Progress does not stand still. And now, in the planning and design departments of enterprises and organizations, it is less and less common to find deposits of folders on the desks of employees, indicating that there is intense work on the project schedule. With the office application Microsoft Project, you can achieve much more meaningful results in less time with just five basic steps.
Instructions
Step 1
Start with the step of defining actions. Identify all the tasks required to complete the project. Write down all tasks. Enter the results to be achieved in the Work Breakdown Structures field. The program should show a chain of sequences of actions to complete the work. If there is not enough information yet, you will have to turn to databases to collect the missing data. However, at this stage, you can limit yourself to the information that you already have or use WBS.
Step 2
Now set up a sequence of actions with dependencies. All dependencies of related tasks will be identified. All this is recorded by the program in the work schedule. Analyze each task to identify the types of dependencies on additional project tasks.
Step 3
At this stage, resources and their availability for the project are identified. Please note that in reality not all the possibilities for their use may be involved, as well as not all members of the group in the program. Assign resources to each individual task (for example, using a Gantt chart). At the lowest point in the WBS, click on the list in the Resource Names column and select a possible group member. Avoid adding more than one resource for each task. The work schedule will, of course, be longer, but by using it, you will be able to better control the tracking of resources during the course of the project.
Step 4
At this stage, the duration of each task is estimated (i.e., the number of work periods required to complete it). When working in Microsoft Project, the duration can be set in months, weeks, and days. Distinguish between the types of duration, as the choice of each of them will subsequently affect the availability of resources and the projected completion time of the project.
Step 5
At the last stage, the analysis of the work schedule and consideration of all sequences, durations and mandatory schedule restrictions is carried out. The purpose of the stage will be to check the correctness of the schedule. Check if the durations are correct. Adjust resource allocation (preferably manually) to make the project tasks realistic.
