The provided text is a comprehensive guide to using Microsoft Project 2021 for effective project management. It begins with an overview of project management concepts and a tour of the Project environment. The guide details creating a project plan from a blank template, defining project schedules, managing tasks, and establishing a work breakdown structure. It further explains how to manage project resources by adding, costing, and assigning them to tasks, as well as resolving resource conflicts. The text covers finalizing a project plan through optimization, setting baselines, and various methods for sharing the plan. Additionally, it instructs on tracking project progress, using different views, creating custom elements, and analyzing the plan with features like task boards and sprints. Finally, it explores reporting capabilities, including built-in and custom reports, visual exports to Excel, and application customization through options, templates, and sharing resources across projects.

Microsoft Project 2021 Study Guide

Quiz

1. What is the purpose of manually scheduled tasks, and when might you switch to automatically scheduled tasks in Microsoft Project?
2. Describe the function of summary tasks and how their information is derived in a project plan.
3. Explain what a milestone task is and how it is visually represented on the Gantt chart.
4. List and briefly define the four types of task relationships available in Microsoft Project.
5. Differentiate between lead time and lag time in the context of task relationships.
6. What are the three types of resources you can add to a project plan in Microsoft Project, and how do they differ?
7. Explain the concept of resource over-allocation and one method to resolve it in Microsoft Project.
8. What is the significance of setting a baseline plan in Microsoft Project, and what types of data does it track?
9. Describe the difference between the “copy” and “copy picture” commands in Microsoft Project and when you might use each.
10. What is the purpose of the project timeline, and how can you customize it for reporting to stakeholders?

Quiz Answer Key

1. Manually scheduled tasks allow you to enter placeholder text for task duration, start, or finish dates, which is useful in the early stages of project planning when not all information is available. You would typically switch to an automatic schedule before work starts on the project, allowing Project to take over the scheduling based on dependencies and durations.
2. Summary tasks are used to group related subtasks and provide an overview of a particular phase or section of the project. Their information, such as duration, start, and finish dates, is automatically calculated based on the earliest start date and latest finish date of their subtasks.
3. A milestone task is a task with zero days duration used to mark significant events or checkpoints in a project plan. On the Gantt chart, it is visually represented by a diamond icon with the date of the milestone displayed next to it.
4. The four types of task relationships are:

• Finish to Start (FS): The successor task cannot start until the predecessor task is finished.
• Start to Start (SS): The successor task can start at the same time as the predecessor task.
• Finish to Finish (FF): The successor task cannot finish until the predecessor task is finished.
• Start to Finish (SF): The successor task cannot finish until the predecessor task has started (infrequently used).

1. Lead time is a negative delay that allows a successor task to start before the predecessor task finishes, enabling task overlap. Lag time is a positive delay that introduces a pause between the finish of a predecessor task and the start of its successor task.
2. The three types of resources are:

• Work: People or equipment that perform the tasks, measured in time.
• Material: Consumable items used by the tasks, measured in units (e.g., reams of paper).
• Cost: Expenses associated with tasks, such as travel costs or rental fees, measured in currency.

1. Resource over-allocation occurs when a work resource is assigned more work than their maximum availability allows within a given timeframe. One method to resolve this is resource leveling, which delays or splits tasks to bring resource assignments within their availability limits.
2. Setting a baseline plan captures a snapshot of the original project schedule, including planned start and finish dates, durations, work, and costs. It is crucial for tracking project progress by providing a point of comparison against actual performance and identifying variances.
3. The “copy” command in Microsoft Project copies data from the selected cells to the clipboard as data, which can then be pasted into other applications, often retaining the tabular format. The “copy picture” command takes a snapshot of the selected portion of the Gantt chart or other view as an image, which can then be inserted into documents or presentations.
4. The project timeline is a visual representation of key project phases, tasks, and milestones that appears above the Gantt chart. It can be customized by adding specific tasks, adjusting the date range, and displaying tasks as callouts to provide a high-level overview of the project schedule for stakeholders.

Essay Format Questions

1. Discuss the importance of effectively managing task dependencies and constraints in Microsoft Project for creating a realistic and achievable project schedule. Explain how different types of dependencies and constraints can impact the project timeline and resource allocation.
2. Explain the process of resource management in Microsoft Project, from defining resources and their availability to assigning them to tasks and resolving over-allocations. Analyze the impact of effective resource management on project timelines and costs.
3. Evaluate the significance of tracking project progress against a baseline plan in Microsoft Project. Describe the various tools and views available for monitoring progress, identifying variances, and making necessary adjustments to keep the project on track.
4. Compare and contrast the different methods for sharing project information and reports with stakeholders using Microsoft Project. Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each method in terms of clarity, accessibility, and the level of detail provided.
5. Discuss the benefits of customizing Microsoft Project to better suit specific project needs and organizational workflows. Explain how creating custom views, fields, tables, and reports can enhance project planning, monitoring, and reporting capabilities.

Glossary of Key Terms

• Baseline Plan: A saved snapshot of the project plan at a specific point in time, used as a reference point for tracking progress and variances.
• Critical Task: A task on the critical path with zero or very little total slack; a delay in a critical task will directly impact the project’s finish date.
• Duration: The amount of working time expected to complete a task.
• Gantt Chart: A horizontal bar chart that visually represents the project schedule, showing tasks, their durations, start and finish dates, and dependencies.
• Lag Time: A delay inserted between the finish of a predecessor task and the start of a successor task.
• Lead Time: An overlap allowed between the finish of a predecessor task and the start of a successor task (represented as a negative lag).
• Milestone Task: A task with zero duration, representing a significant event or checkpoint in the project.
• Predecessor Task: A task that must be completed before another task (the successor task) can begin.
• Resource Leveling: The process of resolving resource over-allocations by delaying or splitting tasks.
• Slack (or Float): The amount of time a task can be delayed without affecting either its successor task (free slack) or the project’s finish date (total slack).
• Summary Task: A task that represents a phase or group of related subtasks; its duration and dates are calculated based on its subtasks.
• Successor Task: A task that depends on the completion of another task (the predecessor task) before it can begin.
• Task Constraint: A restriction applied to a task that affects its start or finish date (e.g., start no earlier than, finish by).
• Task Dependency: A relationship between two tasks that determines the order in which they can be performed (finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, start-to-finish).
• Timeline: A high-level graphical overview of key project tasks and milestones, typically displayed above the Gantt chart.
• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): A hierarchical decomposition of the project into smaller, more manageable tasks.

Briefing Document: Analysis of Project Management Sources

This briefing document reviews the main themes and important ideas presented in the provided excerpts from “01.pdf,” which appears to be a tutorial or guide on using Microsoft Project for project planning. The document covers the initial setup of a project plan, task management, scheduling modes, importing tasks, organizing tasks using summary tasks and the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), defining task relationships, managing project resources, finalizing the project plan by setting a baseline, sharing the plan with stakeholders, tracking project progress, analyzing the project schedule, and controlling the project plan through various actions and adjustments.

Main Themes and Important Ideas:

1. Initial Project Plan Setup and Task Entry:

• Saving the Project: The first crucial step is to save the project file. “before we start manually entering tasks into our project plan file we should probably go ahead and save the work that we’ve done so far… I’m going to name it training roll out initiative and save it.” This ensures that progress is not lost.
• Scheduling Modes (Manual vs. Automatic): Microsoft Project offers two scheduling modes for tasks:
• Manually Scheduled: This is the default mode, allowing for placeholder text in task duration, start, or finish dates. This is useful in the early stages of planning when all information might not be available. “manually scheduled gives us the ability to put placeholder text for a task duration start or finish date… before work starts on the project I always switch it to an automatic schedule.“
• Automatic Schedule: In this mode, Project takes over the scheduling based on dependencies, durations, and the project start date. Placeholder text is not allowed in this mode.
• Entering Task Names and Durations: Task names should be concise, using noun-verb combinations. Duration is typically entered in days, with “D” being optional if the unit is days.
• Task Mode Indicator: A pushpin with a question mark icon indicates a manually scheduled task in the “Task Mode” column.
• Gantt Chart Representation: Manually scheduled tasks are represented by lighter-colored bars on the Gantt chart, showing duration only until start and finish dates are automatically calculated or manually entered.

2. Importing Tasks from External Sources:

• Tasks can be efficiently imported from other sources, such as Excel spreadsheets. The excerpt demonstrates copying a range of data (excluding a specific column, like Task ID) from an Excel sheet and pasting it into the Project plan. “we’re actually going to use this tab to bring the rest of the project plan tasks into the file… I’m going to just click in cell B1 hold down my shift and my control keys I’m going to tap my right arrow and my down arrow to select everything on this import sheet except column A and then I’m going to do control C just to copy it… and now I’m going to press Ctrl Z to paste the rest of the information in.“

3. Organizing Tasks with Summary Tasks and WBS:

• Summary Tasks: These are higher-level tasks that encompass subtasks. The duration and dates of a summary task are automatically calculated based on its subtasks. The “Project Summary Task” (task zero) represents the entire project. “a summary task like this one is its information comes from its subtasks all the tasks underneath it… the whole project will take 10 days based on the start and finish dates.” Summary tasks can be collapsed and expanded to show or hide their subtasks.
• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): This is a hierarchical decomposition of the project into smaller, more manageable tasks. WBS codes provide a unique identifier for each task and are a standard way to refer to tasks. WBS codes can be displayed in a separate column or within the task name column by enabling “Outline Number” under the Gantt Chart Format tab. “often your tasks are referred to by their code numbers their WBS codes rather than the task name… now if you look in your task name column each task has its WBS code before the task name.“

4. Defining Task Relationships (Dependencies):

• Task relationships define the sequence in which tasks need to be completed. There are four types of relationships:
• Finish to Start (FS): The successor task cannot start until the predecessor task finishes (default). “when one task finishes another task starts that is the default relationship type.“
• Start to Start (SS): The successor task can start when the predecessor task starts.
• Finish to Finish (FF): The successor task cannot finish until the predecessor task finishes.
• Start to Finish (SF): The successor task cannot finish until the predecessor task starts (infrequently used).
• Predecessor and Successor Tasks: The predecessor task is the one that comes before, and the successor task is the one that follows.
• Lead and Lag Time:Lead Time: Allows for overlap between tasks (successor can start before the predecessor finishes). Represented by a positive value. “when the first task is 50% finished the next task can start that would be known as lead time.“
• Lag Time: Introduces a delay between tasks (successor starts after the predecessor finishes). Represented by a negative value in the predecessor column or a positive value in the “Lag” field of the Task Information dialog box. “after it’s finished wait one day before the next task will start… lag time is represented as a negative lead time is represented as a positive.“
• Relationships are set up by selecting tasks and using the “Link the selected tasks” icon or by directly entering predecessor task numbers in the “Predecessors” column. The Gantt chart visually represents these relationships with arrows.

5. Managing Project Resources:

• Resource Sheet View: This view is used to add and define project resources (work, material, and cost). Columns include Resource Name, Type, Material Label, Initials, Group, Max Units, Standard Rate, Overtime Rate, Cost per Use, Accrual, and Base Calendar.
• Resource Types:Work: People or equipment. Max units represent availability (e.g., 100% for full-time, 500% for five full-time individuals). Costs are defined by standard and overtime rates.
• Material: Consumable items (e.g., paper). A material label (unit of measure) must be specified.
• Cost: Project-related expenses that don’t fit into work or material (e.g., travel). Costs are entered per occurrence.
• Adding Resources: Resources are entered row by row in the Resource Sheet view, specifying their type, availability, and cost information.
• Assigning Resources to Tasks: Resources are assigned to tasks in the Gantt Chart view (in the “Resource Names” column) or through the Task Information dialog box (Resource tab). Multiple resources can be assigned to a single task.
• Resource Calendars: These define the working and non-working time for individual resources, overriding the project calendar. Exceptions (e.g., vacation) can be added to a resource calendar.
• Resolving Resource Conflicts (Over-allocations): When a resource is assigned to more work than their availability allows, they are considered over-allocated (indicated by a red person icon). Over-allocations can be resolved by:
• Delaying tasks.
• Assigning different resources.
• Leveling resources (allowing Project to automatically adjust task start and finish dates within available slack).

6. Finalizing the Project Plan and Setting a Baseline:

• Optimizing the Plan: This involves reviewing task relationships, lead/lag times, and resource assignments to ensure the schedule is realistic and efficient.
• Setting a Baseline: A baseline is a snapshot of the project plan (duration, start/finish dates, work, cost) taken before work begins. It serves as a reference point for tracking progress and identifying variances. Up to 11 baselines can be saved. “you’re definitely going to need to set a Baseline Plan before work starts on your project and that is the only way you’ll be able to track the progress of your project… Your Baseline tracks your durations the start and finish dates of your tasks the amount of work and the cost.“
• Interim Plans: These save only the current start and finish dates and are simpler than baselines, used as project markers.
• Baselines are set via the “Set Baseline” option under the Project tab. The “Project Statistics” dialog box can be used to verify that a baseline has been set.

7. Sharing the Project Plan with Stakeholders:

• Printing: Least efficient method due to potential for many pages and blank areas.
• Copying Task Lists: Selecting task names and durations and copying them into other applications like Word for a simple list.
• Copy Picture: Taking a snapshot of the Gantt chart (or a portion of it) to share as an image in documents or presentations. Options include saving as a GIF file.
• Timeline View: A high-level visual representation of key project phases and tasks, useful for stakeholder communication. Tasks can be added to the timeline and displayed as bars or callouts. The date range can be customized, and the timeline can be copied as a full-size image for sharing. “my favorite built-in tool to use to do high level reporting to stakeholders at this stage of the project is the timeline.“

8. Tracking Project Progress (Covered Briefly, likely expanded upon later):

• The document mentions that once work starts, actual progress can be tracked, and variances against the baseline will be identified.

9. Analyzing the Project Schedule (Covered Briefly, likely expanded upon later):

• The concepts of slack (free and total), critical tasks (tasks that, if delayed, will delay the project finish date), and late/slipping tasks are introduced as elements for analyzing the project schedule.

10. Controlling the Project Plan (Covered Briefly, likely expanded upon later):

• The document briefly touches upon editing the task list, setting deadlines, splitting tasks, applying constraints, and rescheduling tasks as ways to control the project plan as it evolves. Updating the baseline after significant changes is also mentioned.

This initial excerpt provides a foundational understanding of how to begin and structure a project plan in Microsoft Project, emphasizing the importance of careful setup, task organization, dependency management, resource allocation, and the establishment of a baseline for effective project control and communication.

Microsoft Project Task Scheduling and Organization

Manually Scheduling vs. Automatic Scheduling

Q1. What is the difference between manually scheduled and automatically scheduled tasks in Microsoft Project? Manually scheduled tasks allow users to enter placeholder text for the duration, start, or finish dates. This is useful in the early stages of project planning when not all information is available. The scheduling of these tasks is primarily controlled by the user. Automatically scheduled tasks, on the other hand, have their start and finish dates determined by Project based on dependencies, durations, and constraints. Once a project plan is more defined, switching to automatic scheduling allows Project to manage the timeline.

Q2. Why might you choose to use manually scheduled tasks initially in a project plan? You might choose manually scheduled tasks at the beginning of a project plan because you may not have all the detailed information about task durations, start dates, or finish dates. This mode allows you to input placeholder text or rough estimates without Project automatically calculating and potentially misrepresenting the schedule. It provides flexibility in the initial planning phase.

Q3. When is it recommended to switch from manually scheduled to automatically scheduled tasks? It is generally recommended to switch to automatically scheduled tasks once the project plan is more complete, and you have defined task names, durations, and ideally, the relationships between tasks. This allows Project to take over the scheduling, ensuring that start and finish dates are logically linked and any changes to one task automatically update dependent tasks.

Organizing Tasks: WBS, Summary Tasks, and Milestones

Q4. How can you organize tasks in Microsoft Project using a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)? A WBS is used to break down a project into smaller, more manageable components. In Microsoft Project, you can create a WBS by using summary tasks and subtasks. Summary tasks represent higher-level activities, while subtasks are the detailed work items under them. Indenting tasks under a summary task creates this hierarchical structure. Project automatically generates WBS codes (outline numbers) that reflect this hierarchy, providing a unique identifier for each task.

Q5. What is the purpose of creating summary tasks in a project plan? Summary tasks serve as containers for related subtasks. They provide an overview of a particular phase or component of the project. The duration, start, and finish dates of a summary task are automatically calculated based on the earliest start date and latest finish date of its subtasks. They help in organizing the project, making it easier to understand and report on progress at different levels.

Q6. What is a milestone task, and how is it represented in Microsoft Project? A milestone task is a task with zero days duration that marks a significant point or event in the project timeline, such as the completion of a phase or a critical decision point. In Microsoft Project, milestone tasks are represented on the Gantt chart as a diamond icon with the date next to it.

Task Relationships, Lead Time, and Lag Time

Q7. What are the four types of task relationships in Microsoft Project, and which one is the default? The four types of task relationships in Microsoft Project are: * Finish to Start (FS): The successor task cannot start until the predecessor task finishes (default). * Start to Start (SS): The successor task can start at the same time as the predecessor task. * Finish to Finish (FF): The successor task cannot finish until the predecessor task finishes. * Start to Finish (SF): The successor task cannot finish until the predecessor task starts (infrequently used). The default relationship type is Finish to Start (FS).

Q8. Explain the difference between lead time and lag time in the context of task relationships. Both lead time and lag time modify the start or finish of a successor task relative to its predecessor. * Lag Time: Introduces a delay between the finish of a predecessor task and the start of its successor (in a Finish to Start relationship), or between the start of a predecessor and the start of its successor (in a Start to Start relationship), and so on. It is entered as a positive value in the “Lag” column of the Predecessors tab in the Task Information dialog box or by adding a positive number followed by a time unit (e.g., +2 days) to the predecessor link in the Predecessors column. * Lead Time: Creates an overlap between tasks. In a Finish to Start relationship, lead time allows the successor task to start before the predecessor task has completely finished. It is entered as a negative value in the “Lag” column (e.g., -1 day) or by adding a negative number followed by a time unit to the predecessor link.

Microsoft Project 2021: Project Management in the Application

This course on Microsoft Project 2021 will begin with a brief review of project management concepts. Understanding these concepts is useful because they correlate with how project plan files are created and administered in the application. While Microsoft Project is primarily used by project managers, it’s also valuable for anyone who needs to track a schedule.

The typical phases of project management include:

• Conception and initiation: This initial phase determines the purpose of the project, whether it is feasible, and what resources would be needed for successful completion. This course will not cover this phase.
• Definition and planning: This is the phase where you determine the scope of the project and the budget. You also set up your work breakdown structure (WBS) to organize tasks and consider risk management techniques that might be necessary. This course will start with this phase, aligning with how you’ll work in Microsoft Project.
• Launch and execution: During this phase, you are actively tracking the status of your project, updating your tasks, resource assignments, and schedules, and reporting on the status to your project stakeholders. This is also known as executing the project or tracking actuals.
• Performance and control: Here, you check to ensure that your objectives are on track. If not, you identify tools to get them back on track if possible. You also assess whether the deliverables meet quality standards and perform effort and cost tracking, as well as evaluating the overall project performance. This involves monitoring project progress and controlling the project plan.
• Project close: This final phase typically involves a post-mortem to go over Lessons Learned and the creation of end-of-project reporting.

The course will primarily focus on the definition and planning phase and subsequent phases as they relate to using Microsoft Project. You will learn how to define a project, create a work breakdown structure, manage resources, track progress, and report on a project plan’s progress within the software.

Microsoft Project Environment Overview

Let’s discuss the Microsoft Project environment as described in the sources. When you launch Microsoft Project and click on “Blank project” under the “New” heading, you enter the main interface.

The key elements of the Project environment include:

• Title Bar: Located at the very top of the screen, it displays the name of the application (e.g., “Project Plan – Project Professional”). On the right side of the title bar, you’ll find your login information and the traditional window management buttons (minimize, maximize/restore, and close). It’s also noted that there are two sets of close buttons (two ‘x’s), with the top one controlling the application and the bottom one closing the current file. To the left of the title bar is the Quick Access Toolbar.
• Quick Access Toolbar: This toolbar is located to the left of the title bar and can be customized like in other Microsoft programs. The source demonstrates how to add the “Project Information” icon to this toolbar by right-clicking on it in the “Properties” group of the “Project” tab on the ribbon and selecting “Add to Quick Access Toolbar”. This allows for easy access to frequently used features.
• The Ribbon: Below the title bar is the ribbon, which is organized into tabs. The main tabs mentioned are:
• Task: This tab contains most of the features needed to work with tasks.
• Resource: This tab houses tools related to managing resources.
• Report: Here, you can access built-in interactive reports, visual reports, and create your own custom reports.
• Project: This tab is described as an overall tab with various features that will be used throughout the course, including spell check.
• View: This tab provides access to lots of different views in Project, and you can customize these views as needed.
• Help: This tab offers access to help resources, feedback options, information about new features, and comparisons to previous versions.
• Gantt Chart Format: This is a contextual tab that appears because the default view for a new blank project is “Gantt Chart with timeline”. This tab provides formatting options specific to the Gantt Chart view.
• “Tell me what you want to do” Box: Located to the right of the ribbon tabs, this box offers another way to navigate the program or get help by typing in what you are trying to achieve.
• Default View: Gantt Chart with Timeline: When you select a new blank project, this is the view you typically see. It’s a split screen:
• Timeline: Located at the top, below the ribbon, this provides a high-level overview of the project and is useful for managing the plan with a quick glance at the project’s progress.
• Entry Table: This is on the left side of the screen and contains columns where you enter task information such as task name, duration, start and finish dates, predecessors, and resource names. The column headings are visible at the top of this table.
• Gantt Chart: On the right side of the screen, this provides a visual representation of your task durations and other task-related information as the project is populated.
• View Indicator: Situated to the left of the entry table, this area currently says “Gantt Chart” and indicates the view you are currently in. You can change views by using the “View” tab on the ribbon or by right-clicking on the view indicator to see other available views.
• Status Bar: This is the gray band located all the way at the bottom of the screen. It typically starts with the word “Ready”, indicating that you can start entering information. It also provides information such as whether new tasks are manually scheduled. On the right side of the status bar, there are a series of view buttons that act as shortcuts to switch to different views like Gantt Chart, Task Usage, Team Planner, Resource Sheet, and blank Report views. Finally, to the far right is a zoom slider. Unlike in Excel or Word, this zoom slider in Project changes the time scale displayed above the Gantt chart and does not increase or decrease the font size.

Understanding these components helps you navigate and work effectively within the Microsoft Project 2021 environment.

Creating a Project Plan in Microsoft Project

Let’s discuss the process of creating a project plan in Microsoft Project as outlined in the sources.

The process typically begins by launching Microsoft Project and clicking on “Blank project”. It’s a best practice to set up your project plan file before actual work starts on your project.

The initial steps in creating a project plan involve defining the project:

• Setting the Project Schedule: You need to determine how the project will be scheduled: from its start date or its finish date. By default, Project schedules from the project start date, and all tasks begin as soon as possible. Scheduling from the finish date changes this to “all tasks begin as late as possible,” which can potentially cause issues. Therefore, it’s generally recommended to schedule from the project start date.
• Setting the Project Start Date: This is done through the “Project Information” dialog box, which can be accessed from the “Project” tab in the “Properties” group or via a customized icon on the Quick Access Toolbar. In this dialog box, you can select the desired start date for your project. Once the start date is set, a vertical line indicating the project’s start date will appear on the Gantt chart. Additionally, a default task zero (the project summary task) will update to this start date if it’s visible. You can control the visibility of this project summary task in the “Show/Hide” group of the “Gantt Chart Format” tab.
• Assigning a Project Calendar: The project calendar lists all the exceptions, such as holidays or days when no work will occur on the project. Unlike an Outlook calendar, you need to manually enter these exceptions. To set up a project calendar, you go to the “Project” tab on the ribbon and click on “Change Working Time” in the “Properties” group.
• Project has three built-in calendars: Standard, Night Shift, and 24 Hour. It’s recommended to leave these built-in calendars intact and instead create a new calendar.
• To create a new calendar, in the “Change Working Time” dialog box, select the standard calendar (or another if preferred) and then click “Create New Calendar”. You can base it on a copy of an existing calendar and give it a unique name, such as “training rollout initiative”.
• In the new calendar, you can define exceptions (non-working days) on the “Exceptions” tab by selecting dates on the mini calendar and entering a name for the exception (e.g., “Independence Day”, “Labor Day”). You can also set these exceptions to be recurring yearly with an end date far in the future.
• Once the exceptions are added, you need to tell your project plan file to use this new calendar. This is done by going back to the “Project Information” dialog box and selecting your newly created calendar from the “Calendar” dropdown menu on the right side.

After defining the project, the next step is to create and organize tasks:

• Saving the Project Plan: Before entering tasks, it’s advisable to save the project. You can use the save icon or go to “File” > “Save” or “Save As” and give your project plan file a name (e.g., “training roll out initiative”) and choose a location to save it. The title bar will then update with the correct file name.
• Entering Tasks: There are two modes for entering tasks: manually scheduled and automatically scheduled. By default, new tasks are manually scheduled. This allows you to enter placeholder text for task duration, start, or finish dates, which is useful when you don’t have all the information initially. Before work starts, it’s recommended to switch to automatic scheduling, where Project takes over the scheduling.
• You can manually enter tasks directly into the first blank “Task Name” cell in the entry table. It’s suggested that task names be fairly short noun-verb combinations. After entering a task name and pressing Enter or Tab, you can move to the “Duration” column and enter the duration in days (the default unit). Manually scheduled tasks are indicated by a pushpin with a question mark in the “Task Mode” column. The duration is visually represented by a bar in the Gantt chart.
• Tasks can also be imported from other applications, such as an Excel file. The source mentions an Excel file named “tasks for import” in the video description. To import tasks, you can copy the relevant columns (e.g., task name, duration) from the Excel sheet (excluding task ID if present) and paste them into the first blank “Task Name” cell in your project plan.
• Creating a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): This involves organizing your tasks into a hierarchical structure. The source demonstrates grouping tasks by stages (e.g., four stages in the example project) and creating summary tasks for these stages with subtasks underneath them. You can indent or outdent tasks using the buttons in the “Task” tab to create this hierarchy.
• Defining Task Relationships: You need to define how tasks are related to each other. Common task relationships include finish-to-start (FS), where a successor task cannot start until its predecessor task finishes. You can create these links by selecting the predecessor and successor tasks and using the “Link the selected tasks” button in the “Task” tab. The relationships are visually represented by link lines between the task bars on the Gantt chart.
• Scheduling Tasks: Once task relationships are defined, and the scheduling mode is set to automatic, Project will calculate the start and finish dates of tasks based on their durations, relationships, and the project calendar. You can also introduce lag time (a delay between tasks) or lead time (overlap between tasks) to fine-tune the schedule by modifying the link relationships.

By following these steps, you can create a foundational project plan in Microsoft Project, defining the project, setting up the schedule and calendar, and building the task structure with dependencies.

Microsoft Project Task Scheduling Modes

Let’s discuss task scheduling in Microsoft Project, drawing from the provided sources and our previous conversation about project plan creation.

Task scheduling in Microsoft Project revolves around how the software determines the start and finish dates of tasks. There are two primary scheduling modes for tasks: manually scheduled and automatically scheduled.

Manually Scheduled Tasks:

• By default, new tasks are created as manually scheduled.
• This mode gives you the flexibility to enter placeholder text for the task name, duration, start, or finish dates. This is particularly useful in the early stages of project planning when all the details might not be available.
• The task start date for a manually scheduled task initially defaults to the project’s start date that you set. However, you can override this with any text or date you prefer.
• The finish date for a manually scheduled task is determined by the entered duration, but again, you can manually input any value.
• Manually scheduled tasks are indicated by a pushpin with a question mark icon in the “Task Mode” column.
• In the Gantt chart, a lighter colored bar represents a manually scheduled task, and if you hover over it, the screen tip will show “duration only” if you haven’t specified start or finish dates beyond the calculated duration based on the project start date.
• Project does not automatically adjust the start and finish dates of manually scheduled tasks based on dependencies or the project calendar. You have direct control over these fields until you decide to switch to automatic scheduling.

Automatically Scheduled Tasks:

• When you switch a task to automatically scheduled mode, Project takes over the scheduling. This is generally recommended before the actual work on the project begins.
• Automatically scheduled tasks are indicated by a different icon in the “Task Mode” column, which matches the “Auto Schedule” icon on the “Task” tab of the ribbon.
• The bars for automatically scheduled tasks in the Gantt chart are a deeper color compared to manually scheduled tasks.
• Once in automatic schedule mode, Project populates the start and finish dates for all tasks based on the project start date, task durations, and any predecessor relationships you have defined.
• The project calendar plays a crucial role in automatic scheduling. Project will not schedule work on weekends (Saturdays and Sundays) by default. Additionally, any exceptions (non-working days like holidays) you define in the project calendar will be honored, and no work will be scheduled on those days.
• Task Duration: The duration of a task is a key factor in scheduling. When you enter a duration (e.g., ‘2’ for two days), Project calculates the finish date based on the start date and the working days defined in the project calendar.
• Task Relationships (Predecessors): Establishing relationships between tasks is fundamental to automatic scheduling. The default relationship is finish-to-start (FS), meaning a successor task can only start after its predecessor task finishes. When you link tasks, the start date of the successor task is automatically set to occur after the finish date of the predecessor task, taking into account weekends and calendar exceptions. Other relationship types like start-to-start (SS), finish-to-finish (FF), and start-to-finish (SF) also influence the automatic scheduling.
• Lag and Lead Time: You can further refine the schedule by adding lag time, which introduces a delay between the finish of a predecessor and the start of a successor. Conversely, lead time allows a successor task to start before its predecessor has fully finished, creating an overlap. These adjustments directly impact the automatically calculated start and finish dates.

To switch between manual and automatic scheduling, you can use the “Task Mode” column for individual tasks or select multiple tasks and use the “Manually Scheduled” or “Auto Schedule” buttons in the “Task” tab of the ribbon. You can also change the default scheduling mode for new tasks via the status bar.

In summary, task scheduling in Microsoft Project involves initially defining the project’s schedule and calendar, then creating tasks with durations and establishing relationships. You can start by manually scheduling tasks to input preliminary information and then transition to automatic scheduling to let Project calculate and manage the task start and finish dates based on dependencies and the project calendar. This automatic scheduling ensures a coherent and realistic project timeline.

Microsoft Project: Monitoring Project Progress

Let’s discuss project monitoring in Microsoft Project, drawing on the information in the sources. Project monitoring is a crucial aspect of project management that involves tracking the progress of your project plan and ensuring that objectives are on track. Microsoft Project offers several tools and features to help you effectively monitor your project’s progress.

According to the course outline, Module 3, Lesson 2 is specifically focused on “monitoring project progress”. This involves several key activities:

• Viewing the project in a number of ways: Microsoft Project offers various views that provide different perspectives on your project’s status.
• Gantt Chart: This is the default view and provides a visual timeline of tasks, their durations, and dependencies. You can also visualize progress on the Gantt chart by the thin blue line that appears within the Gantt bars as tasks are completed.
• Tracking Gantt View: This view compares the current schedule with the baseline plan, visually indicating progress. It shows the taskbar (blue) in relation to the baseline bar (gray). Tasks ahead of schedule will have their blue bar extending beyond the gray baseline bar. This view also displays the percentage of completion next to most taskbars.
• Variance Table: Accessible through the “View” tab > “Tables” > “Variance”, this table displays the start and finish dates compared to the baseline start and finish dates, along with the start and finish variance. Negative variance indicates starting or finishing ahead of schedule.
• Project Statistics: Found in the “Project Information” dialog box (accessible from the “Project” tab or a customized Quick Access Toolbar), the statistics provide a summary of the current, baseline, and actual start and finish dates, duration, work, and cost, as well as the variances. It also shows the percent complete for duration and work for the overall project.
• Network Diagram View: This view presents the project as a flowchart, with parallelograms representing summary tasks and rectangles representing subtasks. It displays task names, start and finish dates, IDs, durations, and percent complete. A slash through the shape indicates work has started, and a double slash might indicate 100% completion.
• Task Boards: This view, accessible from the “View” tab, displays tasks in columns representing different statuses (e.g., Not Started, In Progress, Done). You can move tasks between columns to reflect their current status. The appearance of cards can be customized to show additional information like task ID and percent complete.
• Sprint Views: If you are using Sprints (time-phased layers), Project offers views like the Current Sprint Board and Current Sprint Sheet to monitor progress within specific timeframes.
• Adding custom fields: You can create custom fields in Project to track additional information relevant to monitoring. These can be text, cost, date, or other types of fields and can be used to categorize or flag tasks or resources for monitoring purposes. For example, you can add a field to track the department responsible for a task. You can also use graphical indicators in custom fields to visually represent progress based on certain criteria.
• Creating custom views: Beyond the built-in views, you can create your own custom views by combining different tables, filters, and groupings to focus on specific aspects of project monitoring. For example, you can create a split view that shows the Gantt chart at the top and a task form at the bottom to view or edit detailed task information.
• Creating a network diagram: As mentioned earlier, the network diagram provides a visual flow of the project, helping to understand task dependencies and potential bottlenecks.
• Analyzing the plan: Project provides features to analyze the schedule and identify potential issues.
• Critical Tasks: These are tasks that, if delayed, will directly impact the project’s finish date. They can be highlighted on the Gantt chart with a specific color (e.g., salmon) when the “critical tasks” option is checked in the “Gantt Chart Format” tab.
• Slack (Free and Total): Free slack is the amount of time a task can be delayed without delaying its successor task. Total slack is the amount of time a task can be delayed without delaying the entire project finish date. Slack can be visualized as a thin black line to the right of the taskbar on the Gantt chart when the “Slack” option is checked. You can also view free and total slack in a table.
• Late Tasks: These are tasks running behind both the baseline start and finish dates. They can be highlighted on the Gantt chart.
• Slipping Tasks: Tasks with a forecasted finish date later than the baseline finish date. Slippage can be visualized on the Gantt chart by selecting “Baseline” under the “Slippage” dropdown in the “Gantt Chart Format” tab, which displays a thin bar indicating the difference between the baseline and scheduled start dates.
• You can create a custom table to display fields like “Critical”, “Free Slack”, and “Total Slack” to analyze these aspects of your plan in a tabular format.
• Using task boards and defining sprints: Task boards and sprints offer an agile approach to monitoring within Microsoft Project. By using task boards, you can visually track the progress of tasks through different stages. Sprints allow you to monitor progress within defined time intervals.
• Sorting, Filtering, Highlighting, and Grouping: These features in the “View” tab’s “Data” group allow you to focus on specific sets of tasks or resources for monitoring. You can sort tasks by criteria like cost, filter tasks based on resources or cost ranges, highlight specific tasks (e.g., those assigned to a particular resource), and group tasks by various criteria like duration.
• Utilizing Reports: Microsoft Project has built-in interactive reports accessible from the “Report” tab. These reports provide valuable insights into various aspects of the project, including:
• Dashboards: Offering a high-level overview with reports like Project Overview, Upcoming Tasks, and Work Overview.
• Resources: Showing over-allocated resources and resource utilization.
• Costs: Providing insights into cash flow, cost overruns, earned value, and resource/task cost overviews.
• In Progress: Highlighting critical tasks, late tasks, milestones, and slipping tasks.
• Task Boards: Offering reports on task status and work status within the task board framework.
• Sprints: Providing reports focused on task and work status within the defined sprints.

By utilizing these diverse tools and views within Microsoft Project, you can effectively monitor your project’s progress, identify potential deviations from the plan, and take necessary actions to keep your project on track. Remember to regularly review these monitoring tools throughout the launch and execution phase of your project.

The Original Text

welcome to learn it training the exercise files for today’s course are located in the video description below don’t forget to like And subscribe hi everyone Trish Connor Kato here welcome to Microsoft Project 2021 this video is for users who are looking to gain skills in Microsoft Project to create administer Monitor and report on a project plan’s progress project is a powerful scheduling tool used to track tasks resources and costs it also provides powerful and interactive reporting tools used through each stage of a project as you will see during the course we’ll start with A Brief Review of project management Concepts although Microsoft Project is used by project managers it’s also widely used by anyone in a position that requires tracking a schedule it is useful to know how project management Concepts correlate to the way plan files are created and administered in the application we’ll move on to become comfortable in the project environment learning how to navigate around so you’ll be acclimated to that environment we’ll dive into creating a project plan file defining a project and assigning a project calendar then we will begin to create and organize task we will manually enter tasks into project as well as import some from another application we will organize our tasks by creating a work breakdown structure defining tasks relationships and scheduling tasks all of this occurs in the first module in the second module we’ll focus on managing project plan resources and finalizing a project plan we’ll start by adding resources to a project plan creating a resource calendar entering resource cost and assigning resources to tasks we’ll also learn how to effectively manage resource conflicts well in this module by optimizing our project plan setting a Baseline and sharing the plan our first module consists of three lessons lesson one is getting started well we’ll go over project management Concepts and you’ll learn how to navigate the project environment our second lesson is defining a project where we’ll create a project plan from scratch Define the project and assign a project calendar and in our final lesson in this module is creating and organizing our tasks we’ll be adding tasks to our project plan we’ll also import tasks from other programs specifically there is an Excel file in the video description named tasks for import that we’ll be using so before we get started in this lesson you might want to go ahead and grab that file and put it somewhere in your system for easy access then we’ll move on to creating a work breakdown structure it is a way of organizing your tasks it’s known commonly as WBS will Define task relationships and schedule tasks the first phase of project management is conception and initiation and that’s the phase where the purpose of the project is determined whether it can be done or not and what would be needed for a successful completion we’re not going to be covering that phase of project management in this course we’ll start with the definition and planning phase which really lines up with how you’re going to be working in Microsoft Project and this is where you determine the scope of the project and the budget you set up your work breakdown structure which organize your task and you look at risk management techniques that you may need to implement at any point in the project then you move on to the launch and execution phase this is where you’re tracking the status of your project you’re updating your tasks your resource assignments and schedules and your reporting on status to your project stakeholders the next phase is performance and control and this is where you are checking to make sure that your objectives are on track and if not what tools can you use to get them back on track if possible whether the deliverables the end results are of quality you’re also going to be doing effort and cost tracking as well as performance of the overall project and then you have the project close phase which typically consists of some sort of post-mortem where you go over Lessons Learned and the end of project reporting I’ve launched project and I’m sitting on the welcoming screen and I’m going to just click on blank project under the new heading so that it takes us into the interface and this is where I’m going to give you the grand tour so I’m going to start at the very top of the screen where it says project run project professional of course every window has a title bar and that’s what you’re seeing there to the right you have your login information and your traditional window management buttons I always like to point out that when you have two x’s one on the top and one on the bottom the top one controls the application the bottom One controls the current file to the left of your title bar you have a little bit of a quick access toolbar which can be customized like in all your other Microsoft programs there is a useful thing that we’ll be using throughout the course so I’m going to show you one way to customize that quick access toolbar and so we’re going to go to the project tab on the ribbon and in the Properties Group you’ll see several different icons and the group names are at the bottom so in the Properties Group we’re looking for the project information icon and what you’re going to do is you’re going to right click on it and choose add to quick access toolbar so now that project information dialog box can be easily accessed from the quick access toolbar and we’ll be using it several times throughout the course so that’s a good place for it the project ribbon starts with your task tab everything pretty much that you need to do about tasks can be done from this tab you have a resource Tab and the same is true here anything having to do with your resource could potentially be handled from this ribbon tab you have a report tab so we mentioned in the introduction that you have these built in interactive reports this is where you can access them as well as visual reports and you can create your own custom reports from this ribbon tab as well your project tab is an overall tab we’ll be using multiple things on this tab throughout the course and it’s where you can find spell check by the way you have a view tab where you have lots of different views in Project sometimes when you’re new to project it can be overwhelming but what you’ll find are the views that are useful for you and you’ll learn how to customize them as necessary you have a help tab on the ribbon everything about help or giving feedback about the program finding out what’s new and this particular version of project versus previous versions and because when we selected a new blank project the default view is Gantt chart with timeline so you get that contextual tab on your Ribbon which is the Gantt chart format tab that tab is there because it is view we’re in to the right of that you have another way of navigating the program or getting help and that’s your tell me what you want to do box and underneath your Ribbon this default view is called Gantt chart with timeline so you have a timeline that’s a good high level reporting tool or good for you if you’re managing the project plan it’s a quick at a glance of where your project is as you’ll see when we populate it throughout the course underneath your timeline you have a split screen on the left side of the screen you have what’s known as the entry table and on the right side of your screen you have your Gantt chart which when populated will be a visual representation of your task duration as well as some other things about your tasks so you’ll see how these views change as we populate when we start working on our project to the left of your table you have a view indicator and that’s where it says currently Gantt chart that’s the view that we’re currently in so the view indicator says Gantt chart now you can use the view menu to change the different views or you can right click on that view indicator and you’ll see other views that you can switch to all the way at the bottom of the screen in the gray band you’ll see and in my case it starts with the word ready down there and that whole gray area is called your status bar all the way at the bottom so it tells you that it’s ready so if you wanted to start putting in things into your project plan file you could it lets you know that new tasks are manually scheduled down there which you’ll learn about shortly and over to the right side you have a series of view buttons kind of shortcuts that you can use instead of using the view indicator or the view tab of the ribbon you have five different views that you can switch to by using those buttons so the first one is kind of shaded already that’s our default view the view you’re currently in Gantt chart you can get to task usage team planner resource sheet and blank report views from there and then finally to the right you have a zoom slider now it doesn’t function in here the way it does in Excel and in word where it increases the size of your font on the screen for easier viewing and here if you look above the Gantt chart portion of your screen you have what’s known as a time scales when you’re in this View and you use the zoom slider it changes the time scale it does nothing to zoom your text in so it’s larger or smaller the type of project plan that we’re going to be working on during this course is the rollout of a training initiative so it could be that your company is getting a new piece of proprietary software and everyone or most people need to be trained on it or it could be that your company wants everyone trained on Microsoft Project and they need to roll out this initiative so the training is conducted appropriately so we could use this new blank template that we created before but let’s just go to the file tab of the ribbon and on the left side click on new and we’ll just start with another new blank project so now you see it has project two up in the title bar if we had closed project and went back in and did new we would get project one again we hadn’t saved it or named it so that’s kind of how that works it will just keep assigning sequential numbers until you give it a name now a best practice here is to set up your project plan file before actual work starts on your project now we know in the real world that’s not always possible but if you can aim toward that that is a best practice now when you first set up your project plan file you need to Define your project and that means that you have to set the way that the project is going to be scheduled and either its start or finish date and so we’re going to do that from that project information dialog box and we put it up on our quick access toolbar if you didn’t get it up there it resides on the project tab of the ribbon in the Properties Group whichever way you want to access it you can now notice in this project information for project 2 dialog box it has the finished date dimmed out can access the finished date field and that’s because the project by default is scheduled from its start date and let’s just have a brief conversation about that for a moment there’s only two ways you can schedule your project from its start date or finish date now you might think okay well I have this project plan and let’s say it has a deadline of October 31st you might want to schedule it from the Finish date and put in October 31st but in the background project does reverse logic in a lot of areas so for example it defaults to being scheduled from the project start date and right underneath that it says all tasks begin as soon as possible if you schedule it from the Finish date then it changes that constraint to all tasks begin as late as possible and that could actually end up jamming you up in your project schedule so I typically recommend scheduling from your project start date there are things that you’ll learn throughout the course let’s say usually October 31st as a perspective end date again let’s say you get to a certain point in your project that you scheduled from the start date and you realize that you may not make your end date there are ways that you can it’s called crashing your schedule so you can gain some time back in your plan that could potentially help you meet that end date even if you’re scheduling from the start date so for our start date what we’re going to do here is I’m going to just choose the following Monday from whatever date I’m currently on as the start date of this project actually I’m not going to do that I’m going to do the next day as the start date of my project here and we also so let’s let me do this one step at a time we put in the next day as our start date and we’re going to click ok and a couple of things change during your screen first of all if you look over on the right at the Gantt chart portion of your screen you now have a vertical line that’s going down the current where your current date is and to the right of that you have a dotted vertical line that indicates your Project’s start date also this task zero that showed up and that’s a default setting if you don’t have it I’ll tell you shortly how to get that default task there that also updated to the start date that you set now I’m going to show you how to control whether this default task shows up and so one way we can control it it’s set as a default in my options but we can go to that Gantt chart format tab and over to the right in the show hide group you’ll see that project summary task is checked what I’m going to do for right now is uncheck it and we’ll talk about the project summary task a little bit later in the course but we don’t need to have it there right now after you’ve set a start date or finish date for your project you’re going to want to assign a project calendar the project calendar lists all the exceptions so days that no work will happen on the project this is not like an Outlook calendar where you can import the holidays and stuff like that you have to manually enter them but the good news is if you set up a project calendar and you have other projects that are going to be using that same calendar or those same exceptions you can actually share that calendar across different project plans and you’ll learn how to do that later in the course for right now we’re going to go ahead and set up our project calendar and we’re going to go to the project tab of the ribbon and in that Properties Group we’re going to click on change working time and so project has three built-in calendars if you look up at the top of the change working time dialog box there’s a four calendar box and it’s set to the standard project calendar so your standard project calendar is for a standard working times of eight to five so eight to noon and then an hour off for lunch and one to five as you’ll see on the right side of that screen so that is a built-in calendar if I go to the drop down arrow next to where it says standard project calendar you’ll see that there’s also a night shift calendar that’s built in and that goes from 11 at night well it says as for June 20th it has one hour no 11 pm to 12 a.m the next day so we can adjust the hours for that but if you have a project where people are working on different shifts and there is a night shift you can base it off of that calendar and then you have your 24 hour calendar and no we don’t work people 24 hours however you might have equipment that is running continuously on your project and a 24-hour calendar could be assigned to it so you have these three built-in calendars but you really don’t want to use any of them you want to leave those alone and intact we’re going to go to the drop down and switch back to standard project calendar and over to the right we’re going to choose create new calendar and we’re going to make it a copy it’s going to be based off of that copy of standard so eight to five with an hour break for lunch and we’re going to give it a name and we’ll just call it training roll out training rollout initiative and we’ll click ok so by default when project schedules work it never schedules on a weekend now you can override that if necessary but it will never schedule on a Saturday or a Sunday so what we need to do for our training rollout initiative calendar is put exceptions on there for days that we know no work is going to happen with the exception of the weekends so if I look at this mini calendar if I do the down arrow to scroll down it will take me to the following month and so we’ll notice that Independence Day is on July 4th I’m going to go ahead and click on the 4th of July on that mini calendar and then in on the lower half of the screen you have two tabs exceptions and work weeks we’re on the exceptions Tab and in the name box we’re going to just type Independence Day and when you press your tab key it will populate the start and the Finish dates for July 4th because we selected it on the calendar now if you click on the next name line underneath Independence Day and then back on Independence Day you’ll notice that the details button on the right side will become available to you go ahead and click details and this is where you can set up Independence Day as recurring so underneath recurrence pattern we’re going to select the option button in front of yearly and we’re going to put we’ll leave it on July 4th and then what I usually do you can end after a certain amount of occurrences I’m going to choose End by and I’m going to change the year 22. to the year I’m Gonna Change it to the year 2050 so 50. and then click ok so somewhere far out so I don’t have to worry about it so that’s our first exception is you look at the little mini calendar again you’ll see that July 4th right it tells you it’s a non-working day it’s based on the particular exception of Independence Day on the calendar so now let’s navigate our little mini calendar and let’s go to September and we’re going to do September 5th make sure that date is selected put in Labor Day as an exception on the next name line and tab click away from the line and back on it so you can get to details and make that recurring yearly on the first Monday of September and ended in the year 2050 the recurrence and those are the two exceptions we’ll put on and again later you can okay your way out of there later on in the course you’ll learn how that calendar can be utilized by other project plans so you don’t always have to recreate the wheel once you’ve added the exceptions to your calendar we just need to tell your project plan file to use that calendar and we’re going to go back to our project information icon on the quick access Toolbar to do that on the right side of the project information dialog box you’ll notice the calendar defaults to the standard calendar we’re going to do the drop down next to standard and choose training rollout initiatives and click ok so it won’t assign any work on the project for the 4th of July or for Labor Day based on the exceptions that we put on our calendar before we start manually entering tasks into our project plan file we should probably go ahead and save the work that we’ve done so far so I’m going to go ahead and you can click the save icon or go to file save or save as it’s going to take you to save as I’m going to browse for where I want to place this and I’m going to just navigate to where I want to place my project plan file and I’m going to name it training roll out initiative and save it so now of course our title bar updated with the proper name for our file and we’re ready to start manually entering tasks now there are two modes if you will when you enter tasks there’s manually scheduled and earlier I pointed out that it says that new tasks are by default manually scheduled and then there’s the automatic schedule if I click down there I can Auto schedule new tasks we’re going to leave it on manually scheduled right now manually scheduled gives us the ability to put placeholder text for a task duration start or finish date so typically you’re entering you’re starting your project plan file well before work starts on your project you may not quite have all the information so you want to give yourself the ability to put placeholder text and then before work starts on the project I always switch it to an automatic schedule and in that Way project takes over the scheduling right now we’re going to enter our cast names and durations and so if we look at our column headings in our entry table we have an informational column we have a task mode column and you’ll see the indicator for a manually scheduled tasks there in a moment we have task name duration start finish predecessors resource names we’ll deal with start finish predecessors and resource names later for right now we’re going to click in the first task name cell and you want your task names to be fairly short noun verb combinations so we’re going to type Define project objectives and describe mission statement and press enter so and you could have pressed tab I’ll go back up Arrow you could press tab to get over to duration the default unit for a duration is days so you don’t have to type the D which would normally represent days if the duration is in days and that duration so we’re going to type the number two and press enter and notice how it gives it days now a couple of things happened I want to direct your attention to the task mode column and the push pin with the question mark is indicative of a manually scheduled task there’s only two modes manual and Auto if you look over at your Gantt chart you have a bar on your Gantt chart that is representing the duration of the task which is two days if you hover over that bar it will give you a screen tip that says duration only and the task start date is the date that we set our project to start on its finish date is the following day because we made the duration two days let’s put our next task in the next one is ensure total participation by training team and support staff and I’m going to tab after that one and that’s a one day duration so I’m going to just type the number one and press enter we’re going to add several more tasks at this point I’m going to go ahead and get them entered in and then when I resume you’ll see them and you can copy them from my screen I’ve completed our initial task list and I’ve widened the task name column so it doesn’t word wrap so you’re going to complete the other entries on this list on your own so now I’m showing the task for import Excel file that’s in the video description and the file has two tabs the first tab the manually enter tab those are the tasks that we’ve already entered into project now we have another tab at the bottom the import Tab and we’re actually going to use this tab to bring the rest of the project plan tasks into the file now we don’t need to import the task ID that’s in column A so I’m going to just click in cell B1 hold down my shift and my control keys I’m going to tap my right arrow and my down arrow to select everything on this import sheet except column A and then I’m going to do control C just to copy it and now I’m ready to switch back over to my project plan and I’m going to click in the first blank task name cell and by the way notice the row numbers on the left those correspond to the task numbers right now so task one is Define project objectives and describe mission statement and now I’m going to press Ctrl Z to paste the rest of the information in so didn’t have to type all of that stuff and some of the rows are kind of weird I’m seeing some kind of row deviations here in terms of the size so I’m going to just expand my task name column so we don’t get any text wrap and I’m just dragging it putting my mouse between the divider between it and the duration column headings and that just fixed my little role issue that I had you may not have had that issue it could be a resolution thing so we have our task list completed in here now and that’s as of right now now again we may not know all the information and since we’re in manually scheduled mode we can use placeholder text as I mentioned for duration start or finish date so if you look at tasks eight by row number for that duration which is currently 1.5 days I’m going to just go into the duration field and I’m going to type ask coordinator and press enter so it allows me to put placeholder text there notice that the corresponding bar on the Gantt chart portion disappeared because we no longer have a duration now once we put it into Auto schedule mode once project takes over the schedule you won’t be able to type that kind of placeholder text in the duration or start and finish date fields we’re going to change that duration back to 1.5 days so that’s only again because you’re in manually scheduled mode will it allow that let’s say that our task list is as complete as we think it could be at this point and so we want project to take over our scheduling we want to change it all to Auto scheduled and so what I’m going to do and this is very similar to in Excel I can click in the gray box between the row and column headings the intersection box at for your table on the left to select everything and then on the task tab of the ribbon in the task group you will see a manually scheduled icon which is already shaded because everything is manually scheduled and right next to it you have Auto schedule go ahead and click Auto schedule and then you can just click away from any on any cell in your table to get rid of the selection so a couple of things happened first take a look at your task mode column it now has a different icon in there and that icon represents an auto schedule task and it matches the icon that’s on the task tab of the ribbon for auto schedule the other thing that happened is the color of the bars in your Gantt chart changed they’re a deeper color now before it was a lighter color and that’s lighter for a manually scheduled task versus darker for auto schedule tasks and last but certainly not least based on our project start date it has populated the start and the Finish dates for our entire project now you’ll notice if you look at the start date column all of the tasks are starting on the project start date and that’s where creating a work breakdown structure to start organizing our tasks and relating them to each other will make our start and finish dates adjust and that’s the section we’re going to be going into now one way to organize our tasks is to start creating summary tasks before applying a work breakdown structure series of codes to each task so we had earlier seen task zero on my screen and I got rid of it before we really started doing anything when we had our blank template and so now it’s time to bring back task zero so on the ribbon I’m going to go to the Gantt chart format tab and over in the show hide group to the right you’re going to check the box in front of project summary task and when you do that you get a new task at the very top it takes on the name of your project it is in bold if you look at the row number it’s row zero that’s why it’s known as task zero and that is an example of a summary task that is your whole Project based on the information in here right now the whole project will take 10 days based on the start and finish dates so a summary task like this one is its information comes from its subtasks all the tasks underneath it so task zero the project summary task is a good example of a summary task if I want it to collapse it notice right in front of the task name you have that collapse Arrow if I click that everything in the project is collapsed and then I have the expand Arrow so I can expand it again so what I’ve done is I’ve gone ahead and entered two other summary tasks for stage one underneath stage one and they’re showing on my screen so you want to get those entered seek input from training vendor and perform end user skill assessment using indent and outdent as necessary and then when you’re done getting those in you can pause the video so you can just stare at my screen and get those done when you’re done you can unpause and I will have the stage two summary tasks set up on the screen for you to complete on your end now you’re seeing the stage 2 project commencement summary tasks and its other summary tasks so you can pause again and get those set up for stage two and when you unpause I’ll have stage three and four ready for you and now here’s how you’re gonna set up stage three and stage four stage three is a summary task it only has one subtask stage four includes two summary tasks with subtasks and now I’ve collapsed all my stages and your row numbers should match up to mine so I have task 0 1 22 46 and 48 showing on my screen and so when you were working on your summary and subtasks to make it more automated you could have gone down to your status bar where it said new tasks manually scheduled and just change that down there to new tasks Auto scheduled so you wouldn’t have to change it in the task mode column now what we’re going to do is we’re going to add some Milestone tasks to our project plan a milestone task is a task with zero days duration it’s meant to just note a particular milestone in your project plan so let’s expand stage two stages one and two if they’re not already expanded and so my stage two is on row 22. I’m going to just right click on that row heading and insert task and a new task I’m going to name it stage one project planning complete and I’m gonna give it a zero day duration so Milestone tasks show up on your Gantt chart as that little Diamond icon right and with the date next to it so that’s how it shows up on your Gantt chart zero day task is a milestone task now for that task we want to out Dent it so it’s at the same level as stage one so I’m gonna just out Dent as far as it can be out dented and then I’m going to collapse stage one and you see it and it’s Milestone task of zero days we’re gonna expand stage three and right click on its row header and insert task and this one’s going to be another Milestone it’s going to be stage 2 Dash project commencement complete with zero days and out Dent it appropriately and then we’re going to have row 50 where stage four is and insert a task and get your stage three project implementation and control complete milestone in and I’m gonna go ahead and do my out denting on that one and then for stage four I’m going to expand it and right before the last task which is the party we’re going to put in the milestone for stage four being completed so just noting significant events in your Project’s lifeline we have our Milestone tasks we have our subtasks our summary tasks and our project is pretty well defined at this point with the exception of one of the most critical components and that’s task relationships and we’re going to be reviewing them now and then coming back and setting them up to finish defining our project we need to learn about task relationships and a little bit of terminology so there are only four types of relationships in Microsoft Project there’s finish to start also you’ll see it represented as FS and that means when one task finishes another task starts that is the default relationship type so if you create a relationship between tasks and you don’t do anything else it will be a finish to start relationship we have start to start when one task starts another task starts and that’s one that you might review once you start tracking what’s going on in your project and you feel like you may not be able to make your end date your projected end date you can crash the schedule is what it’s called by reviewing some of your tasks and figuring out ones that can start at the same time and that can gain you more time back in your schedule you also have finish to finish when one task finishes another task finishes so you need them to finish at the same date and finally you have start to finish this one is infrequently used when one task starts another task finishes so you want a task to start and another task to finish at the same time and then there’s some definitions you need to know about your predecessor task is the task that precedes another task the successor task is the task that follows another task so let’s just use for example task one precedes task two task one is the predecessor task and task 2 would be your successor tasks in addition to your relationships you need to know about lead time and lag time so let’s say you’re using the Finish to start relationship when one task finishes another task starts well maybe when the first task is 50 finish the next task can start that would be known as lead time it allows for task overlap outside of the relationship that’s defined and then you have lag time which is a task delay so let’s say you have a task that’s like um we won’t have one in this project but let’s say you’re painting a room and that’s a task and let’s say it takes three days well you need another day for the paint to dry before the next task which we’ll say is like hanging the paintings would start you don’t want to make it from a three-day painting task to a four day painting task because then you’ll get resource costs for that extra day so you build in lag time that says it’s a three-day task after it’s finished wait one day before the next task will start and now that I’m back in my project plan I we’re ready to set up relationships I’ve expanded all of my stages so my full task list is visible to me and so what we’re going to do is we’re going to select task two and I’m just clicking the row header holding down my control key oh I did that wrong okay so row header two control key row header five to select those two tasks we want to set up a relationship a finish to start relationship that when task 2 is finished Task 5 will start so we have them selected and we’re going to be working on the task tab of the ribbon and we’re going to be using an icon in the schedule group here and if you hover over that icon it looks like the infinity symbol if you hover over that icon it says link the selected tasks go ahead and click it so a couple of things happened first of all look at your predecessors column so for Task 5 it’s saying that it’s predecessor tasks the task that has to happen before it can start is Task two and also if you look at your Gantt chart remember I said the default relationship type is finished to start so when task 2 finishes Task 5 will start and you can see that type of relationship on your can get chart if you look at the line with the Arrow coming out of the end of task 2 and the arrows pointing to the beginning of task five when task 2 finishes Task 5 will start so you just successfully set up a relationship now we have more to set up now we’re going to set up additional relationships so this time let’s select tasks three and using the control key task six and Link those tasks together now select task 6 7 and 8. I’m going to just click and drag row header six seven and eight and then link those tasks together notice it gives task seven the predecessor of six and task eight the predecessor of seven link test 5 and 9 to each other and then link Task 5 and 10 to each other so predecessor for 9 and 10 will be task 5. Now link 10 and 12 together make 12 the predecessor for 13. and then we’re at task 14. in order for task 14 to begin we need tasks 12 and 13 to be finished so I’m going to start by selecting 12 and 14. and linking those and then I can actually click in that predecessors box after 12 type a comma and a space and type 13 and then press enter so that one has two predecessors link test 13 and 15. to each other and for task 17 we’ll do this a different way just go to the predecessor cell for task 17. and do the drop down and you’ll see a list of all of your tasks you’re going to want to scroll up and check the box in front of task 8 and then just click away from there or you could have just typed in eight so some say it’s easier to do it that way than select it is certainly more efficient so we have eight as a predecessor for 17. I’m going to go to the predecessor box for task 18 and just type 17 and press enter and for task 19 I’m going to press 18 and press enter task 20 we’re going to do 19. and then we’re at task 21 that’s also going to be 19. as its predecessor and at this point I’m just typing them in you’ll know just like any other Microsoft product there’s multiple ways of doing the same thing so we have our predecessors in through task 21. at this point the predecessor for 22 which is one of our Milestone tasks is Task 21. so we’ll go ahead and get that in so we have our stage one relationships set up now we’ll address our stage two relationships so I’m going to collapse stage one and I have my stage two ready we’ll be starting and we’ll be working in the predecessors column we’ll just type all of these in we’re going to start with task 25 and I’m in that predecessor column and I’m going to just type 20 and press enter so now you’re on task 26 and that’s going to be 25 for your predecessor 27 and 28 are also going to be 25 as predecessor and then 29 its predecessor is going to be task 26. 30s predecessor is task 25. and then we’re going to go down to 32 and its predecessor is also 25. 33’s predecessor is 32. 34’s predecessor is 33. and 35’s predecessor is 34. and then we go to task 37 its predecessor is 33 38 is 37 39 is also 37. and 40 is also 37. and then you can go down to 42. so we’re skipping our summary tasks here although it is possible to link them to each other as well both 42 and 43 have 26 as a predecessor and then we’re at 45 and 45 has a predecessor 45 and 46 rather both have a predecessor of 26. and then we get to our Milestone task for the completion of stage two and for this one we’re actually going to use a summary task so we’re going to put in 36 as the predecessor for 47. task 49 conduct training and track attendees or it should be attendance I have a typo there I’ll fix it that one is going to be 47 as its predecessor so 49 has 47 as a predecessor so now I’m going to make sure in my task 49 I believe we bought that in from Excel so I just double clicked it and I’m going to just fix the typo on attendance and then I noticed my stage 3 Milestone task doesn’t say complete at the end so I’m going to just add that word there and then we’re into stage four with task 53 and actually I forgot the stage three one but that’s okay we’ll just for task 50 let’s go ahead and make that predecessor 49. and then we’ll go down to 53 and 53 we’re gonna give it a predecessor of 50. task 54 has 53 as its predecessor task 55 has two predecessors and that would be 53 comma 54. and task 56 has three predecessors and that would be 53 54 and 55. so I’m just typing those in separated by commas almost done here so task 58 has 52 as its predecessor another summary task there 59 has 58 as its predecessor and 60 has 59 as its predecessor and finally the last test task 62 we’re going to be using task 50 as its predecessor and go ahead and save your project plan now because we set up our relationships let’s talk about the things that have changed in our project plan notice your start and finish dates have adjusted according to the relationship also if you look at task zero you’ll see now the duration of our project is 63.5 days and that’s all the stages rolled up to that duration so our schedule is our tasks have been scheduled at this point because of the relationships now I’m going to expand all my stages again and we’re going to add the work breakdown structure codes work breakdown structure codes are universally known great way to talk about particular tasks in meetings and stuff like that and often your tasks are referred to by their code numbers their WBS codes rather than the task name so I’m going to show you two ways of where you can display your WBS codes so the first way I’m going to show you is this if you right click on your task name column heading and choose insert column start typing WBS and you’ll see it shows up on the list and once it’s highlighted on the list you can just press enter so now we have another column in this table with the WBS codes in them that’s one way of getting your codes to display let’s right click on the WBS column heading and in Project hide column means delete column I mean you could get it back by inserting it again but notice the symbol next to high column has the little X the red deletion x on it so we’re going to delete that column and I’ll show you another way of displaying your WBS codes without inserting another column this is my preferred way we’re going to go to the ribbon to the Gantt chart format tab on the ribbon and all the way to the right in the show hide group where we got our project summary task check box earlier for task zero you’ll see another box in there called outline number go ahead and check it and now if you look in your task name column each task has its WBS code before the task name so the first task task one is our stage one project planning task a summary task it’s subtasks are 1.1 and 1.2 and then the next summary task that we have in there is 1.3 its subtasks are 1.3.1 1.3.2 so on and so forth so a nice way of being able to refer to your task are by using the WBS codes now later on you’ll see if we edit tasks if we add more tasks the WBS codes will automatically update if we delete tasks so on and so forth once they’re there they’re there and you can make any modifications necessary so now we’re going to build in some lead and or lag time for some of our tasks let’s start with task seven so I’m still using the row numbers we don’t have to refer to them by the WBS codes I’m still using our row numbers so we made task six its predecessor and we want to have some lag time there so these are all finished to start relationships what we would like to happen is when task 6 is finished wait four days before starting task seven so we want to give it some lag time what you’re going to do is just double click on task 7. and when you double click a task the task information dialog box opens you have several tabs across the top General predecessors resources so on and so forth you’re going to go to the predecessor Tab and notice all the way to the right there’s a column called lag there is no lead column in Microsoft Project when you want to do lag time you represent it as negative it could be days it could be percentages and that’s how the system knows its lag if it starts off with a negative if it’s lead time you’re going to put it in the lag column it can be represented as percentages or days as well and you use that a positive number for that so we want four days of lag here before this task starts so in that lag column we’re going to type minus four and I’m going to type the D for days and press enter and now click ok so notice now in the predecessors column it says for task seven six FS which is finished to start minus four days so it’s showing the lag there right so if you look at it on the Gantt chart right the line is coming out of the end of task six and it’s lagging before it goes into minus four days minus four days of lag time before it starts the next task is what we’re telling it to do there right so lag time is represented as a negative lead time is represented as a positive now go to task 20 and give it two days of lag time and when you’re done its predecessor should say 19 FS minus two days let’s double click on task 26 to get into its task information box and for this one we want to give it a half day of lead time so in the lag box I’m going to just type 0.5 and enter and click ok so now you’ll see its predecessor says 25 FS for finish to start plus this one is going to start a half a day before task 25 is complete it’s overlap so if you have problems finding the Gantt Bar for a particular task like right now on my screen I’m not seeing the Gantt bar for task 26. I’m going to right click on the task name and I’m going to choose scroll to task and it brings that bar into view give tasks 33 two days of lag time and your predecessor’s column for that task should look like mine change the type of relationship to start to start for task 37 as well and do the same for task 39. make it in a start to start relationship add two days of lead time to task 40. you’re also going to add two days of lead time to task 45. three days of lead time to task 46. and you can see the results of those on my screen we’re going to add one day of lead time to task 47 and two days to task 49. let’s go ahead and give task 53 two days of lead time and for task 58 we’re going to do 990 days of lead time and you can see the results on my screen and then the next task task 59 we’re going to give it one day of lag so that’s going to be your minus 1 there so now if I look at task zero we’re up to 146 and a half days duration we added that 90-day lead so that means wait 90 days after that task before the next one or it’s successor task will start and so our start and finish dates have updated our project is Thoroughly scheduled and designed right now except for some more tasks so I noticed that I had accidentally deleted some of my stage 3 tasks I rebuilt that part of the project plan and put in the correct duration and predecessors so I just want to make sure your stage 3 is exactly like mine as highlighted on the screen and then in stage three what we’re going to do is we’re going to change the duration of task 49 to 10 days so we want that to be a 10-day task now your stage 3’s duration should have updated when you change that to 10 days but I want you to scroll to the very top and I want you to look at task zero the project summary task that has been off that is only showing the duration I’m going to collapse my stages now just so we can see clearly what’s going on here so our project summary task is only showing the duration of stage four and it should be showing the duration of all of the stages cumulative so one way that you can jog project into doing its job when it comes to this if your project summary task task zero doesn’t update you can link your stages to each other to get it to update so what we’re going to do is we’re going to just click and drag row headings 1 through 55 so basically selecting our stages and on the task tab of the ribbon you’re going to go ahead and Link those tasks together and now you’ll notice that your stage four actually adjusted it really is 108 days and that’s where we put that 90-day lead time so it is 108 days but cumulatively our project is 153 days if you add up the stage durations so you need to kind of know about that little shortcut sometimes it won’t update sometimes it will and this has happened in various versions of project we’ve decided that when we get to stage three which I’m going to expand we want to have conference calls for one hour every day during that stage so we just want the whole team to get together talk about how things are going are there any risk assessments so we want to add those recurring calls to our project plan file and the way to do that so so far when we’ve been inserting new tasks we’ve been right clicking on a row heading and choosing insert tasks to get the recurrence schedule you can’t use that method for a recurring task so I’m going to just select row header 49 just so that task is selected and on the task tab of the ribbon in the insert group I’m going to do the drop down arrow underneath task so when I do the drop down I can see where I can create a recurring task so I’m going to select recurring tasks there and we’re going to name the task status call and notice it defaults to a one day duration be careful of that go to your duration box to the right and change the D to an H which represents one hour and we’re gonna do this call so we’re going to do the call Daily so we’re going to do that option button and we’re going to say everyone workday and then we’re going to start it so we say stage three the actual work begins on stage three on it looks like Wednesday 8 10 with the training starting so we’re going to start the calls we’ll just change it to August 10th as our start date so we just want to start them with that phase when that phase is up and running and we’ll say end after so we have 12 days in that we’ll end it after 10 occurrences so we want to have 10 of these status calls during stage three and go ahead and click ok so now right underneath stage three you have your 10 incidents of the status calls each one for one hour right every weekday starting on August 10th is what we set up so you want to have them as close to the top of the summary task as possible so they’re not just blending in with your other stage 3 tasks and we want to change the name of that status call summary task um before we do that look at your indicators column so you have a recurring call and it has the recurrence circular arrows in the indicator column and then for each occurrence of the call it has a little calendar icon and if you hover over a calendar icon it says this task has a start no earlier constraint start no earlier than constraint on Wednesday August 10th so for each one it gives the same constraint the call is on every day starting on the 10th so just more icons you’ll see in your indicators column we’re going to double click on 3.1 status call and we’re going to change the name of it to daily conference call daily we’ll just say daily call and then in parentheses to address issues and close your parentheses and then click ok so it’s going to rename every instance of that call that way and that’s fine by us so we added those also notice that your work breakdown structure codes Just Adjust if you add or delete like I mentioned earlier and we can go ahead and collapse stage three and the last thing we’re going to do in module one is I’m going to show you a way to capture additional information about tasks we’ll only address three tasks in this section out of our extensive list of tasks and we’re going to start by adding a note to task one I’m going to just expand stage one I don’t have to expand it to do this and then I’m going to double click on it to get into the task information dialog box and in there you have a notes tab at the top now I suggest that you date an initial notes and if multiple people are going to be working in this plan file that the newest note should be at the top of the note list so I’m going to just go in and put in the date and I’m going to put in my initials and then I’m going to press enter and the note is going to be assumptions colon you could take it off of my screen and the first assumption is software will be rolled out to the participants workstations during training the next line is going to be HR and training management has given their approval and allocated the funds and budget for this project and our last assumption for this task is all necessary compliance and Regulatory issues have been addressed and then you’re going to click ok and so if you look at your indicators column you’ll have that sticky note icon and in order to see the note you can just hover over that icon and you’ll see most of the note but it cuts off so you would have to double click to get to the notes tab to see the rest of it so they’re indicated by the sticky note in the indicators column we’re going to put on two more notes let’s go to task 11 so that’s another summary task I’m going to just double click it and I’m going to date the note and initial it and then this one is going to just be can be skipped if instructors and training are done in-house and then click ok and we have one more note that we’re going to add here and that’s going to be for stage three so task 48 and let me just show you another way of getting to the task information dialog box this time I’m going to right click on stage three or line 48 and I’m going to click on information and that’s just another way other than double clicking you could also get to it from the task tab at a ribbon in the Properties Group there’s an information box so in here I want to go to notes and I’m going to date an initial it and this one is also going to start with assumption and in a colon the rollout will take place over two weeks and then in parentheses 10 business days to train 75-80 users and the next sentence each session can have up to eight users for optimal learning and then I’m going to just put another sentence this is the start of the hands on training and click ok so great way to capture additional information I’ve seen project plans where the name the task name is not just the name of the task but all these notes about the task so you have to have some place to put this additional information notes would be it task name would not be to recap what we’ve covered in module one we started by going over project management Concepts specifically to phases of project management we started our work in Microsoft Project in the definition and planning stage of project management and then you got a grand tour of the project environment and how to navigate within it and then we created a project plan from a blank template we defined the project by setting by deciding to schedule it from its start date and setting the start date and then we created a project calendar based off of the built-in standard calendar we listed a couple of holidays as exceptions on the calendar and then we assigned that calendar to our project plan in lesson three we started adding tasks to the project plan we manually entered some tasks and then we imported tasks from an Excel file that’s in the video description we started creating our work breakdown structure by organizing our task into different groupings so we grouped our tasks by stages we have four stages in our project plan and we got our summary task and our subtasks and then we learned about the task relationships as well as some definitions like successor tasks and predecessor tasks and you learned about lag and lead time and then we created the relationships between tasks by linking them we then went and changed some of the relationship types and we added lag and or lead time to some of our tasks and by doing that we were able to schedule our task we had already switched to automatic scheduling so then the start dates and the finished dates are based on the nature of the relationships and any lag or lead time after that we got our work breakdown structure codes to show in the task name column so that the task can be referenced by their WBS code as opposed to their name we’ve been referencing them by row number in this course we moved on and set up a recurring task for a series of 10 daily calls that will take place when the training starts in our project plan and you learned how to create that recurring task and set up its recurrent schedule and then finally we added some notes to some tasks to capture some additional information now that we have our project plan file as complete as it can be right now in terms of our task list we’re going to move into module two module two has two lessons Lesson Four and lesson five and Lesson Four we’ll be managing project plan Resources by adding resources to a project plan we’ll also be creating a resource calendar entering cost for resources assigning resources to tasks and resolving resource conflicts in lesson five we’ll be finalizing our project plan and this is typically the last step before you start running your plan so work starts on the project you want to optimize your project plan there’s a couple of steps for that you’re going to set a Baseline and learn what that is and also learn how to share your project Plan before work begins on the project before we begin adding resources to our plan file it’s important to understand the three different types of resources that are utilized in Microsoft Project you have work resources which is the default resource type and that type of resource is associated with and tracked by time it also allows for costs to be tracked it can be people and they can be listed as individual or Consolidated groups or a work resource could also be equipment that is necessary to be used on the project then you have material resources they’re assigned by quantity rather than time gravel paper concrete and paint are examples of material resources when you enter a material resource you have to enter its measurement so for example if you entered paper as a material resource its measurement would be reams and then you have a cost resource type these are based on costs without time or quantity consideration these can include travel costs costs for building permits or end of project celebration costs and their total the amount that they are like let’s say you had a lot of travel on your project each travel cost would be noted at that task level so if someone has a task to teach a class and it’s in a different city they have to travel to get to that City their travel costs would be noted on that task so you’ll learn how to deal with all three resource types in just a few moments to add resources to your project plan file you’re going to want to use resource sheet view so on the left side of your screen to the left of your entry table where it says Gantt chart remember that’s your view indicator we’re going to right click there and we’re going to choose resource sheet so it looks like an Excel spreadsheet a couple of things I will point out is when you’re in this view if you look up at your Ribbon the last tab is resource sheet format because you’re in resource sheet view so just want to point out how tabs change depending on views changing so we have an information column here I’ll go over to columns before we start entering our resources your resource name column if it’s a work resource it could be the actual name of the person if you know it if you don’t know the person’s name when you’re putting your plan file together you could give like a title like trainer one or something like that if you’re gonna have a group of people that can perform the same task like if you’re going to have five trainers you can list them individually by their names or trainer one two three four five so on and so forth or you could do one line item and I’m going to jump over from resource name to the max units column here it just says Max but it’s Max units if I had five trainers and I wanted one line item I would make their Max units 500 percent so if there are five trainers available to work on my project 100 of their time their Max units would be 500 percent so for work resources you can enter them quite a few ways and right now we’re going to use a combination of those ways your type column is a drop down for work material or cost it will default to work your material column as mentioned if you’re using a material resource for example paper you have to put in its measurement which would be reams the initials will populate with the first letter of your resource name group is a column that you can use for whatever you want if you need to track internal resources versus external resources you can use the column for that for example and it’s a column that can show on reports your maximum units is how much time and percentage your resource is available to your project and then you have your cost column so you have the standard rate if you have rate information you can put it in hourly weekly monthly annually daily and you can specify an overtime rate if necessary project note will never switch from the standard rate to the overtime rate it’s something you would have to tell project to do overtime is calculated differently in different states and then you have cost per use so let’s say you’re renting a training room for example how much does it cost each time you use that training room you have an accrual column your costs are normally prorated across the task right or you can have them accrue at the start or the end of the task and then the base calendar is the same calendar as your project calendar you also have another free field code which is like group you can use it for anything that you may need to use it for in the First Resource name cell we’re going to type Emily with the last name Barrington and we’re going to leave it on the default type of work resource so we can skip I’m using my Tab Key to material column notice that the first letter of the resource name populates automatically in the initials column for the group I’m gonna type internal and she is our training director I’m gonna say that she’s available to our project 50 of the time of her time now it just so happens that we have her raid information so part of her salary will be charged to this project for the time that she spends on this project at her normal rate so we’re going to just put in her normal rate now sometimes you won’t have cost information for resources sometimes you will if tracking cost is your responsibility then you should or at least get estimated costs if necessary so we’re gonna say we’re gonna type in 75 000 slash y for year and we’re not going to give her an overtime rate or cost per use we’re not going to change anything else and I’m just double clicking between standard rate and overtime columns so I can see her salary and so her 50 availability means project won’t schedule her more than 50 percent of her time on our project all right so now we have our next person and this person is Teresa Brown she’s also a work resource and she’s also in the internal group she’s our training manager when our project is up and running she’ll be available 100 of the time so we can leave her at 100 Max units and her salary is 50 000 slash y we have our next one now we’re not certain the training department has several training coordinators and we’re gonna need two of them to help on our project so what we’re gonna do is we know that we’ll be given their actual names before work starts so we’re gonna just list them as training coordinator one make them internal 100 of their time and we know that the coordinator’s rate is 35 000 slash y for a year and then we’re going to put in a training coordinator two with the same group and standard rate and we can always come in and fill in their real names when we get them and anywhere if we’ve already assigned them to tasks the task will update with their real names and then we have so we have our training coordinators our training director training manager our coordinators now we’re going to put in our HR director and his name is Randy Allison another work resource who’s also internal he’s available like 25 of his time for our project and he’s at 75 000 a year as well our HR manager’s name is Alan and the last name is Otto another work resource that’s internal and he’s available 50 of his time his salary is fifty thousand per year and we have just a few more so we’re going to have let’s see where I am here we’ll just do all of our work ones first we know we’re probably going to be using two trainers from a vendor so we don’t know their names yet we’ll put them in as vendor trainer one and their group is external they’ll be available 100 of their time once that part of the project starts and the rate for the vendor is 1500 a

day so I’m doing fifteen hundred slash d and then we’re going to do the same for vendor trainer 2. and now we’re ready to do a material resource so we’re going to have posters that are displayed advertising these classes and we’re going to use we’ll put in the resource name as posters and when you tab over the type if you type the letter M it will populate material and we’ll say it’s measured in sheets and notice the standard rate is just a flat rate there so we’re going to just put in 10. for ten dollars and then we have a cost resource and we’re going to name it entertainment and change the type to cost and we don’t need to note anything else here for a cost resource again that’s assigned at the task level so we have our resource sheet completed so another thing just to note here and we’ll deal with it in a later module is sometimes you’ll inherit a project plan file and it doesn’t have any task lists or Gantt chart or anything it only has a resource sheet in it and that can be used across projects it’s called a resource pool and we’ll revisit that later on in this course go ahead and save your project plan so we get our resource sheet filled out and we look at it and realize we forgot to put our marketing manager Alice on here so we want her to be included with our internal work resources we’re going to right click on row heading 7 here in resource sheet view and go to insert resource just to get that blank line just like when we were in the entry table in Gantt chart View so in that blank line we’re going to get her name in there and so her name is Alice Peak she is a work resource we’re going to put her in the internal group she’ll be available 100 of her time and she is a manager so we’re putting her salary at fifty thousand per year like our other managers now the thing about Alice that we need to know all of our other resources will be available to us for the duration of the project except Alice she already has some time off and so we need to note that and the way that we note it is by creating a resource calendar for Alice so to do that we’re going to just double click on Alice and it opens up the resource information dialog box just like when you double click on a task it opens up task information and on the right side we’re going to click that change working time button and so this is if you look at the top this is very similar to when we created our training rollout initiative calendar if you look at the top it says that is our base calendar but now we’re at the resource calendar for Alice so if your resources have time off it needs to be noted but not on the project calendar so by going into change working time for Alice we’re creating her resource calendar and we’re going to navigate to July 22nd on that mini calendar and we’re going to select July 22nd in the exception box the first name box under the exceptions tab we’re going to type personal day and press our Tab Key and we’re gonna click on July 25th on the mini calendar and put another personal day entry for that date there for Alice and then we’re going to click ok and okay now July 25th and July 22nd are working days for everybody else on the project but Alice won’t be scheduled for any work on those days and we can right click on our resource sheet view indicator on the left and go back to Gantt chart View and just save your project again there are quite a few ways that you can assign resources to tasks we’re going to start by using the resource name column on our entry table and Gantt chart View so it’s the last column before you get to add column Right add new column and so for task 2 we’re going to do the drop down in the resource names column and you’ll see all your resources regardless of how you enter them in on the resource sheet they will be alphabetical on this drop down list and we’re going to check Emily Barrington and then just click away from it so now if you right click on task 2 and you go to scroll to task if you look at the Gantt bar it shows Emily Barrington and it’s also showing that she’s only available 50 percent of her time for tasks three we’re going to assign Teresa Brown and go ahead and assign Theresa Brown to Task 5 6 and 7. so a couple of things happened when you did that you got three little red people in your indicators column and that means that Teresa Brown is now over allocated and we will take care of that a little bit later in this lesson but the other thing I want to show you is how I did that task how I assigned her to task five six and seven I didn’t do them individually in the resource name column what I did was I just clicked and dragged row headers five through seven right click within the row headers that are selected and I went to information so notice there’s no task name there because I have multiple tasks selected but then I went to the resources tab and I just did the drop down there so that’s how I got them in there Teresa Connor Brown three times just a little bit more efficient way it caused an over allocation and again we will address resolving over allocations later in this lesson for right now I’m Gonna Fill in the rest of the resource name assignments for stage one and then you’ll be able to pause and put them in on your screen so now you have on my screen I got rid of some of my columns in my table so you’re just seeing the task name and resource names you can go ahead and finish filling out the resource assignments for stage one and pause the video while you’re doing that so you can see my screen clearly and then when you resume the video I’ll have stage two up on the screen you’ll pause and get those in resume stage three so on and so forth so you’re going to be doing these assignments on your own and I showed you how like you have a lot where training coordinator is assigned you can select all four of those tasks at the same time and either right click to get to information or click information up here on the task tab of the ribbon so you don’t have to do them as individuals so go ahead and get started on this and here are your stage two resource assignments again pause here’s stage three and finally here’s stage four now that we have all of our work resources assigned we are going to go ahead and assign our material resource and we’re going to do this one a different way so go ahead and select task 33 and go to the resource tab on your Ribbon and in the assignments group you’re going to click on assigned resources so notice that we have Alice Peak assigned to that resource right create posters and place them in high traffic areas and it calculated her cost for that particular task but we also want to I’m going to scroll down here and we’re gonna click on the posters resource and choose the assign button on the right so we have the posters assigned there and for the units we have one sheet because we put in the material measurement as a sheet and we’re going to change that to 500 sheets trying to get into that field can be a little challenging try to type 500 in there yeah so it calculates the cost for me and so we have multiple resources assigned to that now we have Alice as the work resource and then we have the posters and we put the number of units based on the material measurement and its cost and so we can close that assign resources box and we’re going to do a similar thing let’s go to the bottom of the project plan our last task task 77 go ahead and select that one and go up to assign resources on the resource tab and for this one we’re going to assign entertainment so that’s our cost resource right and we’re going to go ahead and put in a cost of ten thousand and then do a sign so we have ten thousand dollars budgeted for this huge party at the end of everything and we’re going to go ahead and do the X and so if you notice the resource name for task 77 says entertainment and it has the ten thousand for that one and if we go up to task 33 you’ll see the resource name has Alice Peak and then the posters 500 sheets and if I I’m going to move my divider bar backwards and I’m going to right click on create posters and scroll to tasks so it shows on the Gantt chart as well when you have a material or a cost resource so at this point before we resolve our resource conflicts we’re making believe here that we just got the information of which two training coordinators will be working on our project so let’s go to our resource sheet view and we’ll update that information so here’s another view where you can see where you have over allocated resources they’re in red they have the little red people in the indicator column for training coordinator one we’re just going to change the name and that name is Eugenia Washington and for training coordinator two it’s Anita Redman and we’re gonna save and then go back to our Gantt chart View and you’ll notice that anywhere that we assigned training coordinator one so if I look at the beginning I have my stage one collapsed there right but they weren’t in that stage but anywhere where we had training coordinator one it now is Eugenia Washington and so in addition to receiving the training coordinator names we’ve also received the information on how they’re going to divvy up their responsibilities on the project so they’re doing it by stage and and summary tasks so Eugenia is assigned to stage one identify departments that’s where their assignments start and so she’s gonna tackle that what we’re gonna do for tasks 12 13 and 14 I’m going to select those as a group go up to the task Tab and go to information in the properties and I’m going to go to the resources Tab and change the assignment to Anita Redmond and then click ok so it put in it has Eugenia and Anita there I’m going to go to Resource name column and just access the drop down I made that column super wide so let me fix that a little bit and I want to get rid of Eugenia so just unchecker click away from it and you get that little warning symbol when you click away click on that and we’re going to decrease the amount of work but keep the same duration that’s the option we want and we’ll talk about that setting later but we want to go with the default and go ahead and remove Eugenia from the next two tasks as well and keep that same default and so this is how they’ve determined they’re going to work together so we have Eugenia in identifying departments and so on and so forth Anita will seek input from the training vendor Eugenia will perform the end user skill assessment and we’ll switch and I’m going to just do this from the drop down in stage two um tasks starting with tasks 25 I’m going to switch Eugenia to Anita in that summary task list and in that way we don’t get that confirmation if I select you Anita and then uncheck Eugenia it just does it in that section okay so the next section well we’re gonna oh there’s another one in that section that we need to assign to yeah task 30 also needs to be assigned to Anita our next one marketing strategy um the one email is going to be Eugenia and we’ll leave her in the training sessions registration and then in schedule instructors and courseware evaluations so task 42 43 45 and 46 switch those to Anita instead of Eugenia and then I think we should be done with the training coordinators I’ll double check that in a moment but after we do those because it already updated in the um the daily calls that we have so we don’t have to we had a we had assigned both training coordinators to those calls so we don’t have to do anything with that section and the next section underneath the calls we do have Eugenia that’s fine and then they’re working together and we’re good for the rest of this all right and just some of our over allocations for Eugenia have disappeared so in order to resolve resource conflicts like over allocations you can let project do it for you or you can do it manually I’m going to show you where you would have to do it manually and you’ll be able to make your choice as to what’s the best way for you so I’m going to right click on Gantt chart on our view indicator on the left and I’m going to go to Resource usage View and in resource usage view you have a time phased scale on the right side of your screen and on the left side you have any unassigned resources and then your resources that are assigned and the tasks that they’re assigned to any over-allocated resources will show there in red with the little red person in the indicator column and it gives you the amount of work hours assigned to that resource if you look at Teresa Brown in that list and you’re seeing the work that she’s scheduled for on a daily basis right you can see her over allocations in red so on this particular date I guess this is in the week of June 19th so 20th 21st 22nd on the 23rd so Thursday she’s scheduled for two eight-hour tasks in the same day and the same for Friday you can see on the following Monday she scheduled for 20 hours worth of work so if you were going to try to resolve this over allocation manually this is what you would need you would need a paper and a pencil you would need to go look at the resources calendar before you do anything and it would go something like this now we’re not going to do it this way but I’ll explain it to you so I’m gonna look at that first day where she has an over-allocation that Thursday so she has two tasks that are eight hours each and what I’d have to do is take one of those tasks away from her on that day by making it zero hours and then I would have to scroll to the right until I find another day that she has an opening and the first weekday that I see where she may have an opening here as far as I can see she’s not over allocated is on the Thursday after the 4th of July that kind of thing order Friday so I would have to change one of her tasks on that first day to zero hours and then put that eight hours for that task on another day that she has availability only if I’ve looked at the resources scheduled the resources calendar because they might have time off so you can see where this can be a tedious not only tedious but it lends itself to mistakes so you can let project do this for you I’m going to switch back to Gantt chart View and we’re gonna go to the resource tab of the ribbon so the last group on the resource tab is the level group and that’s the way that you can let project help you resolve your resource conflicts over allocations um when it’s resolved it’s called leveling the project so you have a couple of options here you could level the entire project or you could just level by specific resources this is what I normally do so I start by going to Resource sheet view it’s just an easier way of seeing which resources are over allocated so we have four that are over allocated I’m going to go back to Gantt chart View and in that level group on the resource tab I’m going to choose level resource before we do that we need to look at task zero so right now the duration of the project is 155 days it starts on June 21st and it ends on January 25th and the next year and you want to make note of that once you make note of that you’re going to click on level resource and we’ll start since they’re in alphabetical order here it looks like by first name this time we will start with Let’s see we have Theresa Eugenia Anita and Alice so we’ll start with Alice and then we’re going to just click the level Now button and then we’re going to go back to level resource and we’re going to choose Anita and level now and you see things are adjusting if you look at project zero the duration to start the Finish dates are adjusting right and then we’re going to go to level resource again and we’re going to level Eugenia and then we’ll go back one more time and select Teresa so and sometimes that causes other things so I’m going to go back to Resource sheet view and it’s still showing that they’re all over allocated so we have to do some other work on this we’re going to go back to Gantt chart View and this is pretty typical sometimes when you just do level your resources like we did it fixes everything other times it doesn’t so this time we’re going to make note of where we are now with the duration so it’s pushed out our project and its finish date is pushed out as well as its duration has expanded so this time I’m going to click the level all button and it gets rid of everything it also pushed it out by another four days okay so originally it was scheduled to end on January 25th but after we level everything it pushed it out about three weeks and we’re gonna just say that that three weeks is tolerable for us now there are some other ways that you can gain time back in your project we talked about using the start to start relationship type and I forgot to I’m in my Gantt chart view I forgot to add back in my predecessors column let me get that back in there and so you can review let’s say that three weeks is intolerable you need to gain like a week back you could look at your relationships and figure out can any of these tasks get started on the same date right and if so you can change them to start relationship that gains you more time in your schedule so if we look at let me give you a good example of this if we look at task six and that’s a seven day task in duration so task seven is set to start we put a lag time on that so it’s set to start four days after task six is completed because we put that lag on there and then we look at this we have to perform the training needs analysis before we compile the results so we can’t really do anything about those two right but then I look for another opportunity right of where I can start especially if I can use some of the training you know we have two training coordinators so maybe if I can start some of the other tasks on the same day that would gain us back a week in our schedule so those are decisions you’ll have to make as you’re going through your schedule you’re probably always going to end up with some over allocation of resources if you let project level it for you it could push out your finish date to an intolerable level and then you’ll have to use the other techniques like we talked about start to start relationship type or some more um lead time between two tasks so there’s that overlap to gain time back in your schedule so now we’re moving into lesson five and this is where we’re going to spend some time optimizing our plan we’re going to set a baseline And before that you’ll learn what a baseline is and then we’ll also go over how to share a project plan and these are the final steps before work begins on the project hopefully so we’re going to start when we’re talking about optimizing a project plan we’ve already discussed some of that and that could be changing the relationship type from Finish to start in order to gain some more time back in your schedule it’s also finalizing resource assignments and it is resolving any over allocations that haven’t been resolved through leveling so if we scroll down in the project we’ll start seeing little red people again and so we have and a lot of it is Eugenia Washington and she’s our training coordinator one so because she’s over allocated there and this is for let’s see so task 34 37 38 and 39. what I’m going to do is I’m going to change those over to Anita Redman who is training coordinator too so I’m going to change the resource for all of those tasks to Anita from Eugenia and now I actually have some more over allocations for Anita so let’s change that back let’s change 34 back to Eugenia and we’ll say that we’re so we’re in a situation now oh wow when I changed it back it got rid of all of my over-allocations that’s very strange but anyway I changed it and then I changed it back and it’s magically cleared all my over-allocations so if you need to go ahead and change yours so they’re not over allocated if necessary and that’s one thing that you’ll do when you’re optimizing your plan that was very strange I’m gonna just save my project now and yeah I got rid of all the over allocations that must be some kind of a glitch because it doesn’t typically work that way and then the other thing that we’re going to do here is we want to assign the two vendor trainers to the actual training so that’s going to be down at task 60 we’re gonna change that assignment so it’s 10 days what we’re going to do is we’re gonna go to the drop down in the resource name column we’re going to uncheck Eugenia and check vendor trainer one and vendor trainer 2. and the setup is they’ll probably be alternating the days of training and when you get that warning we’re going to leave it on the default keep the same duration so we have that set up there and that’s really how you optimize your project you just make sure that your task list is correct in terms of relationships if there’s any way of truncating the project by using start to start relationship type you would want to do that or by adding lead time to task if necessary making sure your final resource assignments are done and any over allocations are resolved and once you do all that save your project so this lesson is all about finalizing your project plan and so the next step in finalizing your plan for certain is setting a baseline plan now you may or may not need an interim plan but you’re definitely going to need to set a baseline Plan before work starts on your project and that is the only way you’ll be able to track the progress of your project so this slide is talking about the Baseline plan and you can set up to 11 Baseline plans for each project plan file well that begs the question why would you need more than one well maybe you want a baseline for your external customer and another one for your internal team that has other tasks on it that you don’t necessarily need to share with the external customer maybe you’re preparing for a risk event so you have an alternate plan in case some things occur and it impacts the project or you know that there’s a big change request that’s going to be implemented on this project and so you want a baseline of your original plan Just for future reference so those are some of the reasons why you would have multiple base lamp Baseline plans now your Baseline tracks your durations the start and finish dates of your tasks the amount of work and the cost you also have the ability to set an interim plan and that only saves the current start and finish dates it can be used just as a project marker it’s much more simple than your Baseline so we’re going to go in and we’re going to learn how to set a baseline in our project plan we’re going to go to the project tab of the ribbon to set our Baseline and on the project tab you’ll find set Baseline in the schedule group and so if I go to the drop down arrow I can set or clear the Baseline I’m going to choose set Baseline so it defaults to setting a Baseline and it’s just called Baseline if you do the drop down arrow next to Baseline you’ll see that you can have up to 11 in a project plan file as we discussed so we’re going to leave it on Baseline if you wanted to set an interim plan you could do that from the same dialog box we’re going to just focus on the Baseline you could set a baseline for the entire project or just for selected tasks we’re going to leave it on entire project and we’re going to click ok now it doesn’t look like anything happened but I can show you how you can verify that it did set a baseline there are two different ways let’s go back to set Baseline and you’ll see that now Baseline tells you when it was last saved so you know if a baseline has been set because it would be saved and we can cancel out of there another way is we’re going to go up to our quick access toolbar and go to our project information dialog box and in the lower left hand corner you’re going to click on statistics so if your Baseline values are populated here that means that a baseline has been set and so when I was managing projects actively I would be in Project statistics multiple times a day once work began on the project just to keep apprised I worked on some really huge projects and so I needed to be a prize at that level so it captures your start and finish dates all of these are the same now the duration of the project the amount of work on the project and the total cost of the project and at the bottom left corner you can see that it also captures the duration percent complete and the work percent complete so once work starts on the project and you come into your plan and you start tracking your actuals these values will fluctuate you can go ahead and click close on your project statistics dialog box and go ahead and save your project again now that we’ve optimized our plan and set a baseline there may be at this point occasion to share your plan with some of your stakeholders and so short of sharing your project plan file which I’m when I was managing projects I was very reluctant to do because people get in there they play around a lot of them don’t know what they’re doing and I’ve had to recreate some plans that way however there are other ways we’re going to start with the least efficient way the way that I’m going to suggest you never use and let’s go to the file tab of the ribbon and click on print so when you just go to print your plan it puts a legend at the bottom of the page showing what all the different icons that are found on Nagant chart mean and it generated if I look at the very bottom it generated 28 pages now I’m going to show you why I say this is the least efficient way I’m going to go in the lower right hand corner to the multiple Pages icon and I can see that there are plenty of blank pages from blank areas of the Gantt chart so in my opinion this is not an efficient way to share your plan by printing it out and distributing the print out I’m going to use the back arrow at the top of the green band to go backwards so let’s say you have stakeholders that want to see just the list of task names and their durations for the entire project so what I’m going to do is I’m going to start with task zero and I’m going to select the task name cell and the duration cell then I’m going to hold down my shift and control keys on my keyboard and tap my down arrow so it selects the rest of the tasks and their durations now on the task tab in the clipboard group you’re going to click on the copy button right on the word copy and not its drop down arrow we’ll address the drop down arrow in a few minutes so just click on copy nothing visible happens it just copied it to the clipboard now I have a blank document open in Word and I’m just going to switch to that and I’m going to do control V to paste so I get two pages and it’s just a list of all the tasks and their durations and I could distribute this as an email attachment or whichever way that the stakeholders want to receive it and while I’m in word I’m going to do control and the letter N to bring up a new blank document and then I’m going to switch back over to my project plan and I’m just going to click on any cell so that I don’t have anything selected now at this point you want to make sure that you can see all of the resource names in your resource name column and your Gantt chart whatever part of it is visible can be shown I’m going to right click on task zero and choose scroll to task well that’s not going to help me there so the way it’s configured right now now this time without selecting anything and even if you had something selected it’s going to override your selection we’re going to go to the drop down arrow next to the copy button on the task Tab and we’re going to choose copy picture so it’s going to make a picture of our project plan that can be rendered for the screen directly to the printer or to a gif image file we’re going to leave it on for screen we’re going to leave the copy setting to rows on the screen and the time scale as shown on the screen we’re going to leave those defaults and we’re going to click ok I’m going to switch back over to my blank Word document and I’m going to do control V again to paste and so it’s only showing what was shown on the screen the time scale on the screen and so it gives me all of the tasks the entry table that it can see it cut off my resources here and it shows the part of the Gantt chart that is showing and I’m gonna just close word without saving any changes and I’m back in my project plan so my favorite built-in tool to use to do high level reporting to stakeholders at this stage of the project is the timeline so the timeline has been sitting underneath our ribbon the whole time and what I’m going to have you do is Click anywhere up in the timeline so that it’s selected and you see the timeline format tab on your Ribbon and so the first thing we’re going to do if I drag my divider bar backwards so I can see more of my Gantt chart you’ll notice in the timeline it has this green box I’m hovering over it right now and that’s basically representing what’s showing what’s visible on the Gantt chart at this point and so the first thing I want to do is put my mouse at the green border at the top of that box so I get a four-headed Arrow and I’m going to just drag it backwards to around the start date of the project and you see the start date at the beginning of the timeline so I’m going to just adjust that so it starts at the beginning of the project and now I’m going to grab the right most green vertical line so my mouse looks like a two-headed pointer two-headed Arrow I’m going to click and hold and drag it all the way across so that the Finish date is showing and mine went a little bit more but so now it’s showing more of the project in the Gantt chart so that’s what that green area covers it’s what’s showing in the grant chart in the grant chart now we’re going to add some tasks to this timeline on that timeline format Tab and the insert group you’re going to choose existing tasks and it’ll bring up a dialog box with all the tasks in your project and for this example we’re just going to put our stage one task on the timeline so I’m gonna put a check mark in every task in stage one the summary task and there’s subtasks I’m gonna just check them all until I get to the bottom of stage one and it’s Milestone completion task so I’m just checking the boxes just to make sure we get all the tasks and as a matter of fact when you get everything checked don’t check the stage one project planning complete Milestone task I’ll show you another way of getting that in the timeline so after you check all the others you’re going to click ok and the timeline is kind of overwhelmed with all of those tasks so we have a lot of white space in the timeline and because the timeline is going from the start date to the Finish date when I look at stage one it goes from June 21st to July 28th so one thing that can help is changing the date range to get rid of some of that white space so on that timeline format tab in the show hide group I’m going to click on date range and I’m going to choose that custom dates and for the start date I’m going to select June 21st and the Finish date is going to be July 28th and then I’m going to click ok so it has more space to breathe and space out the different tasks that are in that timeline for that stage so another thing we can do to make it look better the first task in that stage stage one project planning that’s its initial summary task we’re going to select that task and right click on it and choose display as call out so it takes it out of the timeline proper and it puts it outside of it as a call out and it just makes the timeline less cluttered right now it’s still going to be looking kind of cluttered here we can go through and we can let’s see what this one is ensure total participation so this one I can barely see when I click on it and I hover over it I can see the details of it but what I’m going to do is I’m going to grab that one I’m actually going to drag down my divider bar between the table and the timeline to get more working space and what I’m going to do with that one is click and hold on it and drag it outside of the timeline so it displays as a call out so you can see it better and these are the things we have to do so the there’s another one create list of Target departments I’m going to drag that above the timeline make it a call out so they’re not all just bunched together and unreadable so there’s one here that starts with inform and I’m going to drag that one down compile I’m going to drag up there’s one that looks like it starts with Define vendor deliverables I’m going to drag that one down and I’m just picking and choosing based on how they look on my timeline there’s one that starts with obtain and I’m going to drag that up create a list of it’s going to come out to the bottom as is send skill assessment forms I’m going to drag that one out and just drop it a little bit lower than the other one so they don’t interfere with each other it’s kind of how you do that and then there’s an initiate end user and I’m going to drag that one up and so the timeline is looking much better for me now now there’s another thing that you can do here we’re going to so we look at the way the dates are formatted in the timeline and if you wanted to change the date format you could use that date format drop down I’m going to leave mine the way it is and what I want to do is I want to give this timeline a name so the bar label button in the show hide group and I’m going to just call this stage one and so that shows up here I’m going to just drag my green band out of the way because it’s showing that part of the project okay so stage one is showing real close to that ensure total participation task so I’m going to move that task down a little bit so I can see the name of the timeline more clearly and so now that I have my timeline set up again it’s a very high level reporting tool I’m going to on the timeline format tab I’m going to click on copy timeline and we’ll do full size and then I’m going to just bring up word again and on the layout tab I’m going to go to the second button orientation and change it to landscape and let’s see if I can find my eight and a half by fourteen not finding my bigger paper size here but I normally change that but in either case I can do control Z to paste it in and you’ll see I mean it pasted in kind of like a picture so I can make it smaller it pasted in rather like a shape so I can make it smaller and I’ll make the width of it like eight see what happens it might be too small but it’s kind of all fitting on the page now so this is another way and it’s a visual way of giving stakeholders initial information about your project before work begins on it so just as a recap for our second module which included lessons four and five we started by adding resources to our project plan file and we reviewed the columns on in resource sheet view and then we input some resources we input work material and cost resources we entered the cost for our resources as we were adding them to the project plan and then we created a resource calendar to note some days off for one of our resources so no work will be scheduled for them on those days we moved on to assigning our resources to tasks you learned a couple of different ways of doing that and then you learned how to resolve resource conflicts in particular over allocated resources in the next lesson we finalized our project plan by optimizing it that’s when we reviewed whether we needed to change any relationship types where or add some lead or lag time to task we also added some other resources we actually performed some more resource assignments that needed to be done and updated a couple of existing resources and watched how that filtered through to the tasks they were already assigned to after that we set a baseline so that we’ll be able to compare our plan to what actually happens on the project when work starts on the project and we start tracking the actuals and then we went over a few ways to share the project plan short of sharing the file we talked about how printing is the most inefficient way you learned the difference between copying and the copy picture commands and then lastly you learned how to populate the timeline and the ways that you can share it for high level reporting for some of your stakeholders hi everyone Trish Connor Cato here I just wanted to officially thank you for attending this Microsoft Project 2021 video course and just to recap everything that we covered in this course we started with a brief review of project management Concepts before you learned how to navigate around in the project environment and then we dove into creating a project plan from a blank template defining the project by scheduling it from its start date and creating and assigning a project calendar to the plan then we started manually entering some tasks and then we actually pasted some in from within Excel we began to organize our tasks by creating a work breakdown structure we created summary and subtasks we also defined the task relationships and at that point Microsoft Project took over the scheduling of our tasks when we got to the second module we focused on managing project resources and how to finalize a project plan so we started adding resources and resource sheet view including their cost we created a resource calendar to note a resources exceptions and we assigned resources to our tasks we also learned about leveling to resolve over-allocated resource conflicts and then we got into optimizing our project plan setting a baseline so that we could track our progress on it once work starts and sharing the plan once again my sincere thanks hi everyone Trish Connor Cato here welcome to Microsoft Project 2021 this video is for users who are looking to gain skills in Microsoft Project to create administer Monitor and report on a project plans progress project is a powerful scheduling tool used to track tasks resources and costs it also provides powerful and interactive reporting tools used through each stage of a project as you will see during the course executing a project monitoring project progress and controlling a project plan we’ll learn how to execute the project by entering task project updating the work done on task and updating task costs globally this is known as tracking actuals we’ll switch our Focus to monitoring the progress of the project plan by viewing the project in a number of ways adding custom Fields creating custom views creating a network diagram so we can look at the project in the flow chart type visual and analyzing the plan and viewing progress by using task boards and defining sprints we’ll finish the third module after learning ways to control the project plan this includes editing the task list rescheduling tasks splitting tasks and updating the Baseline the final module of this course zeroes in on how to report on a project and customizing the application we’ll start by formatting and sharing a chart View ing the interactive existing reports creating custom reports and creating a visual report which tie in with Excel and or Vizio will end the course after reviewing project options which give you the ability to customize the application to meet your needs you’ll also learn how to create a project plan template which can be used as a starting point for a future project of a similar type and you will learn how to share resources across project plans and how to link project plan files for more efficient oversight so now we’re gonna get into the launch slash execution phase of project management starting with our third module so we have three lessons in this module the first one is executing a project and this is known as tracking actuals so we’ll be entering task progress updating task progress with SharePoint updating work and updating costs during that lesson we may also update resource assignments in the second lesson we’re going to start monitoring project progress by viewing it we’ll also be adding custom fields to our project plan creating custom views creating a network diagram View analyzing a project plan and you’ll get introduced to task boards which are another way of monitoring your project progress and Sprints which allow you to monitor by set segments of time and in our final lesson in this module is controlling a project plan that may include editing the task list rescheduling tasks and updating a Baseline before we start tracking actuals we’re going to give ourselves more working Space by hiding the timeline now this is known as a split view this is the default view in Microsoft Project it’s called Gantt chart with timeline so it has the timeline at the top of the screen the entry table on the left and the Gantt chart on the right on the bottom half of the screen we’re going to get rid of that timeline especially since we added all the tasks to it and it’s taking up a lot of space so if you go to the view tab on your Ribbon toward the right side you will see a split view group and you’ll see a check mark in the Box in front of timeline you’re going to go ahead and uncheck it and we get lots more working space so now the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to start tracking actuals and the first one we’re going to track is percent complete we’re going to say that task 2 and 3 are 100 percent complete so we can do that by selecting I’m just dragging the row handle from two down to three and go to the task tab of the ribbon in the schedule group you’ll see a series and this is just one way of doing this but you’ll see a series of percentage icons starting with zero percent then 25 50 75 and 100. with those two tasks selected we’re going to go ahead and click on 100 percent and you’ll notice a couple of things happened first the indicator column now has a check mark for each of those tasks and if you hover over the check mark it will let you know the date that the task was completed on on your Gantt chart if you look at the Gantt bars for those two tasks they have a Thin Blue Line going all the way through them which indicates 100 percent complete even with a 25 completion anything above zero you’ll see a Thin Blue Line in the Gantt bar so then we decide you know that was a mistake task 3 is only 50 percent complete so I’m gonna just select task three and use my fifty percent complete preset button the check mark disappears from the indicator column because that represents a hundred percent complete and you can see that The Thin Blue Bar is going halfway through the Gantt bar on the Gantt chart so far during this course we’ve been using this entry table now there is another table that we’re going to access that is better suited for tracking actuals and it’s called the tracking table to get to it we’re going to go to the view tab on the ribbon and you’ll see in the data group you have a tables drop down we’re going to go ahead and click it and select tracking off of the list now our Gantt chart doesn’t change on the right side of the screen the only thing that changed is our entry table and it has different columns now so you have your task name column I’m going to just expand this and then you have the actual start an actual finish date columns we have percent complete and physical percent complete and you can see in the percent complete column that it has a hundred percent for task two and fifty percent for task three you also have the physical percent complete column so let’s say a task is 50 percent complete that’s based on the duration so if it’s a one day task like task three is and it’s fifty percent complete then it has a half a day duration remaining when it’s a hundred percent complete there are zero days remaining duration and you can see the actual and remaining duration columns but the other thing is you can have a task that’s 50 complete in terms of the duration but maybe only 40 percent of the actual work has been done and that’s what’s captured by physical percent complete so if you need to track at that level you have two different columns the percent complete is duration based physical percent complete is the amount the percentage of the work that has been done and they could be different when we marked tasks to a hundred percent complete it automatically changed the remaining duration to zero days and since it was a two-day task that’s what the actual duration is noted as we’re going to say that it actually took one day to complete that task so we’re going to change the actual duration for task two to one day and when we click away from it you’ll see that the remaining duration has also updated and it is now one day it was originally a two-day task we marked it a hundred percent complete and then we change the actual duration to one day it also changed the percent complete to 50 percent we’re going to say no this really only took one day so we’re going to go to the remaining duration and we’re going to change it to zero days and we’ll click away from it so now it marked it a hundred percent complete again and it noted that it is only a one day task and I had collapsed my expansion so we also have the actual cost and actual work columns in there as well so based on the resource cost that we put in it’s calculating the actual cost so the next thing we’re going to do here is we’re going to do a little bit more tracking on task three and for this one this was originally a one day task and so we marked it fifty percent complete half day of actual duration half day of remaining duration we want to say that this is a two-day task so we’re gonna go to the remaining duration and we’re going to change it to 1.5 days so now you’ll see that it marked it 25 percent complete half day has already elapsed another one and a half days remain and so when you make a change in project and you’ve seen this throughout the course when you change one thing and then it blue Shades other things in the table those are things that have also updated and so you can see that our project summary task has updated right now it’s one percent complete that’s the entire project actual duration of 2.05 days remaining duration and actual cost and actual work so it captures everything based on what you’re doing in here so our project was scheduled to start in my case I have June 21st of 2022 and we’re going to say that it actually started a day early so in a situation like that what I like to do is go back to project information and change the project start date first so we’re going to do that that’s project information that we put on a quick access toolbar and I’m going to just change the start date of the project to the previous working day now notice the actual start column is still showing the following day the original start date but we actually updated the start date for the previous day and so one of the reasons why I wanted to do that is because tasks two and three actually got started on the previous day so now I’m going to go to the actual start date for task 2 and change it to the previous workday and I’m going to do the same for task three and at that point the actual start date of task zero the entire project and stage one updated as well now if we hadn’t gone and changed the start date you would have gotten the message so here let me just demonstrate this for you you don’t have to do this so I went back to project information and changed it to the original start date and I undid these date changes for task two and three so now when I go to change it to the previous day it’s going to give me this planning wizard error it’s not really an error it’s informational it’s letting me know that I move this task to start before the project start date and I can either continue and have that happen or cancel I’m going to cancel out of here and go back and change the start date and then it avoids getting that pop-up so I changed this project start date and now I can set both of these to the 20th and see the shading the corresponding blue shading nowadays you can sync your project plan file onto a SharePoint site if you have the ability to access a SharePoint site or the ability to create one you will be able to do Hands-On with this section if not and you do gain access in the future you can always come back and view this portion of the video it’s a two-way sync so if I update tasks in SharePoint they flow down to my project plan and vice versa and let’s go ahead and save our project plan file first and then we’re going to go to the file tab of the ribbon and we’re going to choose save as on the left on the bottom of the save as list you’ll see sync with SharePoint go ahead and click that so pardon my privacy blockers on my screen but you’ll notice it says it wants to sync with in my case a new SharePoint site or you can do the drop down and select an existing one I’m going to let mine be a new one and then it gives the project name as the same name of our project plan file and it gives the site address the URL to the site address and it ends with the name of the project plan file and so it lets you know that a new SharePoint site with a task list will be created at the address above and the project file will also be saved to the SharePoint site so we’re going to go ahead and click on Save it will go through several steps and then it will launch the site in your browser window and now we’ll review the site so right now you’re seeing the timeline you could edit the list and all of this kind of stuff from here but what normally you’re going to want to do is go to tasks on the left side navigation and when you click on task and you scroll down you’ll see your task list and so the thing is is that you’ll notice this is our task that we marked 100 complete if we click on ensure total participation task the next one you’ll see that that is marked 25 complete we did that in the plan file and we also changed the start dates for both of those tasks we’re going to close this and we’re going to go down in the task list and open a task that says create list of Target departments and so you can’t change anything in here unless you click the edit item the first icon on that view tab of the ribbon and then it opens everything up we’ll leave it on the same start date and let’s just mark it 60 percent six zero percent complete and then save thank you and so now we’re going to switch back over to our project plan file when I look at Task 5 and my tracking table now I can see the percent complete has been updated go ahead and save your project plan file and it’s syncing so going forward any changes you make in your plan file when you save it will sync with that SharePoint list let’s do another change another update for task three let’s go ahead and make it 100 complete oops so many different ways of doing the same thing so we made it into a two-day task right and so the actual work is 16 hours let’s go over to the actual work and change it to 20 hours so notice it changed the actual duration now to two and a half days to accommodate that the cost and everything will have updated so when you do one thing project logic kicks in and the application can do several other things that’s one of the reasons why project is so hard to learn from scratch like if you’re self-taught a lot of things happen nowadays there’s Google so that makes it a lot easier but it can be a little bit tricky and it’s behind the scenes logic let’s go down to task 33. that’s the one where we have the material resources assigned so we’re going to go ahead and this is again just for training purposes we’re getting ahead in our schedule which is fine but let’s mark that one 100 complete and it calculates the actual cost for that material resource as 5769.23 we’re gonna change that there was a price increase and so we’re gonna make it 6500 the actual cost of that one and so now when we look up at task zero as of right now with everything we’ve tracked the actual cost of the project is seven thousand two hundred and forty dollars and 38 cents go ahead and save your project plan file now that we’ve tracked our actuals we’re going to go ahead and start looking at a few different ways to view our project progress to date so we’re going to start by using a different View there is another view called tracking Gantt that we’re going to switch to so on my left side of the screen I’m going to go to my Gantt chart view indicator and right click and I’m going to select tracking Gantt now we were on our tracking table but when we switched to the tracking Gantt view it switched us back to the entry table and the focus is on the differences in the Gantt chart here so you’ll notice a lot of the taskbars have a percentage next to them everything except Milestone tasks will have the percentage and then you have two different colored bars the blue bar is your taskbar and the gray bar would be your Baseline so if you look at I’ll show you a good example that’s really good to see on the Gantt chart and this one is for task number two on the Gantt chart you’ll notice the taskbar the blue bar is in front of the gray bar that task started early the Baseline start date was June 21st in my case and we changed it to the 20th so you can see that that one is ahead of schedule and so is the next one task three it’s ahead of schedule and so the tracking again and it shows you the ones that have any percentage of completion noted including your summary task it will show that as the percentage so that’s just one way just a visual way of tracking the progress of your project another way of viewing your Project’s progress in a table format is by using the variance table I’m going to switch back to Gantt chart View and because we were in our tracking table it’s still in that table and we’re going to just simply switch to another table so we’re going to go to the view tab go back to your tables drop down and this time select variance so this table shows you your start and finish dates compared to your Baseline start and finish dates and then it shows the start and or finish variance so notice tasks two and three they started early so they have a negative one day start variance and task 2 also has a negative two day finish variance so this is another way of seeing how you’re doing right now our project is in pretty good shape but we haven’t tracked a lot of the actuals in here and that can change over time and a really simple way to view your Project’s progress is from the project information dialog box so I’m going to access it from the quick access toolbar and in the lower left corner I’m going to click on statistics and so now we have where we currently are our start and finish dates versus the Baseline and our actuals we also have our variances listed in the top half of the screen the bottom half deals with duration work and cost so we can see our current and our Baseline so duration we’re ahead of where we should be we’re also ahead in work and we’re a little bit over cost right now but we added a significant amount to that material resource so that explains that and then we see what we have actually and then what is remaining in the lower left corner we’ll see our percent complete for duration and work for the overall project and we can close project statistics now when we get to the next module you’ll learn how to view your Project’s progress by using the reporting features in Microsoft Project for right now let’s go ahead and save our project plan and then you’re going to learn how to add custom fields to your plan file earlier when we were working in resource sheet view we saw a couple of fields group and code that project added to that view that you can use for whatever you want and you can report on them we use the group field to say whether it was an internal resource or an external resource type of thing but in addition to that you can create additional custom fields in project and this is pretty cool feature let’s start by going to the project tab on the ribbon and in your Properties Group you’ll see custom fields and go ahead and click on it so you have basically two types of fields starting at the top it’s defaulting to task Fields you also have resource fields and if you’re on Project server you will have project Fields there so for your task Fields if you go over to the right and you look at the text drop down right there’s a variety of different types of fields that you can have so text cost date so on and so forth and then you also have resource fields and again they come in multiple types just like text fields go back to task and it defaults to text and if you scroll down that field list where it starts with text one through you have up to 30 tasks text fields that you can add to your project plan file go to your text drop down and choose cost you have 10 cost fields for a task that you can add to your project plan file and take it back to text so we’ve decided that we want to add a field and resource sheet view that lists a department for our resources so for the type of field we’re going to switch to Resource here we’re going to leave it on text and it’s on text one right under the list of text fields with text one selected we’re going to click the rename button and we’re going to just name it Department now Project’s name for it will remain text 1. so when you look in the field list now you’ll see that that is in parentheses after your name for IT department we want this to be a drop down list field so the users or you whoever’s working in the plan file can just use the drop down list to select a department as opposed to having to type it in so under custom attributes we’re going to do the option button for lookup and then click on the look up button and we’re basically going to type in our list of departments here pressing enter after each one so you don’t have to type them in alphabetical order we’re going to type training and then enter the next one is human resources marketing and then we’re going to have one called vendor and the reason why we don’t have to have them in alphabetical order is we because we can change the display order for the lookup table down below so I’m going to expand that by clicking the plus sign so it defaults to by row number so that means it would be in the order that we typed it in we’re going to select sort ascending and then on the right you’re going to click the sort button and down at the bottom we can click close and we can click OK on the custom Fields box go ahead and navigate to Resource sheet view and we have more over allocations that have been happening as we’ve been updating our task progress but for right now what we want to do is we want to add that department column but I would like to add it right next to the resource name column to the right of the resource name column so I’m going to right click on the type column heading and choose insert column and I’m going to start typing department and you’ll see Department text one comes up and you can press enter and notice it now has and I’ll just expand that field has a drop down arrow so starting from the top I’ll give you the Departments Emily Teresa Eugenia and Anita are in training so you can go ahead and use your drop down and this keeps more consistency in here as well if people are typing it in it could be you know could be interesting and then we have Randy and Alan and R in human resources Alice is in marketing and then our two vendors are our vendor it’s not really a department but we want to note it that way so that is our first example of a custom field so now we’re going to add another custom field this one is going to be a text excuse me a task text lookup field and it’s also going to be using a graphical indicator to display in the field so we can on the project tab we can go back into custom fields we’re going to change it make sure it’s on task at the top we’re going to leave it on text and we’re going to rename text one in here to progress go down to custom attributes do your option button for lookup and then click on look up and we’re going to type early on track and then behind schedule and we’re going to leave them in that order so we’re not going to change the display order we’ll leave it by row number and we’re going to click close at the bottom and then on the custom field screen all the way at the bottom under values to display you’re going to select the option button for graphical indicators and then click on the graphical indicators button so we’re going to be working where it says test for Progress values and then image up here we’re doing this for our non-summary rows so in the first test for Progress you’re going to do a drop down and select equals and then in the values column to the right of that you’re going to type early just like we put on our lookup list and then you’re going to go over to the image and do the drop down and we’re going to select the green flag we’re going to go to the next test for progress and choose equals again this time we want the value to be on track and we’re going to give it the yellow flag as an image and set up the last one so it equals behind schedule and give it the red flag and since since we have our three tests set up we can go ahead and click ok and we can okay again and then switch to Gantt chart View and we’re going to add oh let’s switch to our entry table so let’s go to the view tab tables drop down entry and I’m going to expand it and we’re going to put this to be this wide we’re going to put this all the way to the right so where it says add new column I’m going to click right there on add new column and I’m going to start typing progress and you see your progress text one is highlighted I’m going to press enter and then I’m going to go down to task 2 and do the drop down and I’m going to select early and it shows the green flag I’m going to do the same for task 3. so that’s a combination lookup and graphical indicator text field you can also create custom views in Microsoft Project so we’re going to create a split view we want our Gantt chart and then we want a task details form on the bottom half of the screen so we’ll have our entry table and Gantt chart just as it is but we’re going to have a split on the bottom of the screen when we’re done so the create a custom view you’re going to start on The View tab of the ribbon and in the task views group you’re going to click on the other views drop down and at the very bottom you’re going to click on more views and then on the right you’re going to click on new so we’re going to do a combination view because we want a split view as opposed to a single view so go ahead and click combination View and click ok so now it wants you to give your view a name and we’re going to call it Gantt with task details and then we’re going to have our primary view we’re going to do the drop down and select Gantt chart and then the details we’re going to select a view named task details form and we want to be able to show it from the other views menu or any view menu so we’ll leave that box checked and we’ll click ok and then we’ll click apply and you’ll see now that the Gantt chart and the entry table are on the upper half of your screen and you have a task form on the bottom half so in the upper half I’m on task two if I click into task 3

my task form updates so this is a way that I can get to additional information about the task and even use that form at the bottom to change information so I don’t always have to go to task information and get into all of that stuff so that is a benefit of having a split view now if you go to your other views drop down again on The View tab you’ll see that it’s just showing some of your built-in views go back to more views and if you scroll through the list you will see your Gantt with task details because we said show it in the menu and you can cancel out of that now if you wanted to at this point just get back to your Gantt chart view you can double click the divider line between the upper and lower half of your screen and it will make your secondary view go away now there’s another thing go to your other views in the task views group drop down go back to more views and select your Gantt with task details view again you can double click it or click it once and do apply and so if you look at the view tab in the split view group you can see that we’re not showing the timeline here so that’s unchecked but details is checked now and the details section is the bottom half of the screen and it’s showing your task details form so another way of getting rid of it is just by unchecking details some people like to look at their project plans and a flow chart type format and so there is another view that I’m going to show you now let’s right click on our view indicator and we’re going to go to network diagram View so in network diagram View it has that flowchart field and let me explain what’s going on here so your parallelogram shapes those are all your summary tasks so task zero it shows the name of the task its start date its ID the Finish date the duration and the percent complete you’ll notice that these have a slash through them and that’s because work has started on them so training rollout initiative that’s our task zero and stage one work has started on so there’s a slash mark through there parallelograms and then you have your rectangles which are your subtasks so we have one here this is stage one right so before I start looking at the subtask let me do this differently we have this line coming out and going down from stage one if I scroll down you’ll see that it’s then pointing the stage two if I continue scrolling down you’ll see stage three so they’re all connected kind of in that way your summary task starting with your summaries not task zero and then up top you have the sub tasks for stage one so Define objectives and describe and that has a double slash through it because that is a hundred percent complete right we have another one here and then we have this one that is partially complete showing here and this is another summary task and these are its subtasks so you can see the slash is partially complete and if I scroll across to the right I’ll be able to view continue viewing so you have the ability to view your project in this manner and when you’re in this view Network diagram view you get a network diagram format tab on your Ribbon so you can show and hide different things if you want so if I want to uncheck progress marks you see those slashes go away if I want to not see project summary task I can uncheck it there if you check link labels so you’re seeing your finish to start relationship types showing on those link lines and then you also have straight links so it’s kind of pointing to everything that’s associated with it and we can go back to Gantt chart View before we get into analyzing our project plan let’s go over some definitions so the first one is what is slack you have two different types of slack in Microsoft Project free slack is the number of days that a task can have before it starts delaying its successor task so if task one is going to be delayed it could potentially delay task 2 or whatever it’s successor task is so free slack would be the number of days that it has the amount of wiggle room that it has before it starts delaying its successor tasks and in total slack is the number of days a task can have before it starts delaying the entire project so free slack is task to task total slack is tasked to entire project and in other definitions you’re going to need to know are about slipping and late tasks so they’re slightly different slipping tasks or tasks that have a forecasted finish date that is greater than the Baseline finish date they may be scheduled to start late have already started late or are taking longer than planned then you have late tasks and that one is running behind both the Baseline start and finish dates they may or may not have started they may have started on time but will finish late they may have started early but will finish late or they might just be finishing late so keep those in your back your mind while we analyze our project plan before we get started let’s go ahead and level our plan again we’ve been tracking actuals and doing other things in here that has caused us to have over-allocated resources again so this time what we’re going to do on the resource tab in the level group we’re going to just select level all and we still have some minor allocations there’s several surrounding those daily calls but there are only an hour that wouldn’t really raise a flag for me and so we only have a few left and that’s good so now we can actually start analyzing our plan the first thing we’re going to do is go to the Gantt chart format tab on the ribbon and in the bar Styles group you’ll see that you have a series of three check boxes critical tasks slack and late tasks so we talked about slack and late tasks on the slide on what you’re not seeing here are slipping task and we didn’t talk about critical tasks because you’re going to learn about those right now so let’s check the box in front of critical task and look at your Gantt chart and you’ll see that you have several tasks if you scroll across it and down that now are not with a blue bar but they have like a salmon colored bar based on my color scheme those are critical tasks so what is a critical task a critical task is a task that could potentially delay the Project’s finish date if it goes off schedule now typically and what we have here is a highly sequential task list we usually with a task list you put the task in the order that they’re going to happen on your project you outline your tasks by creating summary tasks and so on and so forth and so whenever you have a highly sequential task list there’s always going to be critical tasks and that’s how they show up on the Gantt chart we’re going to uncheck critical tasks on the ribbon so now we’re going to take a look at slack and that’s on the same bar Styles group on the Gantt chart format tab you can check the box in front of Slack and you’ll notice if you right click on task 9 and scroll to task you’ll see your taskbar right your blue bar to the right of it the resource and the resource name seems to be sitting on top of like a thin black line that is the line that indicates Slack and if I hover my mouse just so over that line a screen tip will pop up and it’s telling me it’s showing the free slack not total slack it’s telling me this task is scheduled to be finished on the 27th but you can let it go until August 4th without having an impact on any successor tasks perhaps forcing them to cause the project to go over schedule so that’s a lot of slack on that task now there are other ways that you can view your slack your critical tasks and I’ll show those to you in a moment in the meantime go ahead and uncheck the slack box they are check boxes so you could have critical slack and late task check and this time click on late task and I don’t think I’m looking to see no we don’t have any in our project plan so we can uncheck that so I’m going to show you how to create a custom table that shows all of these fields that you can use to analyze your plan like whether a task is critical both free and total slack if it’s late if it’s slipping so on The View tab of the ribbon you’re going to go to your tables drop down and at the bottom select more tables on the right side choose new and we’re going to name it project analysis on the right side this one doesn’t default so the right side of where you put the name you’re going to check show in menu and then what we’re going to do is click in the first field name do the drop down or you can start typing and we’re going to start typing critical and when critical pops up we’re going to just tab we’re going to go down to the second field name and start typing free and free slack will pop up and tab underneath free slack we’re going to do total Slack and underneath total Slack will put um late so it has late finish or late start we’ll leave late off of here and let’s try slipping and that doesn’t show up either so we’ll be able to see oops okay I gotta get rid of that we’ll be able to see our critical and free Slack critical free and total slack in this new table that we create so we’re going to go ahead and click OK there why am I getting this I have something in the field that shouldn’t be there and now that I work through that when I clicked OK project analysis is selected and I can apply and so now I can see free and total slack well actually I guess we should have put the task name in there so let’s go back we’ll edit what we did We’ll add the task name that would be helpful and I noticed we didn’t uncheck the default of lock First Column so we’ll fix that as well so we’re going to go back to our tables drop down more tables with project analysis selected go to edit on the right and let’s insert a row so critical is already selected insert a row to go above it and let’s type name in there so we get the task name that will be helpful and then underneath where your check boxes are you’re going to uncheck lock First Column and click OK and apply so now I can expand the name column and just expand everything so I can see what’s critical and the amount of free and total Slack they’ll often be the same number but sometimes they’ll be different if there’s both for example if you look at stage one project planning it has zero days of free slack so we can’t push that stage back at all without impacting a successor task but we do have five and a half days of total slack for a wiggle room that won’t impact the project end date and we can go back to our tables drop down and switch it back to your entry table and now we’ll view slippage on our Gantt chart so we’re on that Gantt chart format ribbon Tab and the bar Styles group we’re going to do the slippage drop down and select Baseline so now you will have these little thin bars on your Gantt chart I’m hovering over one now and the screen tip pops up slippage right it gives me to name it a task its Baseline start date is August 2nd but the task start date is scheduled for August 10th so that’s why it’s coming up with slippage and I’m going to go back to the slippage drop down and uncheck Baseline now we’re going to go into sorting filtering highlighting and grouping and this will be mostly in your entry table so I’m going to drag my Gantt chart divider bar all the way over to the right I just want to focus on the table for right now and so if you go to the view tab of the menu and it’s in the same group where you have your tables drop down you have your highlight there you have your filter you have your group by and you also have your sort so if I go to the sort drop down I can sort my project by start date finish date cost or ID and so let’s do by cost and so we’re not showing a cost field here let’s right click on the duration column heading go to insert column start typing in cost and press enter so you can see that we have it sorted by cost so what’s happened here stage three came up to the top underneath task zero because stage 3 has the highest cost that’s kind of how that’s working and then stage four and then stage two and then stage one now to undo that sort we’re going to go back to the sort drop down and you’re going to choose buy ID so that’s the row numbers so that’s how you can undo that sort you can also group your task list in addition to you know your default groupings of summary tasks and subtasks so in that data group on The View tab go to the no group drop down and choose duration yeah so by the way when you have a grouping applied you don’t even want to try to look at your Gantt chart because it’s crazy it’s based off of the grouping so what it’s done is it looked for everything that had a duration of zero days that’s our Milestone tasks they’re all grouped together our roll numbers are all over the place then our calls are like 0.13 days then we have our one day task one and a half 1.6 two days so on and so forth so we Group by duration now go back to your duration now duration drop down for group by and at the top click on no group in Project you have two different types of filters that you can apply to your plan I call the first one a column filter which is specific to a particular column and then you have more of a global filter you can use them separately or you can use them together we’re going to use both of them now the first one we’re going to do is a column level filter on the cost column so we’re going to go to the drop down arrow to the right of the cost column heading hover over filters and choose between so it says show rows where cost it goes to is within we’re going to do the drop down next to is within and we’re going to choose is greater than or equal to in the text box to the right we’re going to type 300 we’re going to go to the next text box under the and or and do is less than or equal to and then we’re gonna put in 500. so we want to show rows where the cost is basically between 300 and 500 including both of those numbers and we’re going to click ok so now your entire task list for your sub task okay this doesn’t apply to your summary task but it’s only showing those that are between 300 and 500 dollars now we can apply a more Global filter on top of this so what we’re going to do is on The View tab in the data group we’re going to go to the no filter drop down and we’re going to click on using resource and we’re going to do the drop down and select Teresa Brown and click ok so now it’s showing the tasks that Teresa Brown is assigned to that are between 300 and 500 in cost now let’s clear those filters we’re gonna go to what used to be the drop down arrow next to the cost column heading we’re gonna click that funnel and just click on clear filter from cost and then we’re gonna go to the filter drop down that says using resource and at the top select no filter go ahead and save your plan file let’s do another Global filter using a resource so I’m going to my no filter drop down using resource and this time let’s do the drop down and select Anita Redmond and click ok so it’s only showing tasks that she’s involved in now notice it collapse your list you know you’re not seeing your whole list you can see that by looking at your row numbers it skips from Row 1 to row 11 it skips from 14 to 23 so you’re not seeing your entire task list you’re only seeing the rows of Interest which are the ones that Anita Redman is assigned to now you might want your list to be intact and have the effect of a filter so let’s go up to the filter using resource and choose no filter and right above that go to no highlight drop down choose using resource and then do the drop down and select Anita Redmond again and click ok so your list stays intact and your rows of Interest are highlighted go ahead and go to your highlight drop down and choose no highlight at the top another way that you can analyze your project plan and you may be familiar with some of these terms if your team uses agile or the scrum method there is now a tie-in in project using what are known as task boards and Sprints and so it’s another way of analyzing your plan and we’re going to start by using setting up our task boards and we can access task boards from The View tab it’s in the task views group you can do the drop down and select task board and you’ll notice that there are tasks already all of your tasks basically are on the not started section of this task board and so we’re going to modify this what we’re going to do is for not started we’re going to leave it named that way and you’ll learn how to move these completed tasks in a little while right we’re not going to use the next up one so I’m going to right click on that and delete it we just want not started in progress and done that’s all we want but we want to change what shows on the cards so right now it’s just showing the name the resource and the check mark for percent you know 100 complete so we’re going to go to the task board format Tab and in the customize group we’re going to click on customize cards we want to check the box in front of show task ID and then you can add up to five additional fields in addition to these three base fields so we’re going to do the first drop down and we’re going to select percent complete and we’re going to do the second drop down and start typing Sprint and you can press enter when it shows on the list now we haven’t set up Sprints yet you’ll learn about those in just a few moments we’re going to click ok so now if we look at any task card we have the percent complete we have Sprint and all of it says no Sprint because we haven’t done anything with the Sprints yet and we have the task ID which is our row numbers showing the first first button on the task board format tab is sheet click on it and it takes you to task board sheet view and you can see you have your no Sprint column there you have your indicators column your task may be slightly out of order on this view at this moment but what I can do let’s see what we want to focus on here is how to move it from task board to task board so if you notice the ones that have the check marks in the indicator column you see the board status says not started and we’re going to do the drop down where it says not started and choose done so do that for everything that has a check mark I think there’s only three of them there with a check mark done and that’s kind of how that works and then we know that we can add a new column here this might be helpful and we’re going to just choose percent complete and so we have this other task at the top that is sixty percent complete so task five and I’m going to go to board status and I’m going to choose in progress for that one and then I can go back to my view tab and go back to and you can click the upper half of the task board button to get into it and you can see how your tasks are now distributed between the three different boards that we have there go ahead and save your project so your task boards work in conjunction with sprints Sprint is like a Time phase layer in addition to like your tasks start and finish dates so you can look at your project by Sprint meaning by the duration of this time phase layer we’re going to set up one month Sprints for our project plan and we can do that by going to the project tab of the ribbon and in the Properties Group you’re going to click on manage sprints so it gives you a default no Sprint with zero days length and then it gives you a beginning Sprint Sprint one right and and it’s two weeks we’re going to change that to four weeks now you may if you use the up arrow button to change the time you’ll get three ew that’s estimated week I’m going to keep going up and I get 4ew I don’t want the E I just want the W so just four week Sprints and when I tab it starts with my project start date and it goes out for a period of four weeks and then down at the bottom I’m going to click add Sprint and this one is giving me a two weeker as well I want it to be four so I’m going to just change these to four weeks if you wanted to do two weeks for inch you’re set because that’s what its default is otherwise oops I have to go back into my manage Sprints I move too fast there and so and normally I would do this for the duration of the project we’re just going to add two more Sprints and make them four weeks just so we don’t have to keep going all the way until next February is when it ends just so you can see how this kind of works then I’ll add the last one and make that one four weeks as well oops and then I’m going to click OK at the bottom and you have your on the Sprints tab of the ribbon now and you can get back into managing your Sprints from that ribbon tab and then you have views if you go to your Sprint view drop down arrow you can see current Sprint board let’s go there first right and it’s just showing the current Sprint which is the current the beginning of the project for the first month right and then we’re going to go and you don’t see any tasks here you’re going to go back to your Sprint drop down and go to current Sprint sheet and you don’t see anything here either because we don’t have any tasks assigned to any Sprints at this point you’re going to go to your task 4 drop down and go to task board sheet and when I scroll up here you’ll see everything is assigned to no Sprint so what I’m going to do here is I’m going to get rid of the percent complete column because I don’t need it here right now so I’m going to right click on its heading and hide column and then I’m going to add a new column and I’m going to start typing start so I want the start date of the task and we’re going to put it in Sprints by the start date so for the first two tasks right two and three we’re going to do the drop down and select Sprint one so all the tasks up to an including task 18 are in Sprint one go ahead and set that up and just put 19 through 21 in Sprint 2. now let’s go to your Sprint drop down and go to current Sprint board so this is Sprint one and we’re seeing it populate with tasks right and with the task cards not started in progress and done we can go back to the Sprint drop down and from there you just have your Sprints and you have your current Sprint sheet if you want to take a look at that now so this is just Sprint one it’s the current time phase that we’re in and then we’re going to go to the planning drop down and we can go to Sprint planning board and here you have your no Sprint so all the tasks that are in no Sprint the ones that we assigned to Sprint one and the ones that we’ve assigned to Sprint too so if you know that you’re looking at a month at a time that’s a different view of your project you could name your Sprints stuff like that but I’m just saying this is another way that you can analyze how your project is doing you’re looking at it with this time phase overlay of a month right and so and we based it I base the Sprints off of the start date of the tasks for those months so just another way of analyzing your project go ahead and save your project plan file so I’m gonna go back to manage on that Sprints tab and I’m going to have you do this on your own you’re going to rename Sprints one through four month one month two month three month four something like that go ahead and do that and then click ok so now that they’re named appropriately it will make more sense when you’re analyzing now we’re going to get started on the last lesson in this module which is controlling a project plan we’ll be editing the tasks list by deleting a task and setting what’s known as a deadline task we are also going to be splitting tasks learning about task constraints rescheduling tasks and updating a Baseline so I’m going to challenge you now I’m going to have you switch back to Gantt chart View and delete task 46. once you’ve done that go to the very bottom of your task list and click in the first blank task name cell so we’re going to set a deadline task here I notice the finished date of the project let me go take another peek at that February yeah February 17 2023 so I’m going to say that we have a couple of weeks wiggle room at the absolute latest this project needs to be finished by February 28th so I’m going to set a deadline of February 28th and what it does is only helpful kind of after the fact right so it will put an indicator a green arrow on your Gantt chart for the deadline date and if you blow past the deadline that Arrow will turn red and you’ll get a indicator in the indicator column so in that last the first empty task name we’re going to just type project deadline that’s what we’ll name this deadline task and press enter and then click on it and out Dent it one level from the task tab and now what we’re going to do is we’re going to double click it to get into task information dialog box and on the advanced tab you’ll see the deadline is set to non-applicable we’re going to do the drop down there navigate to February of the following year and select the last day of the month and click ok now on your Gantt chart you can scroll to the right until you get to February of next year in that particular week the last week of the month and you’ll see the Green Arrow indicating your deadline date on your Gantt chart and like I said if you go past February 28th that Arrow will turn red and you’ll get an indicator in the indicators column so that’s what a deadline task does for you in Project now let’s say you have a resource that starts work on a task and then let’s say it’s a multi-day task and they put in like two days of the work and then they call out sick for two days there’s not another resource that can be assigned to that task so you have to be able to note that in your project plan file somehow and the way you do that is by splitting the task and then adding a task note so what we’re going to do is we’re going to go up to task six and you’re going to right click on it and scroll to task so the Gantt bar comes into view and we can see that Teresa is assigned to that seven day task and so the task is starting on a Friday and we’re going to say that she works Friday Monday and Tuesday of the following week and then she’s out sick Wednesday and Thursday so that’ll be our scenario she works Friday Monday Tuesday then she’s out sick Wednesday and Thursday then she returns on Friday so what we want to do is we want to make sure we’re on the right task bar on the Gantt chart perform departmental training needs analysis and on the task Tab and you may want to watch me do this first and then do it on the task tab of the ribbon in the schedule group you will see the split task button and so what I’m going to do is I’m going to click on it and you’ll notice a couple of things as I move my mouse around there’s like a white pop-up box that seems to be attached to my weird looking Mouse pointer looks like two vertical lines in the right pointing Arrow and so what I want to do is I want to hover over that taskbar for task six on the Gantt chart and as I move my mouse to the right over that bar you’ll see on the right side the schedule start date comes up right and it’s going to Sunday so it starts on a Friday and then I’m on Saturday Sunday I’m going to get to Monday so she worked on Friday Monday and Tuesday and when it gets to Wednesday the 29th I’m gonna click my mouse on that bar and it splits the taskbar Now it only split it for one day so in the scenario she’s having Wednesday and Thursday off sick so I’m gonna put my mouse on top of the right side of the split bar looks like a four-headed Arrow I’m going to click and hold and drag that side to the right one more day until the task starts says Friday in the white pop-up box so now she worked on Friday Monday and Tuesday she called out sick Wednesday and Thursday and then she resumed her work on the task on Friday and that’s how it’s represented on the Gantt chart and by the way when you’re leveling when you’re having project level for you one of the things it may do to get rid of the over allocation for a resource is it may split some tasks so if you see a taskbar with a split and a dotted line in between it it means it’s been split once you split a task you may want to document the reason why and you do that via task notes I’m going to double click task six to get into the task information dialog box and on the notes tab I’m going to date the no it’s going to be weird because I’m doing the split in advance but I’m gonna date an initial to know and I’m going to say Teresa called out due to illness on 6 28-29 [Music] 22. and then I’ll just go ahead and click ok so it’s documented another situation you may run into when you’re controlling your project plan is having to apply a constraint to a task let’s take a look at task 69. it’s discussing the results with the vendor for any improvements and it’s currently scheduled to start on September 26th it’s a two-day task so it’ll end on Tuesday the 27th right okay so this is the thing the vendor says that they are unable to meet at all that week they’re going to be out of town and they will be able to meet toward the end of the following week so we need to apply a constraint on that task and we do it from task information so let’s double click task 69 and if you go to the advanced tab you’ll see the constraint type it defaults to as soon as possible now we talked about that very early in the course when we scheduled our project from its start date it gives all tasks the constraint type of as soon as possible so whenever there’s room in the schedule that task can start as soon as possible and then when you do the drop down arrow you’ll see as late as possible that’s the default if you schedule your project from a finish date so it does reverse Logic on almost everything then you have enosa considered fairly flexible constraints the as soon as possible and as late as possible constraints then you have semi-flexible constraints finish no earlier than or finish no later than the task can finish no earlier than a particular date or no later than a particular date and if you select one of those then you have to give it a constraint date on the right side and then back to the list I’m going to skip the must finish on and must start on for right now at the bottom of the list you have start no earlier then and start no later than they also require a constraint date and they’re also semi-flexible the ones that you want to avoid as much as possible is what we call hard constraints the task must finish on a specific date or must start on a specific date if you choose those constraints one of those constraints for a task then project cannot reschedule that task no matter what is going on in the schedule whether it comes to leveling or anything else it is set in stone so you want to avoid those as much as possible so I said that the vendor is not available until late in the following week and so what I’m going to do is I’m going to say the constraint type is start no earlier than that’s semi-flexible so this task this meeting with the vendor can’t start any earlier than and then for the constraint date I’m going to put in the following let’s see that would be the week of September 26th it was scheduled so I’m gonna put in October 6th so that’s semi-flexible project can schedule around it and it’s going to shift our schedule so we’re going to click ok and then you get all your blue shading of everything that was pushed back you know your successor task would be pushed back and the phase changed as well we look at tasks 76 and we realize that we have the party scheduled for Tuesday and everybody’s agreed that they’re available on the following Saturday well Saturday and Sundays are not considered working days in project but we can change it anyway and that’s what we’re going to do now so we’re dealing with tasks 76 and we’re simply going to go to its start date field and do the drop down arrow and we’re going to select Saturday September 24th now as soon as we do that the planning wizard pops up it’s very helpful so it’s a couple of things have happened here right it’s telling us that we are moving it away we’re attempting to move it away from a link task and now the link between the tasks will not drive the start date of this task in addition a new start date is a non-working day so we can we this is a two-part process here because it’s a link task if it wasn’t a linked task we would only get the message about the new start date is a non-working day but so the first thing we have to do is remove the link and it’s going to move it to start the following working day after the Saturday that we chose so we’re gonna remove the link we’re gonna click ok and so now it changed it to the following workday but it no longer has a link we’re going to go to the start date drop down and we’re going to choose Saturday September 24th and this is where we get you moved it to a non-working day but we can override that by making Saturday September 24th a working day and that would only apply to this task so it’s not going to schedule any other task on that day just this task so make that choice and click OK and now we’ll have the party on that Saturday now notice that you have an a calendar icon in your indicator so by doing that it created a start no earlier constraint for that task it can’t start any earlier than that Saturday go ahead and save your project plan file so a lot of times many unexpected or a few unexpected things may happen during the life cycle of a project and so I’m going to give you two scenarios here and how you would handle them in your project plan file and for this we’re going to be focusing on our stage four tasks except for task 69. and the party task so we’re gonna do two things let’s say that the stakeholders have informed you that you may have to push stage four out we’ll just say due to budget reasons and so we at this point it’s not confirmed we don’t want to remove them from the project schedule but we need to start looking at the schedule as if those tasks may not be in it on the schedule so we’re going to go ahead and select from task 65. to task 68 and then hold down your control key and select from 70 down to 75 and we’ll leave the deadline there for and the party okay is fine so now what we want to do is we want to go to the project pass tab of the ribbon for this one so we have the tasks selected that may or may not have to be rescheduled or even removed from the project plan and on the task tab in the schedule group you’re going to click inactivate and it leaves those tasks in your project plan they’re dimmed out they’re crossed out and the only thing that you would have to do so task 69 somehow got inactivated to so I just manually I guess my selection wasn’t right but I manually reactivated that one and I’m going to reactivate the party one as well and so if they say hey everything is fine all we have to do is Select them and clicking inactivate will reactivate them now there is one thing you have to be aware of when you do that out of the inactivated task let’s say task 67 for example is now inactive if that is a predecessor for task 76 we would have to go to task 76 and change its predecessor manually because task 67 is now inactive and in vice versa if we reactivate it we would have to then re-link it to task 67. if that were the situation we’re going to select the inactive tasks and you’re going to click your inactivate button to activate them again and I did the opposite my selecting skills here are not very admirable so that whole stage is activated again so that’s one scenario nothing set in stone they may run but in the meantime let’s just temporarily inactivate them so they’re not interfering with our other work on the project the other scenario is we’re not going to be able to do stage four until starting in May of next year for financial reasons the entire stage except for the meeting with the vendor will keep that meeting so I’m going to start selecting the tasks and then I’m going to select the rest of the tasks I know why I’m clicking the wrong button I’m doing my shift instead of control here we go and so I’m gonna leave the party intact and the deadline so all the other stage 4 tasks are selected and this time we’re going to go to the project tab of the ribbon on the project tab toward the right side of the ribbon in the status group you will see update project and we’re going to click on it so by the way if everything is going like gravy on your project and all your tasks are starting on time and completing on time you can use this box to say update work as complete through and pick a date and you can set it to either of these choices right and then you can use this update Project Box for our purpose here which is to reschedule uncompleted work to start after we’re going to do the drop down there and we’re going to navigate to May of next year and we’ll start we’ll select May 1st and it’s not for the entire project be careful here it’s only for those selected tasks now if you did leave entire project and you did okay you could do Ctrl Z to undo we’re going to click ok so now you’re seeing how it pushed out all of that work we said start after May 1st so it’s literal it’s starting them on May 2nd that’s how that’s working so they’ve been pushed out which means that if I go to the top now the finished date is not until October of next year and if I go to my deadline marker which was set for February 28th of next year on The Gantt chart let me get into February here we are and then scroll down to the deadline task and scroll to it so we can see at this point we haven’t gotten to that date yet right in reality we haven’t gotten to that date we’re just scrolling to it but at this point if that is going to be pushed out that far we might want to consider updating our deadline and making a note about why we’re updating it so that deadline arrow is still fine for February 28th it will flip to Red on February 29th now that we’ve made all of these changes to our project plan particularly rescheduling stage four we should probably update our Baseline so let’s do this let’s um go to the view tab and go to our tables drop down and select variance and let’s see so we see if we look down at stage four we have a two month variance there start date variance right that’s a lot I mean if we go to let’s go back to our entry table and we’re going to just update our existing Baseline at this point so we can go to the project tab and before we do that I just want to point out something here that I think is particularly useful let’s say that we’re already in like January of next year and we want to look at something in our project we want to get the status of what the project was like in August of this year so you can put in a status state in this status group on the project tab you can click on that n a and select a status date and then you can run reports and see the status of the project as of that date it lets you go back in time during the life cycle of your project so I just think that’s very useful to know what we’re going to do is in the schedule group we’re going to click on set Baseline and then set Baseline and so we we want to update the Baseline that we already saved so I’m not going to change to a new one I’m going to just leave it on that one for the entire project and then I’m going to click OK at the bottom so it lets you know that it has already been used are you sure you want to overwrite the data and we’re going to select yes so now if we go back to set Baseline set Baseline you can see it updated its last saved date so we have a more accurate point to continue tracking from at this stage of our project to recap module 3 we started with executing a project and that was really tracking actuals so we marked tasks percentage complete and we did a hundred percent fifty percent a couple of different percentages we use the tracking table to track actuals we changed actual durations we even changed a remaining duration making a two-day task into a one-day task you learned about the different fields and the table on the tracking table and then you learned about how to sync your project plan file with SharePoint and that when you update a task progress on SharePoint it flows back down to your project plan we updated the work on a task and we also updated costs for a task we moved into lesson two which was monitoring our project progress and we learned how to use the tracking Gantt View we also looked at the variance table to see the differences between our Baseline and where we were and we also use project statistics to view where we are compared to our Baseline after that you learned how to add custom fields to your project we added a lookup field for the resource sheet so we could have the Departments for the resource and we also added a look up and graphical indicator field for our entry table where it could show the progress of a task using Flags we went on to creating a custom view we did a split view you learned how to work in network diagram View and we analyzed our project plan by viewing critical tasks we looked at both free and total Slack we actually created a custom table in this section so that we could look at critical tasks and free and total Slack we also talked about late tasks and slipping tasks and we were able to view this stuff in a table as well as on the Gantt chart then we moved in how to sort and group your tasks list as well as how to apply filters and or highlights to it then we moved on to using task boards and Sprint as another way to analyze your project plan so it’s just another way of looking at your task list we have them on task boards we were able to customize the cards you learned how to use task board sheet and then we set up sprints which are time phased overlays on tasks so we set up one month block sprints and you learned how to use the current Sprint board and the current Sprint sheet you learned how to move your tasks onto different task cards and you learned how to assign your tasks to the appropriate Sprint then we moved into controlling a project plan by editing the task list we deleted a task and set a deadline task we then moved into splitting a task that’s not on this list here but we did split a task and we documented the reason for the split as a task note we added a constraint to a task and we also rescheduled a task to a non-working day and we had to break its link to its predecessor task in order to do that and then you learned how to Mark a group of tasks as inactive and then how to reactivate them and then you learned how to move how to reschedule a group of tasks for a later date and because we made all of those changes we ended up updating our Baseline so we overwrote it in our last and final module we have two lessons Lesson Four is reporting on a project so you’ll learn how to format and share a chart view how to view existing reports how to create custom reports and how to create a visual report which is really a way of exporting project information either to Excel and or Vizio and then lesson five is where we’ll get to customize the application you’ll learn how to change some key project options how to create a project plan template so if you’re going to be doing another similar project you don’t have to start from scratch you’ll have a template that you’ll be able to work from you’ll also learn how to share resources I mentioned that you may happen upon a project plan file that only has a resource sheet filled out and that would be known as a resource pool and that’s how you can share resources across project plans and then lastly you’ll learn how to link project plan files to each other we’re going to start this lesson by formatting the Gantt chart and learning ways that you could share just that portion of your project plan so just so our focus is on the Gantt chart I’m going to grab my divider between the chart and the entry table and just drag it all the way to the left and on the Gantt chart the first thing I’m going to start with is the Gantt chart Style Gallery and so you can use that to change the coloration of the bars on your Gantt chart and you have a wide range of choices if you want to see more choices so you’re seeing one row of choices you can access this Arrow downward pointing arrow on the right side of the gallery with the horizontal line above it and that opens up the whole gallery so you can see you have presentation Styles and you have scheduling styles really you can use any style that you want at any point so I am going to just pick a presentation style here and I’m going to go with the orange the next thing we’re going to do is change the font so the first button on the Gantt chart format tab is text Styles and let’s go ahead and click that button in the text Styles box you’ll see at the top item to change is currently set to all so if I do the drop down next to all I can see everything that’s included on that list right so what I want to do is we just want to we want to change the font for everything we want to make the font size larger so I’m going to select 12 point for my font size and I’m going to click ok and so notice it changed the font size for all objects my row headers are larger the Gantt chart is larger my time scale at the top is larger and if I expand the divider I’ll see that the table looks the same so now what we’re going to do actually it did get a little bit larger let me check here yeah now the table does not look the same the table is also 12 point that’s right it was set to all and so now we want to do another font type change so let’s go back to Gantt chart format and back into text styles and this time let’s do the drop down next to all and we will choose summary tasks on that list and for our summary task we’re going to give a background color and I’m going to choose just like an orangey color and I’m going to click ok so that impacts the table portion right because that’s where our summary tasks are showing there and that’s what we selected from the items to change drop down in addition you can put drawings on your Gantt chart all kinds of shapes and things so on the Gantt chart format tab the last button is drawing go ahead and click it and select text box now your mouse looks like a Crosshair and so you can click and hold and draw a text box about that size and we’re going to type Emily can have more than 50 percent availability is necessary I’m going to type a period then I’m going to click away from the box and then go back and reselect it and then I can see I can move it I have sizing arrows around it if I want to resize it I can do that and then what I want to do is I want to make sure that the text box is pointing to this Gantt bar where Emily Barrington is listed at 50 percent so I’m going to go back to the drawing drop down and this time I’m going to select Arrow and I’m going to click on the left side and hold on the left side of the text box and just draw an arrow pointing to where it says Emily Barrington so you can do things like that on your Gantt chart as well so let’s say that you have stakeholders that you need to share your Gantt chart with we are going to do that next go ahead and save your project plan now let’s make our entry table a viewable again so I’m going to just grab my divider bar and really we just need to see the task name columns at this point up through task name and what we’re going to do is we’re going to in this scenario we’re going to say that we need to share stage one with our stakeholders and they want to see the Gantt chart portion not the table so what we’re going to do is in your task list on the entry table I’m going to include task zero I’m going to just click and hold on row heading 0 and drag down until I have row 22 selected so that’s all of stage one as well as task zero and now that I have those selected I’m going to drag that divider bar backwards so I don’t see any of the table anymore and just my Gantt chart and so before we do this let’s go to the view tab and in the zoom group make sure your time scale is set to weeks so it will look like how my Gantt chart looks on my screen and what we’re going to do is go to the task tab of the ribbon we’re going to do our copy drop down and select copy picture this time we’re going to save the image as a gif image file so we’re going to do that option button and then navigate to wherever you want to save the file it might automatically want to take you up to your SharePoint site since we’ve synced this to SharePoint and at that at this point you can just put it on your local computer if you’d like and then we’re going to say in the copy group we’re going to leave it on selected rows so all of stage one and task zero and then for the time scale we’re going to leave it on as shown on screen and we’re going to click ok so I’ve navigated to my local directory and I’ve opened the gif file and this is what it looks like and so this is a picture I can put it into a PowerPoint presentation Word document email I can edit it and get rid of because even though we had the table hidden it still shows the role IDs and the information column I can crop it I can do all sorts of things with it and then share it with my stakeholders and we can go ahead and close that file now we’re going to use the built-in reporting tools by going to the report tab of the ribbon and you can expand so you can see your entry table again and you can deselect those tasks so on the report tab of the ribbon we’ll start in the view report section and what I normally do here is we just do a grand tour of all of the reports and all of the categories of reports so we’re going to start like that and so the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to click on dashboards and we’re going to look at the burn down report now all of these reports are highly interactive they’re also very descriptive so it’s showing the entire life cycle of the project up here the name of the report these are just text boxes which means you can modify them you can delete them it comes with two charts on the left you have your work burned down and it gives you a description shows how much work you’ve completed and how much you have left if the remaining cumulative work line is steeper so that would be a blue line here and we don’t have one then the project may be late and then you have a task burn down shows how many tasks you’ve completed and how many you have left if the remaining task line is steeper which is the orange line on that one then your project may be late so it’s fine it’s not steeper so that is an example of a burn down report now as we go through the tour of the reports I’ll point out several things we’ll actually modify some of the default reports as we go one of the things I want to point out is this if you click in a blank area of your report and you look up at your Ribbon you have that report design contextual tab now click on your burn down text box and in addition to the report design tab you get a shape format tab click on your work burn down chart now you have report design chart design and format so depending on what object on a report you’re working with the appropriate contextual tabs will show up on the ribbon we’ll talk about the field list that just popped up on the right separately now we’re going to go back to the report tab of the ribbon and back to dashboards and this time let’s choose cost overview so this report comes with two charts and a table it has the name of the report the date range of the Project Life Cycle you get a box here which is actually a table showing the cost and the remaining cost and percent complete underneath that you have a table the cost status table only for your top level tasks showing the name actual and remaining costs Baseline costs cost and any variance you have a progress versus cost chart on the right in again with instructions if percent complete line is below the cumulative cost line your project may be over budget and then you have a cost status chart for the top level task showing remaining actual and Baseline cost now the field list on the right side of your screen you can use that to change what shows in any of these report objects so let’s click on that cost status table to select it and if you look in the field list you’ll see that the fields that are showing in that table have check marks in them and there are different categories of field so we have your ID name and resource name at the top then you have your cost fields includes all your baselines you have your custom Fields here these are more cost Fields actual cost costs cost variance remaining cost right and so we’re not using any date fields in there or duration flag number work or other and underneath all of the other fields that are collapsed you’ll see the fields that are in that table underneath that you’ll see it says filter all tasks Group by no group and outline level one outline level one are your top level tasks so we’re going to do the drop down arrow there and we’re going to select all subtasks we want to see the cost status for all of the subtasks so now the table has expanded and all of the subtasks are in there and then if you were going to keep that that way I would change the text box above because it says cost status for top level tasks and I would just put for subtasks now let’s select that table again I just want to click anywhere in it to have it selected and go up to the table design tab on the ribbon and we can give the table a different style so I’m going to use that more button on the right of the table Styles gallery to open it you’ll notice that there are light medium and dark Styles they give you Styles at the top that are best match for this particular document I’m gonna go with a medium orange style with banded Rose so light dark light dark and then click on your cumulative cost chart just somewhere in a blank area of the chart go to chart design and to the left of the chart Styles Gallery there’s a change colors tool and I’m gonna just try it I may not like the color once I apply it and I don’t like that color so I’m just did Ctrl Z which is undo and I decide I’ll just leave these charts alone so if we wanted to see what this report would look like if we were going to print it right we could go to the file Tab and just choose print and you’ll see your print preview and this is where you learn that you may have to change margins so on and so forth It’s generating 10 pages of this report so you can see that that table obviously since we did it for all subtasks is expanding over several pages and then it’s creating some blank pages so when I go to the back arrow to get out of there and I look at the report design tab on the ribbon I can get to in the page setup group I can go to orientation and maybe make it portrait I don’t think that’s going to do any good but I could go to page breaks and then you’re seeing the page breaks on the screen right so I know where that table is breaking and what I might choose to do is something like move the table to another page so you may have to manually massage your stuff to get it to look right if you’re going to be printing the report just put it back where it was for right now you can also change your paper size here and that might help with some of them so what I’m going to have you do is I’m gonna have you take that table back to just showing your level one task your top level task and one other thing that needs to be done here this is why um with the exception and we adjusted that table back but this is why it’s generating more pages because of these charts on the right I’m putting them inside that margin there so that it won’t be bleeding over to another page and now if we go to file print we’re still getting a blank page there I’m getting one of two pages oh because this this text box I can see it bleeding over so just have to go back and clean it up a little bit more so it’s the text box above this table that’s going over there that’s what I’m on so that way if you need to print your report you can do it that way now the other things that you have on that report design tab are important to review as well it’s very rare that I actually print out the reports let’s take a look on report design tab in the report group you have manage which is you can rename your report here or you can get to the global organizer which we will cover later or you can copy the report so when you hover over copy report it says copy it so you can paste it into another application like word PowerPoint or even Excel so a lot of times I’ll do the report as it just paste it into a Word document or PowerPoint or something like that so you can test that feature out by clicking copy report so now I’ve switched to PowerPoint and I’m going to just do a blank presentation here and I want to go on the Home tab to the new slide drop down and choose blank and then I’m going to right click on slide one and delete it on the blank slide I just have my guides showing on the slide and if you want to see guides you can go to the view Tab and check your guides in the show group and I’m going to just right click and I’m going to look at my paste options I can use the destination theme so if I had a theme in this presentation and I wanted the report to look like that theme I would choose that option we just have a blank presentation with no theme I can keep the source formatting so the way that it’s formatted from Project or I can copy it in as a picture I’m going to use picture and then I can resize it so it actually fits on the slide I’m using the bottom right sizing handle and I’m going to just size it so it fits better on that slide and then I would do another new blank slide and put the next report in and send the presentation out or conduct the presentation with the reports in it for my stakeholders another group on this report design tab is the insert group so we’ll revisit this group when we develop a custom report where you can insert images shapes charts tables text boxes onto it and we’ll visit the themes section at the same time because you can apply a theme which is a series of colors fonts and effects to your report to make it more visually appealing so for right now we’re going to go back to the report Tab and back to the dashboards drop down and let’s view the project overview report so this one has your percent complete and then it has Milestones that are coming soon so these are our Milestone tasks that are coming soon right listed in a table form we have a status for all of our top level tasks or our summary tasks percent complete right so stage one is nine percent complete stage two ten percent our other stages are not and then we have late tasks because we have a project deadline a deadline task in there for some reason set for 6 20. I might have done that by accident this is another good report that can be utilized throughout your project and now we’ll go back to report dashboards again we have two other dashboard reports upcoming tasks and work overview let’s look at upcoming tasks this is one that I like to use pretty frequently right um again it shows the percent of work complete the status of remaining tasks that are due this week with their percentage of completions and then tasks starting soon and that’s the status of tasks that are starting in the next week the following week this is a really handy report to keep an eye on and we’ll go back to report dashboards and work overview so this one it has you’ve already seen the work burn down report on the burn down report right it has that chart there it has a work stats chart actual remaining and Baseline work for all of our stages of our project it’s giving you the percent of work complete remaining work and actual work you have your resource stats chart on the left so actual and remaining work per resource and then you have remaining availability for all of your work resources so these are just work resources here not Material or cost and let’s go back to report dashboards one more time so down at the bottom it’s kind of misleading it says more reports but if you click on more reports it’s just showing you the categories and there are no other dashboard reports just those fives that we’ve looked at so you can cancel out of there and our next category of reports are resource reports you see we have two over allocated resources this is another way of looking at them right so you can see and we still have some over allegations in our plan so you see the work status for over allocated resources in the form of a column chart and then you have your over allocation chart right so the orange lines are over allocation for Teresa Brown we have some for Anita Redmond you can look at the Legend at the bottom of that chart and we’ll go back to report resources and resource overview you saw the resource stats in a previous report and here’s our work status the percent of work that’s been done by all your resources and then you have your resource status in the form of a table as well and we can go back to the report tab the cost reports are pretty important here so if if you’re tracking cost in your project these are the reports that you can share with your budget people and so we have a cash flow report let’s take a look at that so you’re seeing your actual Baseline and remaining costs as well as any variance you have a chart and it tells you this chart shows the Project’s cumulative cost and the cost per quarter to see the cost for a different time period select the edit option from the field list so what that means is Select that chart and I’m going to get rid of this format plot area pane that’s what happens when you kind of double click a chart and in the field list up at the top it says select category and it’s set on time and then there’s an edit button click on edit and see that it’s defaulting the quarters do the drop down for quarters and choose weeks and then click ok so now you see the chart updated and if you were going to keep that update then you would want to change the text here if you’re going to keep the text box and say cost per week what we’re going to do is we’re going to go back to edit and we’re going to change it back to quarters and I think we had I’ll just do a q1 Q2 format I think that’s what they had in there and we’ll click ok so yeah you can change that it I love the informational text that’s given on the reports and and a lot of times I’ll leave them there when I’m sharing reports for stakeholders because they explain to them what they’re looking at too and then you have the data at the bottom in the form of a table and it includes a couple of other fields so you have your remaining and actual cost and then your cost field acwp actual cost of work performed then you have budgeted cost of work performed and budgeted costs of work scheduled and we’re going to go back to the report tab and now we’re ready to look at our cost overruns report so you get a task cost variance the cost variance for all your top level tasks resource cost variance and then you have supporting tables and we don’t have any cost variance so the charts are not populated but you have supporting tables for task costs and resource costs we can go back to report cost earned value report so we don’t have a lot of data in our project plan right now so we have our EAC is estimated at completion actual cost of work performed and budgeted cost of work performed values are showing then you have your earned value over time chart which is not super populated right now you have variance over time it’s showing cost variance and

schedule variance and indices over time you have your schedule and cost performance indices for the project so again we haven’t tracked very many actuals in our project plan so at this point a lot of these charts are not going to be super populated we can go back to report cost resource cost overview so you see your cost status for work resources the cost distribution over the different resource types so most of the costs are work resources which is pretty typical and then you have your cost details for all of the work resources and we’re going to go back one more time to the cost and you have your task cost overview so your cost distribution based on the status of the task and this chart is kind of I’m going to move this text box out of the way so I can see it so you have your Legend at the bottom we have very few tasks that are marked complete I’m going to move this text box out of the way as well it’s kind of yeah so and then you have on schedule and most of it is future tasks we have our cost details table our next category on the report tab is in progress now these I would access more often than perhaps some of the others so we’ve talked and we’ve seen like on the Gantt chart and in different tables how to view critical tasks late tasks milestones and also slipping tasks so let’s look at the critical task report right so remember if you have a highly sequential task list a lot of your tasks will be on what’s known as the critical path meaning that there’s really not a lot of wiggle room for it to slip without pushing out the project end date so these are a list of our critical tasks might want to keep a careful eye on them in terms of their start dates and how they’re progressing we’re going to go back to reports in progress late tasks well I’ve got that project deadline of the project start date up there for some reason so that is actually late now hopefully you won’t have anything that is late at this point we’re going to go back to in progress our Milestone report so late Milestones Milestones that are due this month and Milestones that are 100 complete and then you have it in the form of a chart on the right and one more time to end progress and slipping tasks so where the Finish date is past the Baseline finish date we haven’t gone that far in our project tracking actuals to have any slipping tasks and you can go back to your report tab now back on the report tab I’m going to skip getting started custom for right now if you look at your recent drop down you’ll see the car you know in the last one you were on is at the top of the list it stores like maybe five there or six and then because we set up Sprints and create a task boards we can go to view board reports so let’s click on task boards and go to boards task status report this is kind of meaty nice one so tasked by board status so we have our not started in progress and done boards we have our remaining tasks chart remaining tasked by resources and then we have a table on the right which is your tasks summary the summary task name the name of the sub task resource name and the board status let’s go back to report task boards and let’s look at boards work status so this one has your remaining work by task board remaining work by resource remaining work over time the number of hours of work that I’ve completed and the number of hours left and then remaining tasks all of the tasks in task boards that are not marked 100 complete we’re going to go back to report task boards current Sprint task status and so some of the same you know remaining tasks remaining tasks by resource we’re going to go back again current Sprint work status just showing it by Sprint as opposed by your task board or although it does have the board status in this table and we’ll go back again and we’ll do Sprint status so now this is focused squarely on the Sprints task for Sprint work per Sprint and we can go back to report now let’s look at the getting started category on the report tab so some of these are not really reports let’s start with best practice analyzer so this is actually a report right it shows remaining work tasks that have no actual work unassigned work tasked with no resources assigned tasked with durations less than eight hours and summary tasks with assigned resources so out of that group getting started this is a report let’s go back to report getting started and click on create reports so this is more like a tutorial for you it’s guiding you through like you can go up here and click on welcome welcome to project you can go through this you can start and go how to organize your tasks and then you can go next and all about creating reports and then next all about how to share with your team kind of thing so that’s not really what I consider a report it’s a tutorial we’re going to go back to report getting started so create reports get started with project organize task and share with your team all lead you to the same tutorial so they’re not actual reports other than the best practice analyzer now we’re going to go ahead and create two custom reports so on the report tab once you create a custom report then it will show under custom but to create one you’re going to start with the new report drop down and you’ll see that you can create it from blank with just a text box on it you can have a chart a table or the comparison one has a chart and like a table on it we are going to choose the table template there and we’re going to want to give this report a name and we’re going to call it resource info and click ok so now it gives us the text box with our name in it the name of the report in it it has a table and it picks certain fields to put in it so in this case name start finish and percent complete we’re going to use the field list to change the table to the fields that we want so we are going to keep first of all we in the field list is showing the tasks we need to click on resources and we’ll see that name is selected and we’re going to leave that selected and it also has the date category expanded and finish and start are selected and we’re going to deselect those and we can collapse the date group we are going to go to the other fields expansion Arrow and expand it and under custom there we’re going to select group and that’s that free field that we use to say whether the resource was internal or external we can collapse other fields now and we’re going to expand the number category and under number we want to check Max units and lastly we’re going to expand other fields again and then right underneath other fields expand custom and we’re going to check Department which is our drop down our lookup field that we created for the resource sheet view so we have our table set up this is the information that we want and so what I’m going to do is I’m going to move the text box to the left and I’m going to move the table underneath it and in that field list I only want the table to show our work resources so the lower half of the field list where it says filter you’re going to do the drop down and select resources Dash work so it’s only showing our work resources now for that table I’m going to format it a little bit I want the names to show where I don’t have to have a word wrap going on and the same for the Departments so I’m just resizing those columns and we want to add a chart so I want to make sure nothing is selected and on the report design tab of the ribbon you’re going to click on chart and on the left side we’re going to select line and we’ll use the 3D line chart the last one at the top so you can double click it or click it once and choose ok I’m going to move the chart so it’s to the right of the table and in the field list we’re going to start by removing the fields that are currently in the chart and they’re expanded in the work so we’re going to uncheck remaining cumulative actual and remaining cumulative work and then we’re going to go to the resources tab at the top of the field list so the first one we want it already has name selected in that select category name is already there so we’re going to expand cost and we’re going to select cost so it’s showing all of the resources and on the line the 3D line it’s showing their cost and we notice down here this filter is for all resources we want the material and the cost resource included so we have that set up now with the chart still selected go up to the Chart design tab of the ribbon and you can use the more button to open up the chart Styles Gallery where it’s only a couple so that’s not going to work we don’t need to do anything there we could go to change colors and I’m going to pick like an orange color or colorful it’s blocks of colors so let me try this one yeah so I picked one so it looks a little orangey in the chart and then I’m going to select my table by just clicking in it and go to the table design tab at a ribbon and I’m going to give my table a style that kind of matches the chart and that’s kind of how that goes so you successfully created a custom report and we’re going to do another our second custom report is going to focus on our sprints so I’m going to go back to the report tab new report and we’ll base this one off of a table as well and this one we’ll call Sprint info and click ok so it does the same thing it gives us the text box with what we named it and a table with some fields in it we’re going to make sure the table is selected and in the fields list on the tasks tab we’re going to uncheck the finish and start dates and we’re actually also going to uncheck and then I’m going to collapse that date category and we’re going to uncheck percent complete under number and you can collapse the number category for now so we have the name of the task and right now if you look down at the very bottom of the field list the outline level says project summary that’s why we’re only seeing task zero we’re going to do the drop down there and change it to level one for right now so we get to see our stages we’re going to expand the date category and offer the list you’re going to choose Sprint start and then Sprint finish and the reason why the dates are showing as non-applicable is because we’re looking at our stages and you don’t assign your summary tasks to Sprints only the subtasks so we’re going to go down and change our outline level to level two and you’ll see the ones that are in a Sprint or populated in a Sprint you’re getting the start and the Finish dates and we really don’t want that level of detail in this report we really want essentially the start and finish dates of the Sprints so the bottom of the field list we’re going to go to group by where it says no group and we’re going to choose Sprint so now our table is just showing the Sprint and their names and their start and finish dates which is what we want now we’re going to create a visual report which is our last section in this lesson and a visual report you notice on a report tab it’s in the export group it’s a great way of getting data from your project plan file into either Excel and or Vizio so we’re going to be utilizing the Excel visual reports let’s go ahead and click on visual reports and at the top you can say you see where it says show report templates created in and they have Excel and Vizio checked we’re going to uncheck Vizio so we’re just looking at all of the Excel reports so there’s tabs underneath we’re looking at all reports if you want to look at them by category you have the categories there we’re going to select the Baseline cost report and at the bottom we’re going to click View and what it’s going to do is it’s going to export the data and it’s going to open Excel for you so it opens Excel and IT put the data in in the form of a pivot chart so you’re on the chart page notice there’s two tabs in Excel chart one and assignment usage and that’s the actual pivot table so if your Finance people are using a lot of pivot tables in Excel this is a great way of getting the budget information to them from your project plan file and so it’s showing the Baseline costs the action the cost and the actual cost so it has that Legend at the top of the chart right so the Baseline cost is the darker purple cost is the one next to it and you can barely see actual cost in stage one and I’ll show you how to change that in just a moment and then it’s showing your stages down at the bottom now you have these gray tabs on your chart and you can use them to filter and everything but typically they don’t need to be there so if you look at the pivot chart analyze tab on the Excel ribbon the last button is field buttons you’re going to do the drop down and choose hide all so all of those gray buttons disappear from the chart now we’re going to address how to make this so that you can actually see that actual cost its value is so much lower than the other values you can barely see it in stage one so we’re going to go up to the design tab on the ribbon and on the design tab the next to the last button is change chart type and what we’re going to do on the left side is we’re going to make it a combo chart so we have our clustered column for Baseline cost and cost and the actual cost is going to be shown in the form of a line and we want it to have a secondary axis because its number was so low compared to the numbers for Baseline cost and cost we want it to have its own separate axis on the right representing its range of values and we’re going to click ok so now you can see your secondary axis on the right side because some of them haven’t started yet right some of the stages your actual cost is like at zero and the next one up would be 50 and so on whereas this on the left side is showing 5000 up to thirty five thousand so it’s good to have a secondary axis when your number ranges are extremely variant now the other thing we can do with this pivot chart is let’s scroll down the field list and you’ll see it only has value fields on there we’re going to scroll down until we see type and we’re going to check type so now it’s showing the type of resource at the bottom of the chart so one key thing to mention here I mentioned that it’s a good way to export some of your project data to either Excel and or Vizio but it is not a live link so if your Finance people are interested in getting these pivot tables and pivot chart reports from you maybe you can work out the frequency that they would need them and do the export from visual reports once a week or on whatever schedule as necessary these are now two independent data sets so you can go ahead and close Excel and when you’re back in Project you can just close the visual reports dialog box now we’re up to our last lesson in this course which is customizing the application we’ll be reviewing and changing some project options creating a project plan template learning how to share custom items that we’ve created how to share resources and how to link a project plan so to get started we’re going to go to the file tab of the ribbon and all the way at the bottom of the band on the left we’re going to click on options so for any of the Microsoft programs you’re using you should become familiar with their options they’re all on the file tab because that gives you a way to further customize the program for your particular needs so you’ll notice on the left of the project options dialog box you have different tabs we are currently on the general tab so just some examples I’m not going to go over every option with you but you’ll notice under the project view the default view is Gantt with timeline so when we started our project plan file it brought us to that view with the entry table on the left the Gantt chart on the right and the timeline visible beneath the ribbon so that is the default view if you want a different view to be your default whenever you go into project you can change it there you can also control the way dates are formatted in Project from there the next tab we’re going to go to on the left is the display tab so here you’ll notice that you have currency options for this project and it gives you the name of your file right some of the options are only for the current file some could be for the current file or all project files and you’ll see that shortly if you always want to have two decimal places you can change that here or leave it the way it is if you want a space between a currency symbol and the number you can change the placement there let’s go to the schedule tab on the left if you’re weak does not start on Sunday or your fiscal year does not start in January this is where you would want to change it now for this one it says calendar options for this project and this is an example where you can change it for all new projects or just for this project we’re going to leave it on the training rollout initiatives if your default start and end times are not 8 to 5 you can change them here all of these things can be changed so there’s something else here scheduling options for this project when we first started this project plan file new task by default or manually scheduled we changed it to Auto scheduled at some point but if you want to change all new projects if you do all new projects you can see the default there you could change it there to Auto scheduled if you should want to we’re going to leave it and go back to training rollout initiatives so we talked about when we scheduled our tasks the difference between scheduling it from the start date and the end date and when we went into project information it was defaulting to start date because that is the default there are some other things that you need to look for let me look at a couple of other things on this schedule tab and I think we’re good for schedule on the left side let’s go to the save tab so what’s important here if you want it to auto save every 10 minutes or whatever amount of minutes you can do that here it gives you your default file location so where when you’re saving project plan files if you want to change that you can and then it has where save templates default personal templates location all personal templates need to be saved in this custom office templates folder which is under your documents folder on your local drive so you want to make sure you save your templates there if they’re not saved there you cannot access them from within the program and then lastly on the left let’s go to Advanced so you know when we started our project plan as soon as we use the blank template the first thing we did was go to project information so that we could set our project start date you can have it prompt you for project info for new projects if you’d like by checking that box we’ve noticed a couple of times when we went to schedule a linked task on a scat on a Saturday the planning wizard came up and that’s happening because of these check marks here in the planning wizard section if all of your resources on your project were getting the same default standard and or overtime rates you could fill them in here and then they would just populate on the resource sheet and then I’m going to scroll down to display options for this project so you notice when we put in a three-day task it says the word day well you could change that you might want it to just have a d that shows or a d y you can have it now this show project summary test that’s task zero that is checked here for this project because we made it show if you go to display options for this project and do the drop down next to training roll out initiatives and go to all new projects right you could then make sure that it’s going to show the project summary tasks for all new projects if you want it to I’m going to change it back to this project there’s one more one more so the very last one on Advanced is tasks are critical if slack is less than or equal to zero days okay so we talked about critical tasks in a highly organized sequential task list you’re going to have critical tasks and so if you don’t want as many to show up you can increase the amount of slack here for it to be tagged as a critical task and I’m going to just click ok to get out of project options you may have noticed when you’re in a report your view indicator on the left is not active it just simply shows the name of your report and we want to get back to Gantt chart view so on the report design tab they have Gantt chart as the first button and we can click the upper half of that to get back into Gantt chart View now we’re going to play a little bit of Make-Believe here we’re going to make believe that we’re pretty much completed this entire project all the tasks have been completed so on and so forth and now we want to save it as a template because next year in June we’re going to have another training roll out and this one works so well we don’t want to have to build another project plan from scratch so in order to do that we’re going to go to the file tab and we’re going to click on export on the left under export you’re going to choose save project as file and on the right side it gives you all these file formats and we’re going to select project template and then you’re going to click on save as now when you do that it should take you to your custom office templates folder if that was set in Project options but I will say that there has been a glitch where sometimes it doesn’t do that so you need to navigate to your custom office templates folder if it didn’t take you there and we’re going to change the file name to just say instead of initiative we’re going to put template and notice the save as type right underneath it is a project template and we’re going to choose save so when you do that the save as template dialog box comes up you’re about to save a file as a template you can choose to remove the following data items from the template so we would want to remove the values of all the baselines because this is for a future date and time and we’ll want to set up our baselines when we start working in that plan file we probably want to get rid of actual values your resources may change so you want to get rid of your resource rates and we didn’t have any fixed cost in here fixed cost would be something like if you’re doing a remodel project or something and you buy an aquarium how much did that aquarium cost and that is just a column that you can put in any table to enter a fixed cost so we definitely want to strip out the first three you might as well check fixed costs because usually it would be those if you’ve been using the project web app you might want to remove the data about whether they’ve been published from the template as well and we’re going to choose save so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to close the template so I’m going to use that bottom X in the upper right hand corner where I’m trying to draw an arrow right now you’re going to use that bottom X to close the template if you don’t close the template what happens if you just start filling it out you’re actually updating the template itself so you want just like any other template right you want to be able to access the template and it turns it into a plan file and the template itself is not being impacted if you do need to change the template at some point you can go to your custom office templates folder and open it from there and then that way you’re directly changing the template but to access it you’re going to go when you closed out it took you to the new tab and if you look right above where it says search for online templates you have an office category and you have a personal category click on personal if you don’t save your template in custom office templates you won’t have a personal category there and your template won’t be there so now what you’re going to do is go ahead and click on the template and when you select it you can give it a start date from here but we’re just going to leave it the start date on today and we’re going to go create and so if we go to Resource sheet view for example you’ll notice that we stripped out the rates for our resources and then you can go back to Gantt chart View so this template you might have different stages or shorter stages you can modify it but you don’t have to start from scratch now what we’re going to want to do is we’re going to want to save this project plan foreign whatever directory you need it to be in you just navigate to where I want it and you’re going to name it training roll out initiatives 2023. and then you’re going to close it so now I’m going to show you how to share your custom objects with other project plan files we created a project calendar in here a custom view custom table and a couple of custom reports as well as some custom Fields so I’m going to show you how you can make those things available or some of those things available to all of your project plan files new or existing and we do that by going to the file tab of the ribbon and on the left side clicking on info right there you’ll see an organizer button and it says organize the global template let’s click on organizer on the left side of the organizer screen you have your Global template so in this case these are all the views that are included with Microsoft project on the left side and you’ll see at the top there’s several tabs and it defaults to the first tab which is the views tab on the right side you will have the views that are available or being utilized in your particular project and so what we’re going to do is we want the Gantt with task details view the split view that we created to be available and all project plan files new or existing so we’re going to click on it on the right side and then in the middle of the screen do your copy button and you’ll see that the Gantt with task details is now part of the global template and then we’re going to go up to the reports Tab and on the right we have our two re custom reports so I’m going to select each one and copy and then we’ll go up to to the tables Tab and on the right side we’ll select project analysis and copy and then I’ve gone to the fields Tab and at the top I selected resource we want that department drop down field that we created so I’m going to do copy and then we can do the X in the upper right hand corner to close the organizer and you can do the back arrow to get back into your plan file now you’re going to learn how to share resources across different project plan files and so the first thing I’m going to have you do we’re going to leave this training rollout initiative file open and I’m going to have you open your training rollout initiative 2023 project plan so you’ll have both plan files open once that’s done if you go to the view tab of the ribbon almost all the way to the right in the window group you’ll see your switch Windows drop down and you’ll see that you have both files open and you can switch between them that way now we need to have a new blank project plan file also open so we’re just going to go to the file Tab and we’re going to click on blank project and now the project information box popped up automatically and that’s because when we went through project options there was a setting that says prompt for this box every time you create a new project so we’re going to just cancel that if it came up for you you can cancel it and what we’re going to do is go to the Gantt chart format tab and over in the show hide group uncheck project summary task and we’re going to switch to Resource sheet view and then we’re going to save this file and we’re going to name it training resource pool so before we copy and paste the resource information into our resource pool file we need to make sure that the columns are consistent remember on our original resource sheet we added a custom field that we created for the Department we made it a lookup field so it had the drop down list so this shows you what copying things to the global organizer can do for you we’re in the training resource pool file and we’re going to right click on the type column heading and choose insert column and start typing Department all of our custom objects are now available to this file which is a new file and any other existing project plan file so you can select Department and now we’re going to use the switch Windows button to switch over to training rollout initiative and before we copy this stuff because we have these over-allocated resources I’m going to show you a little trick here if we copy them and paste them into our resource pool they’re going to be red but they’re not going to have the little red people they’re not going to be noted in the system as over allocated but they’re red bold font will carry over and you won’t be able to change it so what we’re going to do here is we’re going to go to the resource sheet format tab on the ribbon and the first button is text styles we saw this in Gantt chart format at the very top where it says item to change all we’re going to do the drop down and select over allocated resources and notice it has that deep red color and it’s also bold we’re going to change bold to regular and we’re going to do the color drop down and select the black color under theme colors and click ok and we’ll change it back afterwards but for right now we’re going to select from the First Resource name all the way over to their standard rate making sure all of our resources are selected and we’re going to do control C to copy that information go to your view Tab and using switch Windows go back to your resource pool click in the First Resource name cell and control Z and notice like I said the little red icons in the indicators column so the system would not have thought that they were over allocated in this file there’s no task there’s just a resource pool but you would not have been able to get rid of that shading even if you had gone to the resource sheet format Tab and went into text Styles in there it wouldn’t adjust it so we have this in our training resource pool let’s go ahead and save this file and then switch back over to your training rollout initiative file and we’re going to go back to Resource sheet format text styles and make sure that our over-allocated resources show up bold and then for the color all the way at the bottom under standard colors I’m going to use that first dark red and click ok so we put it back the way it was now that we have our training resource pool set up let’s switch back over to our training rollout initiative 2023 file and the first thing we’re going to do there is go to the project information on the quick access toolbar let’s go in there so this is the file that we created from the template that we saved and so it kept the original start dates and stuff like that and we want to change our project start date at this point so let’s do the start date drop down and let’s navigate to let’s say June of 2023 and let’s select June 5th and then click ok so that adjusted that file and now the second thing we’re going to do because we created this from the template and we chose to keep our resource information minus their rates in the template we want to delete everything off of this resource sheet so I’m going to select the gray box at the intersection of the row and column headings to select everything and just press delete on my keyboard then I’m going to just click on the first resource name cell and I’m going to go to the resource tab on the ribbon and the assignments group you’re going to select resource pool and then share resources so if you were using your own resources they would be populated on the resource sheet and we just deleted everything we want to use resources and it says it requires at least one open resource pool when we select that option button our resource pool should populate if not you can get to it from the drop down it needs to be open and then on the bottom on conflict with calendar or resource information we’re going to leave it on pool takes precedence and we’ll talk about that in just a few moments so we’ll click ok so now we have our resource pool information in this project plan file so let’s switch back over to our training rollout initiatives plan and this is the one that has the over allocated resources on its resource sheet so let me show you why if you’re going to be using a resource pool you should use it before any work is tracked on your project before any work assignments are done on your project you should already have it attached to the resource pool like we just did with the 2023 file because if you don’t and you try to attach it to a resource pool when assignments have already been done when work has already been done this is what’s going to happen let’s go to the resource tab on the ribbon and we’re not going to delete these resources on purpose you’ll see why in a moment and we’re going to go to Resource pool share resources so if we choose to use resources from the pool at this time we’re going to end up getting errors which you’ll see in a moment but this is a good screen to talk to you about the pool and the sharer taking precedence at the bottom of the screen so if I have my own resources here and then let’s say no work has started no actuals have been tracked and then I decide to attach it to a resource pool but I don’t delete my resources my original resources are known as the sharer resources so in a situation like that it would have a duplicate set of resources and so if I come in and I update the resource sheet depending on what set of resources I’m doing to update in it could cause a conflict and you could end up with wrong information so when you’re using a resource pool you want the pool to take precedence in our other file we deleted everything on the resource sheet so everything in there is from the pool and if we wanted to update any resources we would do them in the training resource pool file since it’s attached to the rollout initiative 2023 file all the updates will automatically flow there so if we change somebody’s standard rate or maximum units or if there is a name change if someone marries or something we can make sure that those changes are consistent across the files that the pool is attached to if we make those changes only in the resource pool file so I’m going to show you the error that’s going to get here we’re going to leave it on pool takes precedence go ahead and click ok so there’s a problem it says Resources with the same name different types that’s not really the issue here right material Resources with the names same name but different labels that’s not it either we’re going to click OK on that and so we don’t really have to our list some of it repeated right so this is one of the things the issues you can get into so we don’t want that to happen our posters are on there twice um once with the material once without the material and so what we’re going to do is go back to Resource pool share resources and choose use own resources and click ok and so now we’re just using the resources that we originally had in here again if you want to use a resourceful do it before you do any resource assignments or any actual work starts on the project or you could have issues so for this particular project plan we’re going to use its own resources as opposed to the resource pool which is unfortunate for us because let’s say Emily barrington’s salary gets raised we would have to update it in two places at this point but this is a good lesson learned for you if you’re going to be using resource pools let’s say you’re going to be working on multiple projects at the same time so in our situation the scenario would be that because we pushed a bunch of tasks back in this project when we had to reschedule a bunch of tasks that there might be some overlap between this project finishing and our 2023 project starting so we would want to be working on the plan file for the 2023 plan at the same time instead of having to manage two different plan files you can create a project within a project file and we’re going to do that now you can go ahead and close your training rollout initiative 2023 files and your resource pool file and I just switched to Gantt chart view in our original training rollout initiative file and for this one what we’re going to do is we’re going to collapse our project so I’m going to collapse test zero and I’m going to click on the first blank task name cell after that and I’m going to go to the project tab on the ribbon and the first group is the insert group and it has sub project there go ahead and click on sub project navigate to where your project plan files are and you’re going to select training rollout initiative 2023 and notice at the bottom it says link to project and we’re going to click insert so when you do that it puts it in as like a sub task a summary subtask and so what we’re going to do is when we try to expand it it lets you know that you have to have the resource pool open so we’re going to go ahead and click ok and it did that so the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to rename this one so training rollout template is what it came in on I’m going to double click it to get into and this is inserted project information and I’m going to call it training roll out initiative and then at the beginning of it I’m going to put 2023 and a Dash and click ok so now I can be working on my original training rollout I can expand it I can be collapsing stages within it right doing all that kind of stuff and then when I need to work on both I can expand the next one and maybe do some assignments we don’t have resources assigned in the 2023 training rollout initiative so when I expand it I’m going to go to its task two notice each one has a separate set of row numbers starting over so that task 2 I’m going to go to Resource names column and choose Emily Barrington and so anything that I do in here will reflect in its original plan project plan file so go ahead and save your training rollout initiative file and reopen and then close it reopen your training rollout initiative 2023 file and you’ll see that change so with the 2023 version of the file open I can see that Emily is a resource name there and it works both ways if I do anything in this file it goes back up to the shared file or the sub project file and vice versa and you can go ahead and save and close that file so just to recap what we learned in this last module we started with reporting on a project and so you learned how to format and share your Gantt chart View and then we had a comprehensive tour of each and every existing report couple of which we modified we also created two custom reports and then exported to Excel via a visual report then in our last lesson we got into customizing the application we reviewed several project options we learned how to share custom objects across project plan files that’s not on the list here then we created a project plan template and accessed it to create a new project plan we learned how to create a resource pool file and how to share resources with other plan files and then lastly we learned how to link project plans which is an efficiency tool so if you’re managing multiple projects you can be managing them from one file instead of multiple files hi everyone Trish Connor Cato here I just wanted to officially thank you for attending this Microsoft Project 2021 video course and just to recap everything that we covered in this course focused on executing the project and that’s when we started tracking our actuals we also monitored project progress and learned how to control a project plan so after we updated our actuals we viewed the progress in a variety of different ways of our plan we went into adding custom Fields custom views custom table we learned how to work in network diagram View and how to analyze the plan and view progress by using task boards and defining sprints we also learned ways to control the plan and that included editing the task list splitting tasks rescheduling tasks and we forced a task to begin on a non-working day and updated the Baseline the final module we learned everything there is to learn about reporting on a project and then we went into customizing the application by learning about project options some of which are very useful we actually formatted our Gantt chart added a text box to it learned how to share it before we got into the interactive reports and then we exported project data to excel in the form of a pivot table and a pivot chart by creating a visual report we created a project plan template after learning how to share custom objects using the global organizer and then we learned how to access our template and create a new plan file based on it we ultimately learned how to set up a resource pool and then attached it to a plan file which is the way that you can share resources across project plans and then we ended up by linking project plan files together for more efficient oversight so that if you’re managing multiple projects you can manage them from within one plan file once again my sincere thanks [Music] for watching to earn certificates and watch our courses without ads check out learnitanytime.com foreign foreign [Music]

By Amjad Izhar
Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
https://amjadizhar.blog

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