Why MS Project

Why MS Project

Microsoft Project is the world's most popular project management software developed and sold by Microsoft.
The application is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analyzing workloads. This software builds to assist us in managing the triple constraints or Project Triangle.

Let us see how it can help

Scope: It can help us create and manage the work break down structure by providing the ability to create task, activities, milestones etc.

Time: It can help us to understand and control the timeline of project. It can automatically assist us in arriving the expected duration of project by taking care of holidays, leaves and shifts of resources. Also you can keep track of critical path of your project.

Cost: It can help us managing the resources costs like humans and material. You can use different situational costing for same resource based on respective situation (e.g. If resource is doing overtime it can help us to take care of its overtime rate). It can easily help us to maintain the fixed cost or for calculating cost of material based on usage of respective material. It can help us to visualize the cost variance from our actual plan in case we started to over budget.

Resources: MS Project great way help us to manage resources, we can track and manage different type of resources. In case it is human resources we can manage the workload so our people can have great work to life balance.

Risk: It can help us to visualize critical path and can assist us in tracking our progress against it to avoid possible delays. Also the different type of resource can help us to identify issues like over budgeting etc.

Quality: Well MS Project can’t directly help you to control quality of your product or the outcomes of project however it cans great way help you maintain your project execution quality. (Off course considering you are using the tool effectively and you will by end of training?)
Considering typical phases of any project, MS project can help us in Planning, Executing, Monitoring and controlling and at end closing.