Program Prerequisite

Participants must have managed at least one project from beginning to end with Microsoft® Office Project. If you don’t meet this requirement we recommend you take our MS Project Fundamentals course.

About This Course

This 2-day workshop is designed to check-up on your day-to-day scheduling to make sure you are using the best practices of scheduling with Project 2003/2007. These best practices have been established by Eric Uyttewaal through evaluating and certifying over 1,000 real-life schedules. The overall goal of the course is to get the most benefit from using the tool. The content is restricted to modeling and managing a single project in Microsoft Project as a standalone application.

Dates: Click here for a listing of course dates.

Who Should Attend

The Dynamic Scheduling course is designed for people who are using MS Project regularly, even if this is as often as a day-to-day basis: project schedulers, project team members, project managers, project controllers, project control officers, and project engineers.

Learning Objectives

After this course, you will:

• Have a thorough understanding of the Project 2003/2007 user interface and its workings behind the screen
• Be able to create a valid and dynamic model of your project
• Be aware of the best practices of scheduling with Project 2003/2007
• Be an expert in optimizing the project plan:
  • how to squeeze time out of a project schedule when you need it
  • how to find dollar contingencies in a project budget
• Be able to create custom reports and views that meet the needs of stakeholders in your project
• Know how to efficiently update the schedule during project execution to continuously forecast the project end date and cost
• Know the documented (and undocumented) shortcuts and features of Project 2003/2007

Please Bring to the Class

• A laptop with a processor of 233 MHz or higher and a minimum of 128MB RAM
• The laptop should be loaded with Windows 2000 or later and a full setup of Project 2003/2007 Standard or Professional edition. If you are set up with Project 2000 or 2002, your learning experience will not be affected since these releases are about 90% the same for this course. The instructor will demonstrate from Project 2003/2007 but can point out the differences with your version. The differences between 2003/2007 and previous releases will be clearly indicated in the course book.
• Schedules, budgets, project documents and project files you would like to discuss with the instructor
  

Course Topics

Types of data in Project 2003/2007 and how they relate to each other

• Options: project specific options and global options
• Project data: tasks, estimates, dependencies, deadlines, constraints, resources and assignments
• Objects: views, tables, filters, groups, and calendars

Review on efficiently entering data into Project 2003/2007

• Options: relevant options before entering data
• Tasks:
  • Creating the Work Breakdown Structure and fleshing it out to detail tasks
  • Finding the right level of detail
  • Fixed Duration, Fixed Units and Fixed Work tasks and when to use each type of task
  • Recurring tasks and overhead tasks
• Estimates:
  • A process for estimating
  • Estimating durations or work (effort) and the task types: Fixed Duration, Fixed units and Fixed Work
  • Difficulties in estimating and solutions
• Dependencies and the network logic:
  • The principle of dynamic schedules
  • Using dependencies to model cause and effect in the project
  • How to determine the predecessor and successor in a relationship
  • Types of dependencies and when to use each type
  • How to check the completeness of the network logic
• Deadlines (target dates): how deadlines support dynamic scheduling
• Schedule Constraints (fixed dates): types of schedule constraints and how they make your schedule rigid
• Resources:
  • Types of resources:
  • Part-time, full-time, and consolidated human resources,
  • Material, facility, and equipment resources
  • Varying resource availability and rates
  • Entering the resources yourself or using the Enterprise Resource Pool
• Calendars: the project calendar, base calendars, resource and task calendars. Using Enterprise calendars.
• Assignments:
  • Part-time versus full-time; driving versus non- driving assignments
  • Three rules to make Project 2003/2007 an easy tool for you

How to manage resource workloads

• Preventing over-allocations using an Enterprise Resource Pool
• Resolving over-allocations:
  • Making workloads visible and finding the over-allocations
  • When to level by hand and when to rely on Project 2003/2007
• Leveling workloads by hand:
  • The best view to resolve over-allocations yourself
  • A complete list of ways to resolve over-allocations manually
• Leveling workloads automatically:
  • What Project 2003/2007 can and cannot do for you in resolving over-allocations
  • Leveling algorithms used by Project 2003/2007
  • Where to check how Project 2003/2007 resolved the over-allocations

How to decrease the duration of your project

• Optimizing for Time (having unlimited resources): the Critical Path Method (CPM):
  • Difference between free and total slack (float)
  • Situations that fragment the Critical Path and what to do about it
  • Shortening or crashing the Critical Path
• Optimizing for Time, Cost and Resources (having limited resources: resource-constrained scheduling)
  • How resource leveling affects the Critical Path
  • Finding the Resource Critical Path
  • Ways to shorten or crash the Resource Critical Path

How to decrease the cost of your project

• Types of cost: fixed costs and variable costs (period cost, per unit cost, per use cost)
• How to model each type of cost in Project 2003/2007
• Using cost rate tables for rate escalation and multiple rates per resource
• All the things you can do to bring down the cost

Checking the schedule before publishing

• Did I apply the best practices?
• Using a 40-point checklist and ready-made filters

Reporting the project the way you want

• Creating one-page reports … always!
• How to defend a visible time buffer or cost reserve to your manager, sponsor or client or how to hide it in the schedule otherwise
• Developing custom views
  • Using the Custom Fields, Tables, Filters and Grouping features
  • How to re-use them elsewhere using the Organizer

How to enter actual progress and how to update forecasts in the schedule

• Updating tasks versus updating assignments (time sheets)
• How to perform efficient task updates (if you don’t have a timesheet infrastructure that transfers actual hours back into your schedules)