Chapter 3

Working with Microsoft Project 2019

IN THIS CHAPTER

Benefitting from Project 2019

Exploring the software interface

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.

Everything you used to do with handwritten to-do lists, sticky notes, word processors, and spreadsheets magically comes together in Project. However, this transition doesn’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, the overview in this chapter can refresh your memory and ease you into a few of the new Project 2019 features.

Even if you’re a seasoned project manager, this chapter provides the foundation for how to work with Project.

Connecting Project 2019 to 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: Acme Drilling Project or Network Expansion IT Project, for example. Others are less obvious, such as that presentation you need to put together for your director or that how-to guide on planting a vegetable garden in your backyard.

In this book, a project is defined as a unique venture undertaken to produce distinct deliverables, products, or outcomes. In the context of a project, a deliverable is an individual component or item that meets the requirements of the project, such as a design document or a prototype. Projects have multiple variables; some are straightforward to define, and others aren’t.

Using the information about variables in Table 3-1, you can say that project management is the practice of organizing, managing, and controlling project variables to meet the project outcomes and mission.

TABLE 3-1 Project Variables

Variable	Description
Defined
Scope	The work needed to produce the deliverables, products, or outcomes for the project.
Time	The duration required to complete the project work.
Cost	The funds required to complete the project.
Resources	The people, equipment, material, supplies, and facilities needed to accomplish the project.
Undefined
Change	The type, timing, number, and degree of modifications from a project baseline; can affect the project’s scope, time, cost, or resources.
Risk	Uncertainty (associated with the scope, time, cost, resources, stakeholders, or environment) that can threaten the completion of any aspect of the project. Fortunately, risks can also present opportunities to accelerate the schedule or come in under budget.
Stakeholder	A person who can affect, or who is affected by, the project, either positively or negatively.
Environment	The location, culture, or organization in which the project occurs.

Defining “project manager”

Although understanding the role (let alone the usefulness) of certain managers isn’t always easy, you can easily spot the value of a project manager: This person creates the master plan for a project and ensures that it is implemented successfully. Along the way, the project manager uses technical, business, and leadership skills to manage the completion of tasks and keep the schedule on track.

A truly professional project manager may have a degree in project management or a professional certification. For example, if you see the initials PMP beside a name, that person has been certified as a project management professional by the Project Management Institute, the leading global organization establishing project management standards and credentials. Flip to Book 7 for more about PMP certification.

Identifying what a project manager does

A project manager isn’t always the highest authority in a project. Often, that role belongs to whoever manages the project manager — including, possibly, members of senior management. Rather, the project manager is the person who ensures that aspects of the project are integrated and assumes hands-on responsibility for successes as well as failures.

In project management parlance, the person who champions (and funds) a project is the project sponsor. Although the project manager may work for the project sponsor, the project often also has a customer — outside the project manager’s own company or within it — for whom the end product is produced. See Chapter 2 in Book 1 for more about the people involved in a project.

The project manager manages these essential pieces of a project (introduced in Books 1 and 2):

• Scope: Define and organize all work that needs to be done in order to meet the project mission and create deliverables.
• Schedule: This element, which you create by working with Project, includes the estimated tasks, duration, and timing involved in reaching the project goal. See Chapter 1 in Book 2 for more about scheduling a project.
• Resources: Assign resources and track their activities on the project as well as resolve resource conflicts and build consensus. This part of the job also involves managing physical resources such as materials and equipment.
• Cost: Estimate project costs and apply those estimates across the schedule to create a time-phased budget.
• Communication: Notify appropriate stakeholders (everyone who has a legitimate stake in its success) of the project status.

Creating a logical balance of the defined variables of scope, time, cost, and resources is at the core of a good project manager’s job throughout the life of a project. Managing a project requires overseeing all its variables to ensure that the project goals are accomplished on time, within the limits of the budget, and using the assigned resources while also addressing risks, managing change, and satisfying stakeholders. Sound easy? Maybe not. However, one thing is certain: Having software to help organize and structure the work makes managing the project less daunting. That’s where Project 2019 can help.

Introducing Project 2019

Project 2019, which is a scheduling tool, helps you organize, manage, and control defined variables, as identified in the preceding section. Project can also help you manage the undefined variables as well. You can use Project to organize and manage your work, create realistic schedules, and optimize your use of resources.

Take a moment to look at some of the wonderful ways in which Project can help you organize, manage, and control your project. Now that you have, or your company has, bought Project and you’re investing your time to understand how to use it, you can enjoy these benefits:

• Use built-in templates to get a head start on your project. Project templates are prebuilt plans for a typical business project, such as commercial construction, an engineering project, a new product rollout, software development, or an office move.
• Organize your project by phase, deliverable, geography, or any other method. The outline format allows you to progressively elaborate the information in greater granularity depending on how detailed you want your plan to be.
• Determine costs by your chosen method. Examples are time period, resource type, deliverable, or cost type.
• Organize resources by resource type. Level your resources to avoid overallocation, or determine the impact on the duration of a task based on a change in resources.
• Calculate costs and timing based on your input. You can quickly calculate what-if scenarios to solve resource conflicts, maintain costs within your budget, or meet a deliverable deadline.
• Use views and reports with the click of a button. A wealth of information is now available to you — and those you report to. You no longer have to manually build a report on total costs to date to meet a last-minute request from your boss.
• Manage complex algorithms (that you couldn’t even begin to figure out on your own) to complete such tasks as leveling resource assignments to solve resource conflicts, filtering tasks by various criteria, modeling what-if scenarios, and calculating the dollar value of work performed to date.

No matter how cool the tool, you have to take the time to enter meaningful data. Great software doesn’t ensure great outcomes; it only makes them easier to achieve.

Getting to Know You

The file you create in Project is a Project schedule model. It’s a model because it models what you think will happen given what you know at the time. However, for ease of reference, you can refer to it as a schedule. The schedule has a plethora of data about various aspects of your project as well as graphical representations of that information.

Some people refer to the project schedule as the project plan. In reality, the project plan contains the project schedule — plus information such as the budget, work breakdown structure, project life cycle, risk management plan, and many other ingredients necessary to effectively manage a project.

Opening Project 2019

When you first open Project 2019, you see several options for starting a new project, as shown in Figure 3-1.

You can open a blank project, create a new project from an existing project, or create a new project by importing information from Microsoft Excel or SharePoint. You can also take advantage of premade templates for common project types, such as these examples:

• Residential construction
• Software development
• New product launch
• Merger or acquisition evaluation

FIGURE 3-1: What you see when you open Project 2019.

If you don’t see the template you need, you can search for online templates by entering keywords in the search box at the top of the page. For purposes of this discussion, it’s assumed that you’re starting with a new, blank project.

When you open a new project, you see the Quick Access toolbar, a few Ribbon tabs, the Ribbon, the Timeline, a pane with a sheet and a chart, and the status bar, as shown in Figure 3-2.

FIGURE 3-2: A blank project.

In Figure 3-2, you see Gantt Chart view. For now, here’s an overview of the major elements in Project (refer to Figure 3-2):

• Quick Access toolbar: The Quick Access toolbar, above and to the left of the Ribbon, is onscreen at all times and in all views.
• Ribbon tab: The Ribbon tabs organize commands based on a particular type of activity. For example, if you’re working with resources, you’ll likely find the command or setting you want on the Resource tab.
• Ribbon: The Ribbon provides easy access to the most commonly used tools and commands. When you change tabs, the available tools on the Ribbon change.
• Group: A group is a set of related commands or choices on the Ribbon. For example, to format text in a cell on the sheet, first find the formatting information you need in the Font group on the Task tab of the Ribbon.
• Timeline: The Timeline provides an overview of the entire project — a graphical view of the project from start to finish. You have the option of showing the Timeline or hiding it.
• Sheet: Similar to a spreadsheet, the sheet displays the data in the project. The default fields change depending on the Ribbon tab you’re working in. You can customize the columns and fields in the sheet to meet your needs.
• Chart: The chart is a graphical depiction of the information on the sheet. Depending on the view or Ribbon tab you see, you might also see a bar chart depicting the duration of a task or a resource histogram showing resource usage.
• Status bar: The status bar, at the bottom of the Project window, has information on views and zoom level on the right, and information on how newly entered tasks are scheduled on the left.

Navigating Ribbon tabs and the Ribbon

Each of the Ribbon tabs in Project shows different options on the Ribbon. This section provides an overview of each Ribbon tab and of the Ribbon and the Quick Access toolbar.

Each Ribbon tab has a different group of controls or functions. You can navigate from one tab to another by clicking on the tab name.

The first tab on the left is the File Ribbon tab. After you click this tab, you see the Navigation plan down the left side, as shown in Figure 3-3.

FIGURE 3-3: The File Ribbon tab menu.

The Ribbon tab puts you into Backstage view, where you find choices for working with files and changing options. For example, you can create a new project, open an existing project, save your current project, or print your current project. From Backstage view, you can also share, export, or close your current project. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can click Options and customize the Ribbon and the Quick Access toolbar.

The Task Ribbon tab is where you spend a lot of your time in Project. As you can see in Figure 3-4, on the far left side of the Task Ribbon tab is the View. The default view is Gantt Chart view. It shows the task information and the chart that displays a bar chart representing the duration of each task.

FIGURE 3-4: The Task Ribbon tab.

In addition to Gantt Chart, you can choose these views:

Calendar	Network Diagram
Resource Sheet	Resource Usage
Resource Form	Resource Graph
Task Usage	Task Form
Task Sheet	Team Planner
Timeline	Tracking Gantt

You may recognize some of the groups of commands on the Task Ribbon tab. For example, the Clipboard and Font groups are standard in many Windows applications. Other groups, such as Schedule and Tasks, are specific to a particular view — in this case, Gantt Chart view. Look for the Gantt Chart tools above the Format tab when you see the Task Ribbon tab in Gantt Chart view. In other views, you see different tools above the Format tab.

The Resource Ribbon tab, shown in Figure 3-5, helps you organize resources, such as assigning and leveling resources across tasks. In Project, resources include people, equipment, material, locations, and supplies. You can assign costs and calendars to resources.

FIGURE 3-5: The Resource Ribbon tab.

The Report Ribbon tab, shown in Figure 3-6, is where you can create reports on resources, costs, or progress, or put them all together in a dashboard report. You can create a report that compares your current status to previous versions of your project.

FIGURE 3-6: The Report Ribbon tab.

On the Project Ribbon tab, shown in Figure 3-7, you find commands to help you manage your project as a whole, rather than by task or resource. For example, you can enter or change the project start and finish dates and the baseline. If you need to change working time or add a subproject, this is the place to do it.

FIGURE 3-7: The Project Ribbon tab.

The View Ribbon tab, shown in Figure 3-8, lets you see some standard views. Examples are Task views, such as Gantt Chart, and Resource views, such as Resource Usage or Team Planner. You can use the View Ribbon tab to look at information sorted by date or a specific period. This tab also lets you see the entire project, show or hide the Timeline, and set the timescale you see.

FIGURE 3-8: The View Ribbon tab.

The Format Ribbon tab, shown in Figure 3-9, has commands that help you present your schedule, such as text styles, Gantt Chart styles, and column settings.

FIGURE 3-9: The Format Ribbon tab.

You can either show or hide the Ribbon to produce more real estate on your screen. The pushpin to the far right of the Ribbon pins it to your display, keeping it open and visible (as shown in Figure 3-10). The upward-facing arrow (^) on the far-right side hides the Ribbon. If your Ribbon is closed, click on any tab, look in the lower-right corner of the Ribbon and you will see a pushpin. Click on the pushpin to keep your Ribbon open. You can also press Ctrl+F1 to show or hide the Ribbon.

FIGURE 3-10: Keeping your Ribbon visible.

Displaying more tools

The Quick Access toolbar, which appears onscreen at all times, initially contains the Save, Undo, and Redo buttons. You can customize the Quick Access toolbar by clicking the down arrow at the right end of the toolbar and clicking the option you want to hide or display.

If you don’t see the option you want, click More Commands near the bottom of the menu to display the Quick Access Toolbar category in the Project Options dialog box. This shows you a full list of commands you can add. Figure 3-11 shows the list of commands you can choose from.

FIGURE 3-11: Customizing the Quick Access toolbar.

The nifty Timeline tool shows the entire scaled time span of the project. To show the Timeline, go to the View Ribbon tab (refer to Figure 3-8), in the Split View group and click the check box that says Timeline. You can add tasks or milestones to the Timeline. You can also copy the Timeline and paste it into reports or other presentations. To hide the Timeline, uncheck the Timeline box. You can also work with the Timeline by right-clicking to insert tasks, copy the Timeline, change the font, or view detailed information. Figure 3-12 shows the Timeline with summary tasks and milestones.

FIGURE 3-12: The Timeline.

The status bar, shown in Figure 3-13, sits at the bottom of the project, to indicate whether your tasks are manually or automatically scheduled. The status bar also lets you move quickly to some of the most popular views, such as Gantt, Task Usage, Team Planner, Resource Sheet, and Reports. You can also adjust the time scale from a high-level, time scaled view to a detailed time-scaled view with the View slider, on the far-right end of the status bar.

FIGURE 3-13: The Status bar.

An Updated Feature: Tell Me What You Want to Do

In previous versions of Microsoft Office, there was a Help function. That has been replaced by the Tell Me What You Want to Do feature. If you want some coaching on how to do something in Project 2019, just click the light bulb next to the Format tab. Enter a keyword, and you have several options to choose from. If you search on “critical path,” for example, the information in Figure 3-14 comes up.

FIGURE 3-14: A search for “critical path.”