Datasheet

and tasks will change over time. They hold numerous meetings to keep everyone in the project
informed. People have developed these simple organizational tools because projects typically have
so many bits and pieces that no one can possibly remember them all.
To manage a project, you need a set of procedures. Project management software automates many
of these procedures. With project management software, you can do the following:
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Plan upfront: By preplanning the various elements of your project, you can more accu-
rately estimate the time and resources that are required to complete the project.
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View your progress: By examining your progress on an ongoing basis from various
perspectives, you can see whether you are likely to meet your goal.
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Recognize conflicts: By identifying time and resource conflicts early, you can try out
various what-if scenarios to resolve them before the project gets out of hand.
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Make adjustments: You can make adjustments to task timing and costs, and automati-
cally update all other tasks in the project to reflect the impact of your changes.
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Generate professional-looking reports: You can create reports on the status of your proj-
ect to help team members prioritize and to help management make informed decisions.
To effectively manage projects with many participants, often based in many locations,
consider using Project 2007 in conjunction with its companion server product, Project
Server. Using Project Server and Project 2007, you can manage projects in a Web-based environment,
simplifying collaboration. For more details, see Chapters 16 through 21.
What’s required of you
Many people contemplate using project management software with about as much relish as they
contemplate having surgery. They anticipate hours of data-entry time before they can get anything
out of the software. To some extent, that vision is true. You have to provide a certain amount of
information about your project for any software to estimate schedules and generate reports, just as
you have to enter numbers for a spreadsheet to calculate a budget or a loan payback schedule.
On the other hand, after you enter your basic project information into Microsoft Project, the ongoing
maintenance of that data is far easier than generating handwritten to-do lists that become obsolete
almost immediately. In addition, the accuracy and professionalism of reports that you generate with
Project can make the difference between a poorly managed project and a successful one. As with a
quarterly budget that you create with spreadsheet software, after you enter the data, Project performs
its calculations automatically. And, using Project makes it easy for you to quickly spot potential prob-
lems and to test alternative solutions.
So, exactly what do you have to do to manage your project with Microsoft Project? To create a
schedule in Microsoft Project, you must enter the following information about your tasks:
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Individual task names
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Task durations
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Task dependencies
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Project Management Basics
Part I
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