Microsoft Project Fundamentals: Microsoft Project Standard 2021, Professional 2021, and Project Online Editions

By Teresa S. Stover

Get a firm grip on one of the most popular project management applications on the market today

In Microsoft Project Fundamentals: Microsoft Project Standard 2021, Professional 2021, and Project Online Editions, accomplished project management leader Teresa Stover delivers a hands-on introduction to Microsoft’s popular project management software filled with real-world examples and plain-language guidance. The book walks you through how to plan, schedule, manage resources, track progress, and more.

In the book, you’ll:

• Learn principles and best practices of project management while mastering Microsoft Project capabilities, calculations, and views
• Understand how task durations, dependencies, and date constraints power the project schedule
• Manage human, equipment, and material resources, including availability, cost, and task assignments
• Adjust the project to optimize for the project finish date, budget, and resource allocation
• Use Microsoft Project to manage waterfall or agile projects

Ideal for anyone seeking to unlock the potential of Microsoft’s leading project management software for their own project work, Microsoft Project Fundamentals is an essential resource for those new to Microsoft Project and project management, as well as previous users and seasoned project professionals looking for a refresher in the latest features of the newest version of Microsoft Project.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781119821175

Book preview

Microsoft®

Project Fundamentals

Microsoft Project Standard 2021, Professional 2021, and Project Online Editions

Teresa S. Stover

Wiley Logo

Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

978-1-119-82115-1

978-1-119-82116-8 (ebk.)

978-1-119-82117-5 (ebk.)

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For Mom—Song Ai Soon Remhof—and our continuing moments of joy.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks go to my ever-steady and ever-ready editorial team, including Jan Lynn, Joyce Nielsen, Barath Kumar Rajasekaran, Christine O'Connor, Devon Cajas, and Jim Minatel, along with the many others working behind the scenes. As the model of a project team at its very best, you all worked your magic to bring this book to life and make it the best it could be.

I applaud the conscientious and painstaking work of the Project team at Microsoft, past and present, for creating in Microsoft Project a brilliant tool for project managers in a variety of industries with a range of requirements.

Cheers to Bonnie Biafore for her continuing work in teaching and guiding the next generation of project managers. I value our past collaborations as well as our friendship through the years.

Tons of respect and admiration to Kate Lasky and Rebecca Stoltz for our current work at Josephine Community Library. The upcoming library construction projects will test our project management chops and will result in amazing information services and programs that will expand horizons, enrich experiences, and build community.

My highest esteem goes to all those inspirational and dedicated individuals and groups who work toward justice in our world. It's hard work, and it's slow work, but it pays off with a society that works well for everyone.

All my love and gratitude to Craig Stover, for being my voice of reason, my best friend, and my rock.

About the Author

What a Difference a Plan Makes could be Teresa Stover's adapted theme song. To her, planning and implementing a project—while keeping a mindful eye on the prize of the project's outcomes—creates special excitement and satisfaction.

As the technical publications supervisor for a Silicon Valley startup more than 20 years ago, Teresa came face to face with the art and science of project management. Keen to know who needed to be working on which tasks daily to meet competing deadlines on multiple projects, she discovered the power of project management.

Since then, Teresa has worked as a technical communications and project management consultant for software creators, manufacturing, business, and education. She specializes in project management for entrepreneurial startups, nonprofit organizations, and content development enterprises. She has authored or co-authored 15 books on Microsoft Project, project management, and business productivity software. Recent achievements include helping start up a new library district and serving as a nonprofit foundation's interim executive director, in both cases setting up systems and structures for organizational development and success.

Teresa lives in southern Oregon with her husband, Craig Stover, and her German Shepherd, Dante's Inferno der Wunderhund. Teresa welcomes emails from readers sent to [e-mail].

About the Technical Editor

Joyce J. Nielsen has worked in the publishing industry for more than 30 years as a technical writer/editor, development editor, and project manager, specializing in Microsoft Office, Windows, Internet, and general technology content for leading educational, retail, and online publishers. She is the author or co-author of more than 50 computer books and 2,100 online articles. Joyce holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Quantitative Business Analysis from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business in Bloomington, Indiana. She currently resides in Arizona.

Introduction

Welcome to Microsoft Project Fundamentals. You're about to embark on a journey through the basics of Microsoft Project capabilities that can help you effectively manage your projects. This book focuses on the best and easiest ways to use Project to plan, schedule, manage resources, track progress, and view and report project information. Along the way, you'll also pick up core principles of project management, like the project triangle of scope, time, and cost, as well as the five project phases or processes.

The procedures, examples, and screenshots in this book are based on Microsoft Project Online Desktop Client as implemented in October 2021. Project Online Desktop Client is part of the Microsoft Project Plan 3 subscription for cloud-based project management solutions. If you are working with Microsoft Project Professional 2019 or 2021, the perpetual (nonsubscription) version, you should be able to follow along with this book just fine.

Who Will Benefit Most from This Book

This book is an essential resource if you're new to Microsoft Project and project management. Whether you're a student in school or a practitioner in the field, you'll find this book valuable to your project management journey.

For others of you who have used previous versions of Microsoft Project, this book can reintroduce you to the tool and its new capabilities, especially for managing agile projects as well as traditional waterfall projects.

Looking Ahead in This Book

This book consists of 14 lessons, each of which includes learning objectives, major concepts, and step-by-step procedures, key terms, and review questions to help you test and cement your new skills. The following summarizes each lesson:

Lesson 1, Project Management Basics, introduces the work of projects and project managers, the project triangle, the six project phases or processes, and project management methodologies, including waterfall and agile.

Lesson 2, Introducing Microsoft Project, explains how Microsoft Project helps manage your schedule, calculate costs, balance resources, and more. This lesson also describes the various Microsoft Project editions, and offers a tour of the application's user interface.

Lesson 3, Establish a Strong Foundation, covers basic best practices for initiating a new project. These include identifying the project sponsor, having your project charter authorized, defining the scope, and organizing project plan documents.

Lesson 4, Set Up the Project and Tasks, moves the project from the initiating to the planning process. This lesson demonstrates how to use Microsoft Project to start a new project plan, and how to enter and organize tasks in a task sheet view for a waterfall project or a task board view for an agile project.

Lesson 5, Build the Schedule, describes automatic versus manual scheduling and explains the Gantt Chart. The lesson walks you through entering task durations, setting milestones, linking dependent tasks, and identifying deadlines. It also shows how to schedule sprints for an agile project.

Lesson 6, Set Up Resources, explains the different types of project resources: human, equipment, material, and cost resources. This lesson shows how to add resources to your project plan, enter resource costs, and specify resource availability with units as well as calendars.

Lesson 7, Assign Resources to Tasks, steps you through assigning work, material, and cost resources to tasks. This lesson also shows how to review resource costs for a specific task, and how to add, replace, or remove resources on assignments.

Lesson 8, Check and Adjust the Project, systematically demonstrates how you can optimize your plan for the project finish date, for the total budget amount, and for the best use of available resources, all while fulfilling the stated project scope. This lesson also introduces the use of the project baseline.

Lesson 9, Track Project Information, transitions your project from the planning process to the monitoring and controlling processes, in which the project starts to be implemented. You learn how to collect and enter progress information, as well as how to adjust for inevitable changes and challenges.

Lesson 10, View Project Information, covers how to see the data you need by zooming, sorting, grouping, filtering, or highlighting information in a Project view. This lesson also describes how to work with columns in a sheet view and how to print a view.

Lesson 11, Customize Project Information, introduces basic customizing for a sheet view, a Gantt view, and a board view so you can access the information you need in your Project views. This lesson also offers a tour of some basic Project options and preferences you can set.

Lesson 12, Report Project Information, shows how to run a report or dashboard to share key project progress with stakeholders. The lesson also works through creating a new, custom report, as well as printing a report on paper or to a PDF file to share with others.

Lesson 13, Obtain Project Acceptance, shifts your project from the monitoring and controlling processes to the final closing process. This lesson specifies how to present the finished project to the sponsor and obtain final project sign-off.

Lesson 14, Retain Project History, describes techniques for gathering and documenting lessons learned through a final project review. This lesson also specifies best practices for archiving project history to ensure that solid information is available for people working on similar future projects.

"Appendix" contains answers to the Review Questions in each lesson.

Features

This book uses certain conventions in order to help you quickly identify important information. In particular, look for the following text segments:

In-line boxes further expand on some aspect of a topic, without interrupting the flow of the narrative.

Located throughout are small general discussions that deserve special emphasis or that have relevance beyond the immediately surrounding content. These are found in the general sidebar notes.

Instructor Materials

Instructors using this book as a text for their classes can find bonus digital content at www.wiley.com/go/microsoftprojectfundamentals. This content includes a syllabus, an assessment test, and a presentation slide deck.

Syllabus The syllabus contains course learning objectives, topics, and a chapter reference guide. It's provided as a PDF as well as in Microsoft Word (.docx) format so that it can be easily customized for instructor needs.

Assessment Test Questions The assessment test contains a subset of the questions included at the end of each lesson in this book. Instructors can use this as a pre-test and post-test for their class or adapt it for other purposes. The test questions are provided in PDF as well as in Microsoft Word (.docx) format.

Presentation Slide Deck Instructors can use or adapt the robust series of presentation slides for their course lectures based on the content in this book. The deck is provided in Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx) format as well as in PDF.

PART I

Manage Your Projects with Microsoft Project

Lesson 1

Project Management Basics

LESSON OBJECTIVES

Identify a project versus an operation.

Label the three sides of the project triangle.

List the six project stages or processes.

Explain project manager duties in each project process.

Name two prevalent project management methodologies.

Assess the project types best for the two methodologies.

When you decide to use Microsoft Project as a key tool in managing your projects, you also want to include a solid grounding in project management principles in that toolbox.

This lesson introduces you to the basics of projects and project manager responsibilities, including project management knowledge areas. You'll see the project triangle and the processes within the project life cycle. You'll review waterfall and agile project management methodologies.

Through all this, you'll preview how Microsoft Project can assist you in your responsibilities as a skilled project manager so that you can deliver your well-scoped project on deadline and within budget.

Projects and Project Managers

So what actually characterizes a project as such, rather than other activities we do like operations or task lists? And what are the responsibilities of the project manager? Let's break them down now.

What Is a Project?

A project is a unique activity that has a distinct starting point and a distinct finishing point. Here are some examples of projects:

Remodeling an office

Developing a new training program

Launching an awareness campaign

Hosting a conference and trade show

Designing a new product

Each of these examples are unique—the specific office being remodeled, the topic of the training program or awareness campaign, the locale and speakers involved in the conference, or the specific qualities that go into designing a new product.

None of these projects are ongoing, meaning that they each have a start and an end date. Although some projects like designing a new product or building a high rise might take several years, they proceed through different phases through those years until the project's completion.

In contrast, ongoing activities that are repeated and that don't have distinct start and finish dates are considered operations. Some examples of operations are as follows:

Maintaining information on a website

Running payroll twice each month

Sending weekly e-news to customers and prospects

Preparing packets for the monthly board of directors meeting

Posting daily items on social media

These are routine activities that take place on an ongoing basis as part of the regular business of an organization.

Projects can become operations, or operations can be a result of finished projects. For example, after the project of developing a new training program is complete, delivering a set of classes each month can become part of the organization's regular operations.

Projects can repeat in certain ways but still not be considered an operation. For example, your organization might follow a certain project template for product development that includes research, prototyping, testing, manufacturing, marketing, and launch. Its uniqueness lies in the difference in the product under development.

Whether small, medium, or large, projects are often characterized by the following:

A scope of work defining the project boundaries and standards

Part- or full-time team members who are assigned to the project

Equipment and materials earmarked for the project, if applicable

A budget dedicated to the project

At least one expected deliverable or outcome at the project end

What Is a Project Manager?

Some people become professional project managers as a result of strategic career planning, whether they majored in it in college or discovered it in the working world and then climbed the project management ladder. Many just get themselves assigned one day as a project manager and then must figure out what it's all about.

A project manager is the point person responsible for carrying out a project and delivering the desired outcomes—the scope of the project. As the project manager, you balance the constraints of the project budget and the deadline with the elements of the project scope. You continually check in with the team members working on their assigned project tasks, track and analyze the progress, prevent or solve any problems that arise, and report overall project progress to the project sponsor and other stakeholders.

As the project manager, you have your finger on the pulse of the overall project at any given moment. While individual team members might be working on their own specific part of the project, the project manager always sees the project as a whole and knows in what direction it is heading.

According to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK©), a successful and well-rounded project manager functions within the following nine disciplines, or knowledge areas:

Integration management

Scope management

Schedule management

Cost management

Quality management

Resource management

Communications management

Risk management

Procurement management

Stakeholder management

The Project Triangle

Project management is a constant balancing act of managing the tension between project deadlines and costs deadlines to deliver the intended project scope. You might have heard the old saying, Cheap, fast, or good. Pick two. This illustrates the project triangle, which is also known as the project management triangle, triple constraint, or the iron triangle.

Suppose your project is to develop a new website. If you have a spare budget and need to launch it in two weeks, the website might be more minimal with fewer features. But if you have an ample budget and several months of development time, the site might contain all the information and features that the project sponsor wants. If your customer wants the website in two weeks and is adamant that all the information and features are included without delay, it will be more expensive.

Therefore, the two triangle sides that are non-negotiable, and the one side that's flexible, determines the constraints of your project and where your project has some give.

Several interpretations of the project triangle exist. One version is the triangle sided with time, cost, and quality, with scope in the center. You might see it as a project rectangle with scope, schedule, budget, and quality. Another version is a six-sided project star with scope, schedule, budget, risk, resources, and quality. Figure 1.1 illustrates the concept of a good interpretation of the project triangle with time, cost, and scope.

Depending on the interpretation, a budget can include all resources that cost money including staff, equipment, and materials. Scope might include quality.

While project managers can and do argue about the right project triangle, the important thing is to simply keep the model in mind as you manage your projects. Your job as project manager is to know the ranked priorities and constraints of your project and to make adjustments accordingly.

Schematic illustration of a project triangle

FIGURE 1.1 A project triangle

Project Processes

With its explicit start and finish dates, any project has its own life cycle. The project life cycle consists of six specific stages, or project processes. Figure 1.2 illustrates the project processes along the project life cycle.

Schematic illustration of the processes in the project life cycle

FIGURE 1.2 The processes in the project life cycle

Initiating

Also considered preplanning or scoping, the project is conceived, its scope is defined, and a preliminary budget is drafted during the initiating process. The powers that be—that is, the customer, executive, or other project sponsor paying for the project—agree to the project objectives and requirements.

The initiating stage is also the stage when a project manager is assigned, the business case for the project is outlined, and any other stakeholders and their expectations are identified.

Planning

The project manager works during the planning process to transform the goals and constraints defined in the initiating process into a roadmap for achieving those goals, step by step and task by task. To do this, the project manager lays out the tasks in the work breakdown structure (WBS), determines the duration and dependency of those tasks, assigns resources to the tasks, and estimates costs for those resources.

This effort defines the project schedule, resource requirements, and costs with a greater degree of certainty. With its scheduling engine, resource planner, and costing formulas, Microsoft Project steps up as the project manager's key partner in this planning process.

Executing

When planning is complete and the funding and resources are secured and ready to work, the project manager can press that figurative GO button. This represents the start of the executing process.

The project starts and all resources begin working on their assigned tasks in the work breakdown structure. The clock is ticking and the budget is depleting. The project manager can now use Microsoft Project to track actual progress against the scheduled projections in the plan.

Monitoring and Controlling

As soon