Online courses on MS Project. MS Project computer program training Microsoft project courses
With the help of MS Project, a competent Moscow manager who has undergone appropriate training will be able to achieve his goals while meeting the deadlines and budget allocated for the project. The tasks that are included in the project are determined, and all resources are already distributed between them: material, technical, labor, financial and temporary. Also, with the help of the application, the links of tasks are determined, the analysis of the critical path is carried out, and the documentary library of the project is formed. All this is accessible and easily done by a competent specialist who uses MSP in his work with knowledge of the matter.
To accomplish great and important work, two things are needed: a clear plan and limited time. (Elbert Hubbard, businessman and writer)
However, for a person who has no experience with this application or has studied it only in theory, it is difficult to put into practice even a small part of its functions. Offers to solve the problem The educational center"Alliance". To do this, we have prepared a lot of opportunities - Project courses in any format that best meets the needs of our clients both from Moscow and other regions.
Is there a prerequisite for Microsoft Project courses?
The first question that arises in our potential client- is it worth it to prepare for training? Most often, it occurs in beginners who are just starting to master computer programs from scratch. We can say with confidence that no preparation is required - the teacher will provide everything necessary. In our courses, we individually consider each application, advise the most beneficial form of education, explain the features of each of them. We have MS Project courses for both beginners and professionals. The last category of students is usually applied for advanced training, obtaining fresh knowledge and expanding their professional opportunities. Beginners, on the other hand, learn the subject from scratch, mastering the basics of project management using the Project program.
Expanding the use of Project beyond Moscow
Alliance is the oldest educational center in Moscow, which makes learning Microsoft Project accessible and interesting. Thanks to a well-chosen curriculum, compiled by specialists, taking into account their experience and current trends in the field of education, courses give excellent results. At the same time, everyone can choose the form of classes, taking into account their capabilities and wishes. We offer individual on-site training, corporate courses and even distance learning. Therefore, it doesn’t matter for us whether your initial level of computer literacy is sufficient or not, whether you live in Moscow or far from large Russian cities, whether you want to study individually or if you feel more comfortable in a group - we can offer the most best option just for you. Also in our training center, when choosing courses, you can focus on their cost, but regardless of the price, trainings will always be very effective and very interesting. After all, the main thing for us is the desire to receive necessary knowledge and management design skills in the Project application.
As a weighty argument in favor of studying at the Alliance center, there is a formed team of professional teachers from leading universities in Moscow. We carefully selected the most competent and qualified specialists who have many years of teaching experience, are endowed with the talent to share knowledge with students and simply love their job. The combination of all these factors gives a truly amazing effect - our clients receive excellent knowledge and invaluable experience. practical exercises. And after completing the courses, they not only have a baggage of theoretical knowledge, but successfully apply the opportunities opened by the MS Project program in their professional activities.
55201AC: Microsoft Project 2019. Managing Projects
Do you need to gain system knowledge and skills in managing projects and project portfolios using Microsoft Project Professional 2019? Be sure to take this course. It was developed by the leading teachers of the Center and was authorized by Microsoft, having withstood a strict audit and independent examination.
The course is recommended for project managers and planners, program and project portfolio managers, as well as employees who are involved in project calendar and resource management using MS Project Professional or project portfolio coordination using MS Project Online or MS Project Server.
Having successfully completed the course, you will receive comprehensive knowledge in the field of project management using the application MS Project Professional 2019. The program contains all the necessary information on how to manage projects - from scheduling and resource planning and multi-project management to analysis and forecasting. You will be able to plan the resources and time costs of the project, learn how to evaluate and optimize the project in terms of time, labor and cost. You will know how to effectively monitor and control the progress of the project, as well as analyze, build forecasts and prepare reports. In addition to owning all the tools Microsoft Project, training program includes an overview of modern cloud technologies and takes into account the experience of another world market leader - Oracle Primavera.
The course "55201AC: Microsoft Project Professional 2019. Project Management" provides preparation for), and also prepares for CAPM ® certification (Certified Associate in project management- Certified Project Management Specialist) and a PDU to renew your existing certifications:
Technical | leadership | Strategic | Total | |
PMI_RMP® | - | - | - | - |
PMI_SP® | - | - | ||
PMP(r)® | - | - | ||
PgMP(r)® | - | - | ||
PMI_ACP® | - | - | - | - |
PfMP® | - | - | - | - |
PMI_PBASM | - | - | - | - |
After graduating, you will receive a prestigious certificate of the Center "Specialist" and an international Microsoft certificate.
PMI and CAPM are registered marks of the Project Management Institute.
A small introduction
The whole methodology is just a set simple methods and recommendations for using MS Project to solve applied problems of the project manager. I’ll make a reservation right away that the methodology does not claim to be universal, and is applicable only under certain restrictions, which I will mention in the course of the story.First, let's remember what is usually required of a project manager. For experienced leaders, this is obvious, but for beginners (or just about to become leaders) it will be useful to remember once again. So the development project software is the creation of some unique product. At different stages of the project life cycle, the RP is required to solve different tasks.
Before starting a project
Before starting a project, the project manager is usually required to answer two questions:- how long will the project take
- how much will the project cost
Note. I have never had to deal with the explicit monetary value of the project, and, as I now understand, this is a serious omission. All the projects that I managed were performed by the company's employees. The project team was formed for the entire duration of the project, some specialists were involved for a certain time. In fact, I am required to estimate the number of required performers, as well as the timing of their involvement. It seems to me that this is enough typical situation for software development companies. In the end, it all comes down to an estimate of labor costs, which, using empirical formulas, turns into an estimate of the cost of the project. As you can see, there is a direct dependence of the cost of the project on its timing.
During the project
In the conditions of the mentioned restrictions, the main task of the project manager is to ensure the implementation of the project within the stated time, and this is directlyaffects its value. Unforeseen circumstances that necessarily accompany any project can lead to missed deadlines. Strictly speaking, the project timeline can be unexpectedly shortened, but, to be honest, I have never seen such a thing. The manager is required to respond to such events in a timely manner in order to reduce Negative consequences. The only way I know of to solve this problem is careful planning, regularly monitoring impending problems and adjusting plans.
At the end of the project
At the end of a project, the manager usually looks back and sums up the project. Most often, it is required to assess how the project got out of the planned schedules and why this happened.What MS Project can do
Despite external complexity, MS Project is very simple ideologically. It operates with three entities - tasks, resources, calendar and links between them. Essentially, it's a database, a user interface for creating and editing entities, and minimal, fairly simple automation (what Project does on its own in response to input).Let us briefly analyze the properties of entities.
Task has a duration, a scope, an assigned resource, and a hell of a lot of different properties. If there are not enough built-in properties, you can add your own - we will use this later. Tasks can be interconnected by various relationships (predecessors, successors, etc.).
Resource has many descriptive properties, but most importantly, it can be
set availability in time, for this a calendar is used. The resource can be
assigned to a task.
Based on this data, Project can make various views using
filters, groupings, sortings, etc. In addition, he knows how, according to some algorithm
Calculate start and finish dates for tasks based on the availability of assigned resources
and links between tasks. That's pretty much all he can do.
Let's see how we can benefit from this
How to use it
Note To make it clearer, I will clarify some general properties of projects,
with whom I worked. So, we are talking about software development projects,
which consists of several steps. At the end of each stage, we must get some
tangible result that will be presented to the customer, so it is important for us to evaluate
the term of not only the project as a whole, but also each stage. I repeat, the only kind of resources
which is required is people, and we do not hire specialists from outside, but use
opportunities for existing employees.
Plan preparation
So before us lies technical task, and three questions need to be answered:- How long will this project take?
- How many (and what) specialists will be required for this?
- What is the expected labor cost for this project?
The preparation of the plan is carried out in several stages:
- Preparing a list of tasks
- Exposing dependencies between tasks
(the result of which task is needed to move on to the next one?). - Assign task executors
- Balancing the resource load
- Balancing what we have
- We do not use summary tasks for decomposition.
All tasks are placed in one linear list. At first it may seem inconvenient,
but it saves a lot of problems in the future. To manage the task structure
use custom fields (see below). - Drag&Drop is often used to manage task dependencies. When there are a lot of tasks, it quickly becomes inconvenient. In this case, I recommend not to use drag and drop, but to explicitly indicate the numbers of predecessor tasks. To do this, you can add the "predecessors" column to the table and enter the task numbers manually.
- The deadline for each task should not exceed two weeks.
If the deadline for a task exceeds a week, this is already a reason to think about its decomposition. I followed a very simple estimation methodology: a primitive task - 2 days, an average
difficulty - 1 week, difficult task - 2 weeks. At the same time, there should not be many complex tasks. This approach makes it possible to prepare an evaluation plan fairly quickly.
On the one hand, the resulting estimate, of course, will not be accurate, but, on the other hand, which one is accurate? By experience practical application I can say that on
on large projects, the errors in the estimates of individual tasks are usually leveled out, and on small projects it is often possible (and necessary!) to use more accurate estimates. - By all means we avoid tasks that have several performers. Only one performer should be assigned to each task. It makes sense to appoint two performers
only if they really work together (for example, you practice pair programming). In other cases, it is better to decompose the problem. - When appointing performers, we are guided by their profession and qualifications, while not worrying about the uniformity of workload.
- We use summary tasks to divide tasks into stages. We put dependencies between the stages so that they go sequentially. The division into stages is still quite approximate.
Project balancing
The most important thing in the technique is precisely balancing. The purpose of this process is to prepare a plan in which the work is fairly evenly divided among the performers throughout.After the initial preparation of the plan, a complete disgrace is usually obtained, and not a project. So let's start putting it in order. Tidying consists of manually balancing assignments of performers and divisions into stages. For this we use grouping tasks by performers to see how the tasks have decomposed. For ease of viewing, I recommend sorting tasks by start date.
Note. Theoretically, to estimate the load it is supposed to use graphs
user downloads. These graphs are good (probably) for bosses when they
evaluate finished project. But they are unsuitable at the stage of creating a plan, as they show
that everything is bad, but they do not give any information why this is so and what can be done.
Then the magic of balancing begins. It is required to minimize the execution time of each stage by ensuring a more or less uniform load on all project participants. To do this, we perform the following steps:
- Change task executor.
It makes sense to do this if we see that one performer has a large tail of tasks,
and the other has obvious "holes", and he can take over some of the work from
first. - Move the task to another stage.
A task that leads to a lengthening of the stage time, but is not necessary
to obtain the result of a stage can be moved to a stage later. And vice versa,
if the stage contains "holes" in the loading of performers, and change the performers
fails, you can try to take tasks from the next stage.
Now we look at the project carefully again, make sure that the links between the tasks are set correctly, that nothing is forgotten, and the appointments of the performers correspond to their specialties and qualifications.
Risk accounting
Now - the final touch: risk accounting. To be honest, I have not been involved in serious risk management, but I take into account the possibility of certain force majeure occurrences (such as illness of performers, forgotten works, etc.). To do this, I add a dummy task with the lowest priority, called "other work" for each resource, to each stage. Once resources are leveled, these tasks end up at the end of the stage. The duration of these tasks depends on the probability of occurrence and the degree of influence of risks, it depends on the way estimates of task durations are determined, the health of team members and the degree of paranoia of the project manager. Usually I set the duration of "other work" to about a third to a quarter of the length of the stage.As a result of all the above manipulations, we get a project execution plan that we can work with.
With this plan, we can:
- List the time frame for the project and its milestones. Reasonably and with a high degree
reliability. - Estimate the approximate labor costs for the project
Working with a plan
When a project is put into production, the original plan that was used for the evaluation can also be used to track the progress of the project. The project manager is required to regularly perform the following actions:- Issue tasks to performers
- Mark completed tasks in the plan
- Correct the plan in case of significant deviations
To determine the problem area, it is convenient to use various groupings - by performers, by components, etc. It may often turn out that the project as a whole is even ahead of schedule, but in a certain context there is a lag, for example, one of the developers unexpectedly stumbled upon a serious systemic problem that led to to deviations. Using only the average metric will not show this problem - it will only surface at the end of the stage, when it will be too late to do anything.
Note. Usually I don't move tasks on the calendar, but only note how they are completed. I track the deviation from the plan by the deviation of the total task of the project from the current moment.
There is another strategy - making changes to the deadlines of tasks, "pushing" unfinished tasks forward. With this approach, another useful feature of MS Project, the baseline, can be used to track deviations from the plan. A baseline is simply a saved snapshot of the status of tasks. It can be done at the beginning of the project. To compare the current plan with the baseline, open the "Gantt chart with tracking". For a dynamic plan, where the order of tasks changes frequently, this can be inconvenient, so I insert milestones in the project that reflect some of the important results of the project, and track deviations from the baseline only for them.
Manage task structure with custom fields
I strongly recommend not to use summary tasks in MS Project for functional decomposition or task categorization. The fact is that the hierarchy of tasks in MS Project is strongly tied to their sequence. And often you want to look at the tasks in a different sequence, while the whole structure “crumbles”. To manage the task structure, I recommend using Custom fields. MS Project has a predefined set of fields with undefined behavior that we can use as we see fit. For example, to break down tasks into components, you need, based on the text field Text1 create a field Component and set a list of values for it corresponding to the components of the system.After that, we get the opportunity to specify for each task the component to which it belongs, and, using the grouping of tasks by components, track how things are going.
Custom fields allow you to divide tasks into several categories, for example, I divided tasks by type of work: Development, Testing, Documentation.
I will mention for the curious that in MS Project you can also set the rules for drawing diagrams based on task properties. If desired, you can make it so that tasks for different components will have different colors, and the color will be determined only by the task property, it does not need to be set manually for each task. Such settings do not require writing scripts, but are made by standard chart customization tools.
The use of custom fields, as well as the filtering, sorting and grouping functions built into MS Project, allow you to get a variety of views that allow you to get answers to many questions that a project manager has.
Project Completion
At the end of the project, we get a plan in which all tasks are completed. I usually try to keep the original plan as well, at least as a baseline. To be honest, at this stage, MS Project is of little use, since it is not the planned values that are of interest, but the actual ones. Some solutions to this problem are offered by MS Project Server, there is an opportunity to take into account the actual labor costs, but this is beyond the scope of this article.Conclusion
I tried to summarize my experience of using MS Project for practical solutions to the problems that arose in front of me when I was managing software development projects. The described technique does not claim to be universal, but it seems to me that it is quite simple and logical, while at the same time it allows solving the practical tasks of the project manager.Using this approach has allowed me to successfully complete more than one project on time.
True, there have been failures. This happened, as a rule, when the preparatory part of the project was poorly carried out, namely, the formulation of the problem. Those. the result of the project was not exactly what was required, and the understanding of this came too late.
I must have missed something, feel free to ask questions.
Microsoft Project courses at "GTsDPO" in Moscow - training in effective planning and project management at all stages: from tracking interrelated business processes to allocating resources (personnel, material, temporary) and preparing reporting documentation.
Course objective:
- develop skills in managing small and large projects using the tools of the Ms Project 2010/2013/2016 application.
Course Audience:
- administrators and project managers;
- employees of companies whose duties include monitoring the implementation of business plans, sales, IT projects, etc.
Learning Outcome
Skill:
- install and configure Microsoft Project;
- analyze, optimize, adjust various projects in terms of costs and deadlines;
- implement resource and scheduling;
- monitor the implementation of projects and prepare final reports;
- resolve conflicts related to restrictions;
- exchange Ms Project data with other applications;
- administer a portfolio of projects in Microsoft Project Professional.
- export web page data;
- configure and administer the Project Server application.
Basic training requirements:
- Ability to work with Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point.
Course Curriculum
Topic 1. Projects and project management. Project creation.
Project classification
Project stages
Building hierarchical structure works (ISR)
Development of network models
scheduling by the critical path method (MCP)
Project Resource Planning
Project execution and control
Create a new project
Entering a set of works
Task list structure
Task Duration Estimation
Recurring tasks
Task linking
Leading and lagging tasks
Milestone tasks
Types of time limits
Deadlines.
Topic 2 Project resources.
Resource list definitions
Additional characteristics of resources
Resource Calendars
Task types
Field fixed volume
Assign resources to project tasks
Views of Microsoft Project.
Topic 3. Analysis and optimization of the project plan.
Time Analysis
Resource load analysis
Project cost analysis.
Topic 4. Implementation and control of the project.
Fixing the baseline of the project
Entering real task execution data
Project progress control
Print reports and views.
Topic 5. Managing multiple projects.
Inserting an external project into the current project
Creating a link between tasks in different projects
Create a Shared Resource Pool
Opening projects that use a shared resource pool
Modifying the shared resource pool file.
Topic 6. Exporting a project plan.
Copying diagrams to MS Office files
Export plan to files of other formats.
Breakdown of PDUs in the Talent Triangle
technical | strategic | leadership |
8 | 0 | 0 |
annotation
The course is designed to teach students the basic skills of working in MS Project Professional and is the first step for further learning to work in these programs.
The course covers the most common tasks:
- scheduling;
- resource planning;
- cost planning;
- modeling of various scenarios for project implementation;
- effective use of MS Project in Russian companies;
Learning Outcomes
As a result of studying the course, students will be able to:
- Develop a project schedule in MS Project
- Develop project budget in MS Project
- Use tools for analyzing project implementation options
Course trainers
- — Head of Oil and Gas Projects Department PM Expert
- Alexander Chernobrivets, PME, MCTS - Planning, Reporting and Risk Manager PM Expert