Microsoft Office Project 2007 For Dummies

Introduction

Project management probably started back when a few cave dwellers got together and figured out how to work as a team to bag a wooly mammoth for their Sunday dinner. Some fellow — I’ll call him Ogg — probably took the lead as the very first project manager. He drew things in the dirt with a stick to help his team members understand the strategy of the hunt, and communicated with them in ughs and grunts. Unlike you, he had no boss to report to, no budget, and no deadlines (lucky Ogg), but the fundamental spirit of a project was there.

Over the years, project management has evolved as a discipline that involves sophisticated analyses and techniques, projections, tracking of time and money, and reporting. Project management software — which has been around only about 25 years or so — has brought a new face and functionality to project management that would have left our friend Ogg ughless.

About This Book

Microsoft Office Project 2007, the most recent incarnation of the world’s most popular project management software, offers a tremendous wealth of function-ality to users. However, it’s probably not like any other software you’ve ever used, so mastering it can seem a daunting process. One trick is to understand how its features relate to what you do every day as a project manager. Another is to get someone like me to tell you all about its features and how to use them.

In Microsoft Office Project 2007 For Dummies, my goal is to help you explore all that Project offers, providing information on relevant project management concepts while also offering specific procedures to build and track your Project plans. But more importantly, I offer advice on how to make all these features and procedures mesh with what you already know as a project manager to make the transition easier.

Foolish Assumptions

I’ve made some assumptions about you, gentle reader. I figure that you are computer literate and know how to use a mouse, a keyboard, software menus, and toolbars. I assume you know how to use most common Windows functions (such as the Clipboard) as well as many basic software functions (such as selecting text and dragging and dropping things with your mouse).

I do not assume that you’ve used Project or any other project management software before. If you’re new to Project, you’ll find what you need to get up to speed, including information on how Project works, finding your way around, and building your first Project plan. If you’ve used an earlier version of Project, you’ll find out about Project 2007 and all the new features it provides.

Conventions Used in This Book

I should explain a few odds and ends to make using this book easier:

bullet Web site addresses, known as URLs, are highlighted like this: www.microsoft.com.

bullet Menu commands are given in the order in which you select them, for example, Choose Tools⇒Resource Sharing⇒Share Resources.

bullet Options in dialog boxes use initial caps even if they aren’t capitalized on your screen to make it easier to identify them in sentences. For example, what appears as Show summary tasks in the Options dialog box will appear as Show Summary Tasks in this book.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is designed to help you begin to use Microsoft Office Project 2007 to plan, build, and track progress on projects, keeping in mind tried-and-true project management practices and principles. I divided the book into logical parts that follow the process of building and tracking a typical project plan.

Part I: Setting the Stage for Project

Part I explains what Project 2007 can do for you as well as what types of input you have to provide to use it successfully on your projects. You’ll get your first glimpse of Project views and discover how to navigate around them. You’ll begin to build Project plans by making calendar settings, building a task outline, and then entering timing and timing relationships for those tasks.

Part II: People Who Need People

Part II is the Project resources section: You discover all you need to know about creating and assigning work resources, material resources, and fixed costs to tasks in a project. You also discover how using resources on your project relates to the costs you accrue over time.

Part III: Well, It Looks Good on Paper

Up to now, you’ve been mapping out your project plan. Now it’s time to see whether that plan meets your needs in terms of budget and timing. Project offers a whole toolbox to help you modify resource assignments and task timing to trim your costs and meet your deadlines so you can finalize your plan. You also get briefed on how to modify the format of items in your project to make your plan look as polished as possible, both on-screen and in print.

Part IV: Avoiding Disaster: Staying on Track

As any experienced project manager knows, projects just about never happen the way you thought they would. In this part, you save a picture of your plan — a baseline — and then begin to track actual activity against your plan. You also take a look at methods of reporting your progress, and how to get back on track when you find yourself derailed. In the final chapter, I provide advice on how to use what you glean from your projects to make better planning choices going forward.

Part V: Working with Enterprise Projects

With all that Project Professional has to offer the enterprise via its Project Server and Project Web Access functionalities and SharePoint online services, you can share documents online with your project team, have your human resources report their work time, and even integrate Project information with Outlook. This part shows you the basics of what Project Server can do, and how to use Project Web Access from both the manager and users’ perspective.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Ten seems to be a handy number of items for humans to put into lists, so this part gives you two such lists: Ten Golden Rules of Project Management and Ten Project Management Software Products to Explore. The first of these chapters tells you about some dos and don’ts that can save you a lot of grief when you’re using Project for the first time (or the fifth time, for that matter). The second offers a look at some add-on products and complementary software products that bring even more functionality to Microsoft Office Project.

Part VII: Appendixes

This book is accompanied by a handy CD filled with project management goodies, including project management add-on software and Microsoft Project templates. Appendix A is where I explain how to work with the CD and exactly what you can find there.

Earned value? Budgeted cost of work performed? Work breakdown structure? I’m telling you, project management has more terminology than a medical textbook. That’s why I provide a Glossary that contains a lot of terms, some from the discipline of project management and some project-specific. Definitions of key terms are included throughout this book, but when you need a refresher course, look here.

What You’re Not to Read

First, you don’t have to read this book from front to back unless you really want to. If you want to just get information about a certain topic, you can open this book to any chapter and get the information you need.

That said, I have structured the book to move from some basic concepts that equip you to understand how Project works through the steps involved in building a typical project. If you have an overpowering need to find out the whole shebang, you can start at the beginning and work your way through the book to build your first Project plan.

Icons Used in This Book

One picture is worth . . . well, you know. That’s why For Dummies books use icons to give you a visual clue as to what’s going on. Essentially, icons call your attention to bits of special information that might very well make your life easier. Following are the icons used in this book.

Remember icons signal either a pertinent fact that relates to what you’re reading at the time (but is also mentioned elsewhere in the book), or a reiteration of a particularly important piece of information that’s, well, worth repeating.

Tips are the advice columns of computer books: They offer sage advice, a bit more information about a topic under discussion that might be of interest, or ways to do things a bit more efficiently.

Warning icons spell trouble with a capital T: When you see a Warning, read it. If you’re not careful, you might do something at this point that could cause disaster.

Where to Go from Here

Time to take what you’ve learned in the project management school of hard knocks and jump into the world of Microsoft Office Project 2007. When you do, you’ll be rewarded with a wealth of tools and information that help you to manage your projects much more efficiently.

Here’s where you step out of the world of cave-dweller project management and into the brave, new world of Microsoft Office Project 2007.

Part I

Setting the Stage for Project

In this part . . .

Part I explains the types of input you have to give Project to make best use of its capabilities. You get a briefing on using Project views, using calendar settings to build Project plans, creating task outlines, and then specifying the timing and relationships that organize your project’s tasks.

Chapter 1

Project Management: What Is It, and Why Should You Care?

In This Chapter

bullet Discovering how traditional project management makes the move to software

bullet Understanding what elements of a project are managed in Project

bullet Understanding the project manager’s role

bullet Exploring the role of the Internet in project management

bullet Getting started using Project Guide

bullet Using a template to start a new project

bullet Saving a project file

bullet Finding help in Project

Welcome to the world of computerized project management with Microsoft Project. If you’ve never used project management software, you’re entering a brave, new world. It’s like walking from the office of 25 years ago — with no fax, voicemail, or e-mail — into the office of today with its wealth of high-tech devices.

Everything you used to do with handwritten to-do lists, word processors, and spreadsheets all magically comes together in Project. However, this transition won’t come in a moment, and you need a basic understanding of what project management software can do to get you up to speed. If you’ve used previous versions of Project, this little overview can help you refresh your memory as well as ease you into a few of the new features of Project 2007.

So, even if you’re a seasoned project manager, take a minute to review this chapter. It provides the foundation for how you’ll work with Project from here on.

The ABCs of Project Management

You probably handle projects day in and day out. Some are obvious, because your boss named them so that any fool would know that they’re projects: the Acme Drilling Project or the Network Expansion IT Project, for example. Others are less obvious, such as that speech thing you have to do on Saturday for your professional association or washing the dog.

If you need to organize a company holiday party, it’s a project. If you were handed a three-year Earth-exploration initiative to find oil in Iowa, coordinate subcontractors and government permits, and work with a team of 300 people, that’s definitely a project. Yes, even that speech you have to present is a project because it has certain characteristics.

Understanding what your projects, large or small, have in common is the basis of understanding what Project can do for you. All projects have

bullet An overall goal

bullet A project manager

bullet Individual tasks to be performed

bullet Timing for those tasks to be completed (such as three hours, three days, or three months)

bullet Timing relationships between those tasks (For example, you can’t put a new manufacturing process in place until you train people in how to use the process.)

bullet Resources (people, equipment, facilities, and supplies, for example) to accomplish the work

bullet A budget (the costs associated with those people, equipment, facilities, and supplies)

Project management is simply the process of managing all the elements of a project, whether that project is large or small.

The three Ts: Tasks, timing, and dependencies (well, two Ts and a D)

As Lewis Carroll said, If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. So, first things first: You have to understand the goal of your project so you can begin to build the tasks that have to be performed to get you there.

A task is simply one of those items you used to scribble on your handwritten to-do lists, such as Write final report or Apply for permits. Tasks are typically organized into phases (appropriate stages) in Project, arranged in an outline-like structure, as you can see in the project shown in Figure 1-1. Because timing is essential in any project, Project helps you set up and view the timing relationships among tasks.

Becoming a task master

A task can be as broad or as detailed as you like. For example, you can create a single task to research your competition, or you can create a project phase that consists of a summary task and subtasks below it. For example, the summary task might be Competitive Research, with the subtasks Researching Online Business Databases, Assembling Company Annual Reports, and Reviewing Competitive Product Lines.

Adding tasks to a Project file doesn’t cost you a thing (except a nanobit of memory), so a project can have as many tasks and as many phases as you like. You simply use the outlining structure in Project to indent various levels of tasks. The more deeply indented in an outline a task is, the more detailed the task.

One handy thing about this outlining structure is that you can roll up all the timing and cost data from the subtasks within your phases into summary-level tasks. Three sequential subtasks that take a day each to complete and cost you $200 apiece result in a summary task that spans three days and costs $600. You can view your project at various levels of detail or get automatic tallies of timing and costs if you prefer to simply view the summary level of tasks.

For more about defining and creating tasks, check out Chapter 4.

All in the timing

They say that timing is everything: Rome wasn’t built in a day, a stitch in time saves nine, and don’t even ask me about choosing exactly when to sell your high-tech stocks. The importance of timing applies to Project tasks, too. Almost all tasks have timing — referred to as duration — which is the amount of time needed to complete the task.

The only tasks without duration are milestones. A milestone is a task of zero duration; in essence, it simply marks a moment in time that must be reflected in your Project outline. Typical milestones are the approval of a brochure design and an assembly line startup.

Project doesn’t provide magic formulas for duration: You assign duration based on your own experience and judgment. Does designing a product package take three days or three weeks? Will obtaining a building permit happen in a day or a month? (Remember that you’re dealing with city hall, so think before you answer!) Project isn’t an oracle: You have to provide facts, figures, and educated guesses to build your Project schedule. After that information is entered, though, Project can do some wonderful things to help you maintain your schedule and monitor your progress.

Task co-dependencies

The final piece in the puzzle of how long your project will take is the concept of dependencies, or the timing relationships among tasks. If you have a schedule that includes ten tasks that all begin at the same time, your entire project will take as long as the longest task (see Figure 1-2).

After you define and implement timing relationships among tasks, your schedule can stretch over time like a long rubber band. For example, one task might begin only after another is finished. Another task can start halfway through the preceding task. The second task cannot start until a week after the first task is finished. Only after you start to assign these relationships can you begin to see a project’s timing as related to not just each task’s duration but also the specific ways in which the tasks relate to each other.

Here are some examples of dependencies:

bullet You can’t begin to use a new piece of equipment until you install it.

bullet You must wait for a freshly poured concrete foundation to dry before you can begin to build on it.

bullet You can’t start to ship a new drug product until the FDA approves it.

Figure 1-3 shows a project plan where each task’s duration and the dependencies among tasks have been established, and the resulting overall timing of the project.

One other brief note about the timing of tasks: In addition to applying dependencies to tasks, you can apply constraints. For example, say that you don’t want to start shipping your new cake flavor until you get the ad for it in your Christmas catalog, so you set a dependency between those two events. You can also set a constraint which says that you must start producing the cakes no later than November 3. In this case, if you don’t make the catalog deadline, the product will still ship on November 3; that task will not be allowed to slip its constraint because of this dependency relationship.

You can find out more about constraints in Chapter 4 and about the fine art of managing dependencies in Chapter 6.

Lining up your resources

When people first use Project, some get a bit confused about resources. Resources aren’t just people: A resource can be a piece of equipment you rent, a meeting room that you have to pay an hourly fee to use, or a box of nails or a software program you have to buy.

Project allows for three kinds of resources: work resources, material resources, and cost resources. A work resource is charged by how many hours or days the resource (often human) works on a task. A material resource, such as sewing supplies or steel, is charged by a per-use cost or by a unit of measurement (such as square yards or linear feet or tons). A cost resource has a set cost, such as a conference fee of $250; this cost doesn’t vary by how much time you spend at the conference or how many people attend.

Some resources, such as people, perform their work according to a working calendar. If a person works an 8-hour day and you assign him to a task that takes 24 hours to complete, that person has to put in three workdays to complete the task. In comparison, someone with a 12-hour workday takes only two days to complete the same task. In addition, you can set working and nonworking days for your human resources, which accommodates variations such as 4-day weeks or shift work.

You can set different rates for resources, such as a standard hourly rate and an overtime rate. Project applies the appropriate rate based on each resource’s calendar and work assigned. For more about resources and costs, see Chapter 7.

Several views in Project let you see information about resources and how their assignment to tasks has an effect on project costs. Figure 1-4 shows you the Resource sheet which has columns of information about resources and their costs.

Here’s one other important thing you should know about resources: They tend to have conflicts. No, I’m not talking about conference room brawls (although that happens). These conflicts have to do with assigned resources that become overallocated for their available work time. For example, if you assign one poor soul to three 8-hour tasks that must all happen on the same day — and in the same eight hours — Project has features that do everything but jump up on your desk and turn on an alarm to warn you of the conflict. (Luckily, Project also provides tools that help you resolve those conflicts.)

Spreading the news

I’m one of those people who need instant gratification. One of the first things I ask about learning to use any new software product is, What’s in it for me? Until now, I’ve told you about the type of information you have to put into Project: information about tasks, task dependencies, and resources. But isn’t it about time you got something back from Project? Of course it is.

You finally reached one of the big payoffs for entering all that information: reporting. After you enter your information, Project offers a wealth of reporting options to help you view your project and communicate your progress to your project team, clients, and management.

You can generate predesigned reports based on information in your schedule or simply print any of the views you can display in Project. Project 2007 offers a set of Basic Reports and Visual Reports. (You must have the Microsoft .NET Framework installed in order to use Visual Reports, which is free and downloadable from www.microsoft.com/downloads.) Figures 1-5 and 1-6 show you just two of the reporting options available in Project.

Planning to keep things on track

Projects aren’t frozen in amber like some organizational mosquito: They go through more changes than a politician’s platform in a campaign year. That’s where Project’s capability to make changes to your project data comes in handy.

After you build all your tasks, give them durations and dependencies, and assign all your resources and costs, you set a baseline. A baseline is a snapshot of your project at the moment you feel your plan is final and you’re ready to proceed with the project. After you set a baseline, you record some activity on your tasks. Then you can compare that actual activity with your baseline because Project saves both sets of data in your schedule.

Tracking activity in your project involves recording the actual timing of tasks and recording the time that your resources have spent on those tasks, as well as entering any actual costs that accrue. You can then display Project views that show you how far off you are at any time (compared with your baseline) in terms of the actual timing of tasks and cost of your project.

Whether you have good news or bad, you can use reports to show your boss how things are going compared with how you thought they would go. Then, after you peel your boss off the ceiling, you can use many more Project tools to make adjustments to get everything back on track.

The Role of the Project Manager

Although understanding the role (let alone the usefulness) of some managers isn’t always easy, it’s always easy to spot the value of a project manager. This person creates the master plan for a project and tries to ensure that it gets implemented successfully. Along the way, this key person uses skills and methods that have evolved over time, always seeking to manage how things get done and generally keeping schedules on track.

What exactly does a project manager do?

A project manager isn’t always the highest authority in a project; often that role belongs to whomever manages the project manager, up to and including members of senior management. Rather, the project manager is the person on the front lines who makes sure that the parts of the project come together and assumes hands-on responsibility for successes as well as failures.

In project management parlance, the person who champions (and has the ultimate responsibility for) a project is the project sponsor.

A project manager manages these essential pieces of a project:

bullet The project plan or schedule: This is what you create with Microsoft Project. It includes the estimated steps and associated timing and costs involved in reaching the project goal.

bullet Resources: Managing resources involves resolving resource conflicts and building consensus as well as assigning resources and tracking their activities on the project. This part of the job also involves managing nonhuman resources, such as materials and equipment.

bullet Communication with the project team, management, and customers: Communicating the project’s status to everyone who has a legitimate stake in its success (stakeholders) is a key responsibility.

Although a project manager might work for a project sponsor, the project often also has a customer for whom the end product is produced. That customer can be outside the project manager’s own company, or within.

Understanding the dreaded triple constraint

You’ve seen the signs at the copy store or the auto repair place: You can have it fast, cheap, or right; pick two. That, my friend, is the triple constraint of project management in a nutshell.

In a project, you have timing, resources (which are essentially costs), and quality of the product or service produced at the end of the project. Microsoft Project helps you manage the resources and timing of your project. The quality of your project is often affected directly by how well you manage them. If you add time, costs increase because resources are working longer hours at a certain wage. If you take away resources, you save money, but this can affect quality — and so on.

Coming to a logical balance of time, money, and quality is at the core of what a good project manager does throughout the life of a project.

Applying tried-and-true methodologies

Microsoft Project incorporates some scheduling and tracking tools that are the result of many years of developing project management methods. A few of these are worth noting:

bullet The Gantt Chart (shown in Gantt Chart view of Figure 1-7), which is the main view of Project, shows you a spreadsheet with columns of data along with a graphical representation of the tasks in the project arranged along a horizontal timeline. By using the data in the columns (such as task name, start date, finish date, and resources assigned to tasks), you can understand the parameters of each task and see its timing in the graphical area. Being able to view all this information on one page helps you understand what’s happening in your project in terms of time and costs.

bullet The Network Diagram (also called a logic diagram), shown in Figure 1-8, is essentially the Microsoft version of a PERT chart. PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) was developed during the construction of the Polaris submarine in the 1950s. This mostly graphical representation of the tasks in your project reflects the flow of work in your project rather than the literal timing of tasks. This view helps you to see how one task flows into another and to get a sense of where you are — not so much in time, but rather in terms of the work you have to accomplish.

bullet Risk management is a central part of project management because, frankly, projects are chock-full of risk. You run the risk that your resources won’t perform, that materials will arrive late, that your customer will change all the parameters of the project halfway through — well, you get the picture.

Risk management is the art of anticipating risks, ranking them from most to least likely, and determining strategies to prevent the most likely ones from occurring. Project helps you with risk management by allowing you to try out what-if scenarios: You can change the start date or length of a task or phase of tasks (for example) and see just what that change does to your schedule, such as the delays, cost overruns, and resource conflicts that might occur in such a scenario, down to the last hour and penny. Having this kind of information at your fingertips makes risk management