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Chapter 1: Project Management: What It Is, and Why You Should Care
✓ You can use built-in templates to get a head start on your project.
Project templates are prebuilt plans for a typical business project, such
as commercial construction, an engineering project, a new product roll-
out, software development, or an office move. See the section “Starting
with templates,” later in this chapter, for more about this time-saving
feature.
You likely do similar types of projects all the time. After you create one
project, you use it as a template for future projects.
✓ You can create resources for your project according to information you
already created in your Outlook Address Book. You can even create
one set of company resources and give access to every project manager
in the company (see Chapters 18 and 19 for how to set up centralized
enterprise resources).
✓ A number of tools in Project use complex algorithms (that you couldn’t
even begin to figure out) to do such tasks as level resource assignments
to solve resource conflicts, filter tasks by various criteria, model what-if
scenarios, and calculate in dollars the value of work performed to date.
Collaborating with your
project team online
You can take advantage of all the Internet has to offer by using Project
features to collaborate with others. In fact, Project is part of the world of
Enterprise Project Management (EPM), where easily sharing ideas, informa-
tion, and documents across your enterprise becomes possible.
For example, Project allows you to e-mail a project plan to team members
and others, either as a Project file or as PDF document. You can post docu-
ments to online server locations and ask for team input.
The Professional version of Project offers the ability to work with Project
Server and Project Web App (also called Project Web Application; formerly
known as Project Web Access), which enhance workgroup collaboration.
You can take advantage of an online project center and resource center with
areas for discussions, progress tracking, document exchange, and more.
Part V of this book, “Working with Enterprise Projects,” looks at how to
take advantage of the enterprise-wide features of Project Server and Project
Web App.
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