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Introduction

Welcome to Microsoft Project Fundamentals. You're about to embark on a journey through the basics of Microsoft Project capabilities that can help you effectively manage your projects. This book focuses on the best and easiest ways to use Project to plan, schedule, manage resources, track progress, and view and report project information. Along the way, you'll also pick up core principles of project management, like the project triangle of scope, time, and cost, as well as the five project phases or processes.

The procedures, examples, and screenshots in this book are based on Microsoft Project Online Desktop Client as implemented in October 2021. Project Online Desktop Client is part of the Microsoft “Project Plan 3” subscription for cloud-based project management solutions. If you are working with Microsoft Project Professional 2019 or 2021, the perpetual (nonsubscription) version, you should be able to follow along with this book just fine.

Who Will Benefit Most from This Book

This book is an essential resource if you're new to Microsoft Project and project management. Whether you're a student in school or a practitioner in the field, you'll find this book valuable to your project management journey.

For others of you who have used previous versions of Microsoft Project, this book can reintroduce you to the tool and its new capabilities, especially for managing agile projects as well as traditional waterfall projects.

Looking Ahead in This Book

This book consists of 14 lessons, each of which includes learning objectives, major concepts, and step-by-step procedures, key terms, and review questions to help you test and cement your new skills. The following summarizes each lesson:

Lesson 1, “Project Management Basics,” introduces the work of projects and project managers, the project triangle, the six project phases or processes, and project management methodologies, including waterfall and agile.

Lesson 2, “Introducing Microsoft Project,” explains how Microsoft Project helps manage your schedule, calculate costs, balance resources, and more. This lesson also describes the various Microsoft Project editions, and offers a tour of the application's user interface.

Lesson 3, “Establish a Strong Foundation,” covers basic best practices for initiating a new project. These include identifying the project sponsor, having your project charter authorized, defining the scope, and organizing project plan documents.

Lesson 4, “Set Up the Project and Tasks,” moves the project from the initiating to the planning process. This lesson demonstrates how to use Microsoft Project to start a new project plan, and how to enter and organize tasks in a task sheet view for a waterfall project or a task board view for an agile project.

Lesson 5, “Build the Schedule,” describes automatic versus manual scheduling and explains the Gantt Chart. The lesson walks you through entering task durations, setting milestones, linking dependent tasks, and identifying deadlines. It also shows how to schedule sprints for an agile project.

Lesson 6, “Set Up Resources,” explains the different types of project resources: human, equipment, material, and cost resources. This lesson shows how to add resources to your project plan, enter resource costs, and specify resource availability with units as well as calendars.

Lesson 7, “Assign Resources to Tasks,” steps you through assigning work, material, and cost resources to tasks. This lesson also shows how to review resource costs for a specific task, and how to add, replace, or remove resources on assignments.

Lesson 8, “Check and Adjust the Project,” systematically demonstrates how you can optimize your plan for the project finish date, for the total budget amount, and for the best use of available resources, all while fulfilling the stated project scope. This lesson also introduces the use of the project baseline.

Lesson 9, “Track Project Information,” transitions your project from the planning process to the monitoring and controlling processes, in which the project starts to be implemented. You learn how to collect and enter progress information, as well as how to adjust for inevitable changes and challenges.

Lesson 10, “View Project Information,” covers how to see the data you need by zooming, sorting, grouping, filtering, or highlighting information in a Project view. This lesson also describes how to work with columns in a sheet view and how to print a view.

Lesson 11, “Customize Project Information,” introduces basic customizing for a sheet view, a Gantt view, and a board view so you can access the information you need in your Project views. This lesson also offers a tour of some basic Project options and preferences you can set.

Lesson 12, “Report Project Information,” shows how to run a report or dashboard to share key project progress with stakeholders. The lesson also works through creating a new, custom report, as well as printing a report on paper or to a PDF file to share with others.

Lesson 13, “Obtain Project Acceptance,” shifts your project from the monitoring and controlling processes to the final closing process. This lesson specifies how to present the finished project to the sponsor and obtain final project sign-off.

Lesson 14, “Retain Project History,” describes techniques for gathering and documenting lessons learned through a final project review. This lesson also specifies best practices for archiving project history to ensure that solid information is available for people working on similar future projects.

“Appendix” contains answers to the Review Questions in each lesson.

Features

This book uses certain conventions in order to help you quickly identify important information. In particular, look for the following text segments:

In-line boxes further expand on some aspect of a topic, without interrupting the flow of the narrative.

Located throughout are small general discussions that deserve special emphasis or that have relevance beyond the immediately surrounding content. These are found in the general sidebar notes.

Instructor Materials

Instructors using this book as a text for their classes can find bonus digital content at www.wiley.com/go/microsoftprojectfundamentals. This content includes a syllabus, an assessment test, and a presentation slide deck.

 Syllabus The syllabus contains course learning objectives, topics, and a chapter reference guide. It's provided as a PDF as well as in Microsoft Word (.docx) format so that it can be easily customized for instructor needs.

 Assessment Test Questions The assessment test contains a subset of the questions included at the end of each lesson in this book. Instructors can use this as a pre-test and post-test for their class or adapt it for other purposes. The test questions are provided in PDF as well as in Microsoft Word (.docx) format.

 Presentation Slide Deck Instructors can use or adapt the robust series of presentation slides for their course lectures based on the content in this book. The deck is provided in Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx) format as well as in PDF.