

Thank youManmeet.chaudhari@advisicon.comwww.advisicon.com