You may initially think that Microsoft Project’s auto save feature can be a great life saver… but beware! When you save a project schedule in Microsoft Project — either manually or automatically — all of your ‘undo’ operations are removed. Prior to the save: After the save (notice the ‘Undo’ button on the Quick Access Read more about Beware of Auto Save in Microsoft Project![…]
A Baseline is essentially a snapshot of your project schedule, it should be captured once your schedule is complete and you’re ready to begin your project. The moment your project starts events will occur that you didn’t account for in your project schedule e.g. a resource that was assigned to a task, started later than Read more about The Power of the Baseline in Microsoft Project[…]
Milestones are used in various ways in a Microsoft Project schedule, but are typically indicators of important dates, events, deliverables, or achievements in the project. Visually, a milestone is typically depicted as a black diamond in a Gantt Chart… again indicating an important point along the overall project timeline: The traditional, structured approach to developing Read more about Art of Microsoft Project Scheduling: Using Milestones and the DBS[…]
Not all project tasks are performed sequentially; some are sequential, some are parallel, some have lag times, some have lead times (another term for negative lag), and some require a combination of these. The right logical dependency to establish between any two project tasks will depend upon the situation. If you want to establish a Read more about Art of Microsoft Project Scheduling: Driving Task Dependencies with Percentages[…]
Project scheduling with Microsoft Project is partially a science, and partially an art: Science: Understanding and utilizing the various technical behaviors of the project scheduling engine, as well as the “mouse-click” features in Microsoft Project to build and track project deliverables and activities, timelines, work effort, resource utilization, and costs. Art: Understanding the most effective Read more about The Art of Scheduling with Microsoft Project[…]
Using the deadline feature in Microsoft Project is a great way to impose a deadline on a task, milestone, or summary in your project schedule and see whether your dynamic schedule is causing you to meet or miss that deadline… without using ‘Finish No Later Than’ or ‘Must Finish On’ scheduling constraints. Not only can Read more about Microsoft Project Quick Trick: Quickly Impose Multiple Deadlines Throughout a Project Schedule[…]
Recorded sessions and PowerPoint presentations from the Microsoft Project Conference 2014, held February 2 – 5, 2014 in Anaheim, California, are now available on Microsoft’s Channel 9 web site. Video recordings can be streamed on demand or downloaded for offline viewing, and the accompanying PowerPoint presentations can be viewed in your web browser or downloaded Read more about Microsoft Project Conference 2014 Sessions Now Available On Demand[…]
Perhaps you are aware that you can use the Task Notes feature in Microsoft Project to attach work details, update history, or other notes to individual tasks in a project schedule… but what if you want to store general notes in a project that are NOT specific to an individual task? You could store a Read more about Microsoft Project Quick Trick: Attaching General Project Notes to the Project Summary Task[…]