Microsoft Project Tutorial PDF

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Microsoft Project Tutorial Most non-trivial tasks require some kind of planning and scheduling. We define planning here to be the general process of pre-organizing a task or activity, by defining objectives/goals or procedures/policies to achieve it. Scheduling is the process of estimating or forecasting and then allocating the required resources (e.g. certainly time, but perhaps also material and people) to complete such a task or activity. When events occur that make an original plan unrealistic or unachievable, a plan may need to be revised (e.g. when there is less money available for a project than expected). When things take longer or less time than expected or when planned activities don’t happen in the way that was predicted, re-scheduling may also be required. Scheduling is almost always concerned with the time taken by tasks and by when activities are supposed to be completed. For example, a bus or train schedule would be pretty useless if there was not time information on it! Therefore, at the start of a project, a plan is created and typically not changed too much. Changes in plans are significant. However, schedules are revised on an almost continuous basis. Ideally, over time, if the initial planning work was done properly, the schedule reflects the adjustment of resources so that the objectives of the plan can still be achieved as intended. For this reason, a common set of dates are written in a P/F/A grouping, which stands for: • (P) Plan: The originally intended date for the activity • (F) Forecast: The currently expected date for the activity. o This date is actively maintained by the scheduler based on current progress and project status. • (A) Actual: When the activity occurred (i.e. a record of the actual event’s date) Usually, a schedule will have many different tasks in it, each with the following attributes: • Task name which should be unique o Tasks can be broken down into sub-tasks, which are just tasks themselves. • Relative dependencies upon other tasks (e.g. task A must be completed before task B can be started). o This can be written in terms of the required predecessors for a particular task (e.g. like the pre-requisites that must be taken prior to taking a specific course at a university or college) • Duration (either an estimate or a record of the actual time taken). A task duration is how much time is required to complete the task in isolation of any other tasks. o A Start-time and a Finish-time might also be associated with a task. As noted above, tasks may have dependencies, delaying their execution. They can also be interrupted by higher-priority tasks, either of which can cause the difference between the end time and the start time to exceed the duration. • Task owner or prime, who is responsible for a specific task. o When assigning tasks to primes, the basic rule is that people cannot be “in two places at once”, work-wise. A person cannot be more than 100% assigned to tasks, assuming that the person wants to sleep and do other things besides work.

This might seem obvious, but most people are ‘optimistic’ schedulers and overassign themselves and others. o A person can work on multiple activities, but this will increase the amount of time required for those activities and this can sometimes cause problems about keeping track of who is supposed to do what, especially when responsibility for a specific task is shared between multiple people. Generally, it is better to split up a ‘shared’ task into sub-tasks, each of which is ‘owned’ by a specific single person. o The duration of a task is often expressed in person-months or person-days or person-hours, even though different people with different levels of ability will take different amounts of time to complete the same task. The choice of task granularity (e.g. person-hours or whatever) depends on the level of accuracy that is required to track activities to meet the plan and the level of understanding of how long tasks will take. For example, if I am going to organize and prepare a meal for a set of people, where I actually care about and want to make sure that the meal is ready at a certain time, I might set the task granularity in person-hours and come up with a plan and a schedule which means doing the following things: • Determine or estimate the number of guests (this helps to plan both time and resources) • Determine a date and a time where those guests are available to attend (i.e. start inviting people and getting an answer about whether they can come). • Determine the type of meal (sit-down, buffet, potluck, etc.). This might affect the number of chairs needed and/or maybe the required size of the table or number of dishes or whether I need to buy disposable cutlery or plates. • Plan a menu of food that I will serve, based on the dietary restrictions and taste preferences of the guest • Take an inventory of food in the house already and either revise the menu or make up a list of new material that needs to be purchased • Organize a shopping trip to get all those needed ingredients or revise the menu if/when specific ingredients are not available • Enlist the help of other family members (e.g. to help buy ingredients, prepare food, clean the house, borrow and pick up a certain number of chairs or dishes or cutlery or glasses or…) • Plan out the use critical resources, like the oven or large pots. Maybe I need to request other family members to cook using their own ovens or make dishes for me ahead of time. Maybe I need to revise my menu to only make dishes that can need to be heated up at the time of the meal, rather than being cooked right beforehand. • Figure out how much time it is going to take me to make all of the things that I want to make or change the menu to reduce that time or decrease the cost or difficulty of preparation • …

 The list goes on. Notice that we haven’t even started cooking yet! Maybe we’ll just pay the money and go to a restaurant instead! If cooking a meal requires so much planning/re-planning and scheduling/re-scheduling work, imagine what is required when designing unfamiliar objects in teams of five people, probably all of whom you don’t know. Worse, the date for the final prototype (whose form you don’t know yet either) has already been set. You don’t even know all of the tasks that you will need to execute (let alone how long they will take) to create that prototype, because you’re a brandnew designer. How can you make sure that this new prototype has a chance of being ready on time? The answer is to have a plan and a schedule and then to keep the schedule reasonably up to date and accurate, while still keeping the original plan in mind (that final date isn’t going to change!). There are different tools for doing this. This lab will teach you the basics of using a Microsoft Project to create a Gantt chart for your project, like the one in the next diagram.

Assuming that the chart contains all team members, working at 100% capacity and that the Gantt chart defines all of the required tasks for the project, answer the following questions: How many team members are there on this project? How many different tasks are there in this project? Are there any issues with this schedule? What are they, exactly? (Hint: things that are shown in red are often a bad thing)

Which tasks must occur before Task 4 can start? Sheila isn’t doing very much work on this project. Which team members can take over her work completely without re-scheduling?

What is meant by a task predecessor?

1. Open Microsoft Project and select FILE/New/Blank Project and then saving this as a new project on your M disk, using FILE/Save As/ and then browsing to your M drive. Call the file Example. Your initial screen should look something like the following diagram:

2. The first column is a task ID, which is a unique numerical number for each unique task. This number is the one that appears in the predecessor list, as you can see from the previous Gantt chart example. The next column is an information column (hover over the column heading icon ( ) to get the context-sensitive help. Follow the instructions and press F1, reading all of the different things that can be indicated in this column.

3. The Task Mode column is ‘Manual’ by default. The other mode is ‘Automatic’. We will stay with Manual mode for now. The next column is ‘Task Name’, which is a label for the task of your choice (choose something more meaningful than Task 1 like “Needs Identification”). 4. After that, the next columns are: Duration, Start and Finish (with a default unit of days that can be changed using the FILE/Options/(Schedule tab)/”Duration is entered in:” value, but we will leave this in units of days for now. The last column shown is ‘predecessors’, which are the tasks which must be completed before this specific task can be started. 5. By grabbing anywhere along the vertical boundary line that separates the text area on the left from the timeline graphical area on the right, as shown by the split cursor which has been circled in red in the next diagram, more fields can be shown. Do this by pulling the divider to the right to reveal the next field, which is “Resource Names”.

Cursor changes to look like this, if you have selected the border properly. Pull it right to reveal more columns of text fields

6. Next, type in “Learn to play guitar chords” in the ‘Task Name box on the first line and assume that this will take a person 6 days, by adjusting the ‘Duration’ value accordingly.

What is the Start date currently indicated by the displayed timeline on the right hand side?

If you change the date value using the ‘Start’ column to about a week from now, what happens to the displayed timeline?

Did anything else change?

What happens to the elapsed calendar time for the task, if the six day task is moved to span a weekend (do this by dragging the graphical timeline on the right hand side for the “Learn to play guitar chords” task left or right)?

7. Use PROJECT/(“Properties” area)/Change Working Time/ to adjust the days that Microsoft Project will use for work scheduling. Don’t change this now (use CTRL-Z to undo any changes that you have made by mistake). 8. Add the name ‘Keith’ into the ‘Resource Names’ box for this task. 9. Add a new task on line 2 with the ‘Task Name’ of “Buy a guitar” and allocate 1 day for that task, and add ‘Mick’ as the resource name, leaving everything else blank 10. Create a third task ‘Earn Money’ and make ‘Mick’ the resource name for that too, giving it a duration of 5 days. 11. Add a fourth task ‘Play Concert tour’ with a duration of 20 days, with both Mick and Keith as Resource Names (using commas to separate the names). 12. Whoops! The band is going to need a drummer. Make Mick the prime for this task since he has already figured out a group name and needs to find a really good drummer who can play the song he just wrote. Give the task a name of “Find a drummer” and give it a duration of 3 days. Your Gantt chart should look something like the one in the next diagram, although your “Learn to Play Guitar chords” task might be in a different position (i.e. have a different ‘Start’ date):

13. We can now start re-ordering tasks so that they are listed in a more logical order down the page by time of occurrence. This is not necessary, but it is easier to understand and is the convention for Gantt charts, to keep them as uncluttered as possible. We will also create some dependency links, which can be done either numerically (by typing in numbers directly into the columns that we were using before) or graphically (by dragging the timelines on the right) or using a mixture of both methods. We will start with the graphical method. You can probably figure out the precedence relationships, but in case you can’t, here they are: “Earn Money” needs to be before Mick can “Buy a guitar” for Keith to “learn to play guitar chords”. Once Keith has learned to play and Mick has “found a drummer”, they can start to “play the concert tour”. 14. In the ‘Task Name’ area, select the first task of “Earn Money” then, holding the CTRL key down, select the second task of “Buy a guitar”. Next, click on the ‘link’ icon which looks like ( ) as shown in the next diagram. The result is a dependency link between the tasks going from “Earn Money” to “Buy a guitar”.

Notice that the start date of the first task got snapped to the current date.

15. Move the “Earn Money” task to the right a few days, until it goes past the “Buy a guitar” task, by dragging the “Earn Money” timeline bar to the right a few days. You will notice that little red men icons appear in the information columns for both of the two tasks, indicating a problem. The problem is that Mick cannot buy a guitar until he has earned some money. Fix this problem by right-clicking on top of the timeline for the “Buy and guitar” task and then selecting “Auto Schedule”. The system resolves the problem automatically, by moving the “Buy a guitar” task right, which is logical. 16. Next, we use the numerical method to create a precedence relationship. Type a number 2 (which is the “Buy a Guitar” task ID) into the predecessor box for “Learn to Play guitar chords” (which is currently task ID 1). The resulting Gantt chart should look like the next diagram now. Notice that the “Buy a guitar” task has become an automatically scheduled one, which means that the tool will take care of moving it around from now on, as best it can.

17. Next, we will re-order the tasks, so that “Earn Money” is first. Do this by clicking once on the task ID number (3 in the previous diagram) and then dragging this box up to the top. Do the same for the automatic task “Buy a guitar” (currently ID 3) and drag it above “Learn to play guitar chords” (currently ID2). Move “Find a Drummer” up before “Play concert tour” too in the same way giving you a Gantt chart that should resemble the one in the next diagram.

18. Use the numerical method to make the “Play the concert tour” task require both “Learn to play guitar chords” and “Find a drummer” by using the numerical method and a comma character to separate the two different predecessors for the “Play concert tour task” to have predecessors with task IDs of 3 and 4 (i.e. type 3,4 into the predecessor

box for “Play Concert tour”). When did this, I created the following problem, shown in the next diagram and perhaps you will have the same issue.

How can this problem be resolved, without changing the dates of the concert tour?

To see how people are assigned, rather than just considering the tasks, use the team planner view, which is selected as FILE/(“view” area)/Team Planner. This looks something like the next diagram in this case and we can see a problem with Mick’s usage in the very beginning. He is over-subscribed/double-booked.

Alternatively, you can see another view of the same problem by looking at the resource graph (FILE/(“view” area)/Resource graph. The problem is that Mick can’t both “earn money” and “find a drummer” simultaneously. No problem! He can just find a drummer after he’s earned money to buy Keith’s guitar. So, change the view back to the Gantt chart view by selecting FILE/(“view” area)/Gantt Chart. Next, drag the “Find a drummer” activity somewhere after Mick has finished “earning money” but before they “play the concert tour”. There are a few places that it can be moved. Here is the one that I chose and the next diagram shows how Mick and Keith organize themselves to get

out on tour and start earning the big money that is typically associated with their big stadium sell-out shows.

19. Milestones are significant events in a schedule (e.g. “Prototype ready”). Finish off the schedule by adding a couple of extra milestones: “Ready to go - Start Me up!” and “Tour over - Time to spend that cash”. Add these by selecting TASK/(“Insert” area)/Milestone. You can also add new tasks this way too, of course. The milestones will be placed at a sport in the Gantt chart that is determined by your current cursor position, so adjust that first before selecting the Milestone icon: (

).

As before, if these new milestones are not in a logical position relative to the other activity timelines, you can move them around to adjust their position. You can set the predecessors graphically or numerically, as before, to get a final result similar to the one shown in the next diagram. Microsoft Project automatically displays dates for milestones, rather than resource names. To get the view below, I also used the VIEW/(“Zoom” area)/Zoom/Zoom out icon to see some of the missing information in the graphical timeline view at the same time as the text field information. Note that the text field information can be hidden, if you only want the graphical Gantt chart portion.

20. Save your Example.mpp file. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bv6KfnuepA...