Using Microsoft Project To Manage Projects
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Introduction
Project management is an important part of a planner\'s responsibilities. For the most part, planners manage projects in an informal way: they have a deadline to meet, and they monitor progress of the project intuitively. However, sophisticated tools are available for managing projects more formally. These instructions introduce you to Microsoft Project, software that helps to plan and track projects. You will walk through instructions for project planning with Project, and then for project tracking. Since time is limited, you will only work with a subset of the features available with Project.
In managing projects, there are essentially two steps: project planning, and project tracking. Projects consist of several tasks, each of a certain duration, that are to be carried out in a certain sequence. Project planning happens at the start of a project; at this stage the planner identifies the tasks involved, estimates task duration, and guesses at task sequence. As the project progresses, some of this may change: task sequences may have to be altered, and tasks may take longer or shorter than originally planned. Project tracking involves recording these various changes, and making appropriate changes to the proposed schedule; tracking must take places throughout the life of the project.
Initial Steps
To launch Project, double-click on the Microsoft Project icon. (Macintosh users will find this on URBAN-SERVER1 in the MAC_APPS volume; PC users will find this in the .)When the Welcome! message box is displayed, click on the button next to Start a New Project.
The various parts of the Project screen are as follows:
- Below the menu bar is the tool bar. This contains a number of buttons that can be clicked to carry out certain common operations.
- Below the toolbar, to the left side of the screen is the Task Table. This looks like a spreadsheet, with information about each task in a row.
- To the right of the Task Table is the Gantt Chart. Using horizontal bars, the Gantt Chart graphically represents the task schedule.
To change the relative sizes of each of these parts of the screen, drag their boundaries to the new location. To increase the height of the Gantt Chart, drag the lower boundary of the Chart. To change the size of portions within each part (for instance, the width of the Name column in the Task Table), drag the bounding element of that portion. To change the width of the Name column in the Task Table, drag the vertical line on the right side of the column to a new location.
Several options for Project functioning and appearance can be controlled using the Tools|Options... menu item. For this exercise, I suggest you change the following settings in the way Project functions. In the Options dialog box, choose the Schedule tab, and set the different options like this