Setup project information – Maintain

So now we are ready to begin our journey with MS project, once you open project the first thing you must do is to setup project information.

Go to Project menu and click on Project Information button.

This will launch the project information window

The first thing you need to decide how do you plan your project, you can plan your project in forward way from specific date or backward if you want to finish project on specific date.

You can select the schedule method by selecting the schedule from drop box, it can allow planning from project start date or from project end date in reverse order. The start date or end date field automatically enabled or disabled based on your selection in schedule form.

In our scenario we don’t have end date constrains but we know that we cannot start the project before 30^th Nov 2014. So let us start planning the project from 1^st of December.

In Schedule from: select “Project Start Date”

Select Start date as 1 Dec 2014.

The other important field you must configure is to select the calendar your project will follow. We will discuss calendar in much details in next session, for now select the Calendar as “Standard”.

The Priority selection determine how your project need to be weighted or given priority compared to other project when there is conflicts with other project. This is useful when your project is part of some other project etc.

 The value can range from 0 to 1000, 500 is default value. Higher the value means it is more important.

Let us assume you have shared resource on two different projects when you try automatic leveling the project will give preference to project which has more priority.

For our scenario leave the priority value to as it is, the status date is used for reporting purpose. Leave it as it is for now.

Introduction

There are many causes of project failure and every failed project will have its own set of issues, however below are common reasons why project fails in most of cases.

#1 - Lack of Visibility of all Projects
#2 - Unclear Project Objectives
#3 - No Visibility into Resource Workload
#4 - Gaps in Communication

Above situations can be managed easily by tools like Microsoft Project, however many project manager procrastinate to use tool like MS project. When I discussed same with my colleagues and friends it is observed that many of them never got trained on this tool and find same as complex to use.

Many books available in market to educate MS project but many of them are more theoretical thus many project manager find it difficult to understand and stop themselves from getting familiar with this great tool.

I had many request from friends to educate them on this tool thus I am writing this blog to help out those who are interested in learning MS project by example.
In coming weeks we will understand the product by learning more about the tool and by working on one scenario that will resemble to real life project scenario.