Software Project Management

Lecture 12
Muneer Ahmed Shaikh
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 Microsoft Project

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 Microsoft Project
• Microsoft Project is a project management
software product, developed and sold by
Microsoft.
• It is designed to assist a project manager in
developing a schedule, assigning resources to
tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget,
and analyzing workloads.
• It is part of the Microsoft Office family but has
never been included in any of the Office suites.
• It is available currently in two editions,
Standard and Professional.
• Microsoft Project's proprietary file format is
.mpp.
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 Project Management Tool
• Track all of the information you gather about
the work (tasks), task duration, and resource
requirements for your project.
• Visualize your project plan in standard, well-
defined formats.
• Schedule tasks and resources consistently and
effectively.
• Exchange project information with stakeholders
over networks and the Internet using standard
file formats.
• Communicate with resources and other
stakeholders while leaving ultimate control in
the hands of the project manager.
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 Gantt with Timeline View
• This is the default view.
• http://examples.oreilly.com/9780735626959-files/ Practice File

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 Timeline View
• Seeing the Big Picture of the project plan.
• Zoom: Zoom in or out / Changing the Timescale

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 Resource Sheet

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 Resource Usage

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 Task View and Task Details

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 Key Questions Regarding A Project
• With a good project management system in
place, you should be able to answer such
questions as:
– What tasks must be performed, and in what order,
to produce the deliverable of the project?
– When should each task be performed, and what is
the final deadline?
– Who will complete these tasks?
– How much will it cost?
– What if some tasks are not completed as
scheduled?
– What’s the best way to communicate project details
to those who have an interest in the project?

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 Project Basics
• A project is a temporary endeavor
undertaken to create a unique product,
service, or result. (PMBOK)
– Temporary endeavor  Every project has an end date
– A project is an endeavor. Resources, such as people
and equipment, need to do work. The endeavor is
undertaken by a team or an organization, and therefore
projects have a sense of being intentional, planned
events.  Tasks & Resources
– Every project creates a unique product or service. This
is the deliverable for the project and the reason that the
project was undertaken.
• When the Great Pyramids at Giza in Egypt were built,
somebody somewhere was tracking resources,
schedules, and specifications in some fashion.
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 Time, Cost, and Scope: Managing Project Constraints

• Project management gets most interesting when you must

balance the Project Triangle: time, cost, and scope
constraints of your projects.
• The project triangle illustrates the process of balancing
constraints because the three sides of the triangle are
connected, and changing one side of a triangle affects at
least one other side.

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 Trade-off: Impacts of Shorten Schedule

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 Impacts of Cost Cutting

• As a project manager, you must consider (or, more

likely, communicate to the decision makers) the
benefits versus the risks of reducing costs.

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 Impacts of Increased Scope

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 Gantt Chart
• The Gantt with Timeline view is the default; the
Gantt Chart is probably the best-known view in
Project, and the Gantt chart is the best-known
concept in project management as a whole.

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 Task Ribbon
• The Task tab provides buttons for adding, formatting, and
working with tasks. From the Schedule group, you can mark the
percentage complete, link tasks to one another, and inactivate a
task. You can also convert manually scheduled tasks
into automatically scheduled tasks from the Tasks group.

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• Use the Project tab to handle advanced project functions involving
properties, scheduling, and reporting. For example, you can add custom
fields, define WBS codes, insert subprojects, and generate visual reports
from the Project tab.

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 View Tab
• The View tab is a one-stop shop for selecting the various views
available in Project 2010 and for customizing your current view.
It is also where you can add a timeline to your view.

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 Format Tab
• The Format tab buttons help you customize the text, columns, colors, and
other elements of each type of view. The groups and buttons in
the Format tab are completely different for each type of view. They change
automatically when you change the view.

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 Task Tab

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 Resource tab
• The buttons on the Resource tab help you with the often-complex
business of managing the resources who do the work on your project.
From this tab, you can add resources, assign them to tasks, and level
resources that are overallocated. You can also launch the powerful
team planner from this tab.

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 Meta Model for Projects

Has task relationship (FS, FF, SS, SF)

Task
Name
Work
Duration
Assignment Units Resource
Start Assigned to Name
Finish Type
Schedule mode Costs
Predecessor tasks (Lag time)
Working Time
Resources
Milestone (Y/N)
Summary task[Phase](Y/N)
Calendar

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 Creating a Task List
• Create a new task and enter task names.
• Estimate and record how long each task should
last.
• Create a milestone to track an important event.
• Organize tasks into phases (Summary Tasks).
• Create task relationships by linking tasks.
• Switch task scheduling from manual to
automatic.
• Set nonworking days for the project plan.
• Check the project plan’s overall duration.
• Record task details in notes and insert a
hyperlink to content on the Web.
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 New Project Information

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 Defining the Right Tasks for the Deliverable
• Every project has an ultimate goal project
deliverable.
• Defining the right tasks to create the
deliverable is an essential skill for a project
manager.
• Product scope vs. project scope.
• Product scope describes the quality,
features, and functions of the deliverable of
the project.
• Project scope describes the work required
to deliver such a product or service.
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 Duration’s Unit of Measure

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 Task Duration Estimates
• Two general rules when estimating task durations:
– Overall project duration often correlates to task
duration; long projects tend to have tasks with longer
durations than do tasks in short projects.
– You should measure task durations at the lowest level
of detail or control that is important to you, but no
lower.
• Good sources of task duration estimates include:
– Historical information from previous, similar projects
– Estimates from the people who will complete the tasks
– The expert judgment of people who have managed
similar projects
– The standards of professional or industrial
organizations that carry out projects similar to yours

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 Task Duration
• Because inaccurate task duration
estimates are a major source of risk in
any project, making good estimates is
well worth the effort expended.
• 8/80 rule: This rule suggests that task
durations between 8 hours (or one day)
and 80 hours (10 working days, or two
weeks) are generally sized about right.
– Tasks shorter than one day might be too
granular, and tasks longer than two weeks
might be too long to manage properly.

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 Milestone

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 Phases
• In MS Project, phases are represented by summary tasks, and
the tasks indented below the summary task are called subtasks.

Summary task bar in the Gantt chart

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 Developing Tasks and Phases
• Top-down planning identifies major phases or
components of the project before filling in the
tasks required to complete those phases.
Complex projects can have several layers of
phases. This approach works from general to
specific.
• Bottom-up planning identifies as many of the
bottom-level detailed tasks as possible before
organizing them into logical groups called
phases or summary tasks. This approach works
from specific to general.

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 Task Relationship  Linking Tasks

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 Link Tasks
• Highlight the tasks to be linked and than click
the Link icon in the Schedule group under the
Task tab.

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 Linking Tasks with Mouse
• Point the mouse pointer at the Gantt bar for task x,
and then click and drag to the Gantt bar for task y,
to link the two tasks.
• Double click the link to define the task dependency

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 Project Calendar
• The project calendar defines the general
working and nonworking time for tasks. Project
includes multiple calendars, called base
calendars, any one of which serves as the
project calendar for a project plan.

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 Elapsed Duration
• If needed, you can schedule tasks to occur
during working and nonworking time. To do
this, assign an elapsed duration to a task.
• You enter elapsed duration by preceding the
duration abbreviation with an e.
– For example, type 3ed to indicate three elapsed
days.
• You might use an elapsed duration for a task
that goes on around the clock rather than just
during normal working hours.

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 Timeline View
• Project Duration

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 Project Statistics
• Project  Project Information  Statistics

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 Task Notes

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 Key Points about Tasks
• Essential aspects of tasks in a project plan include their duration
and order of occurrence.
• Task links, or relationships, cause the start or end of one task to
affect the start or end of another task. A common task
relationship is a finish-to-start relationship, in which the
completion of one task controls the start of another task.
• In Project, phases of a schedule are represented as summary
tasks.
• Tasks can be manually or automatically scheduled. For manually
scheduled tasks, you can record whatever information you may
have about a task’s duration, start, and finish values.
• You use calendars in Project to control when work can be
scheduled to occur.
• You can document additional details using task notes and create
hyperlinks to the Web.

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 Resources
• Set up basic resource information for the
people who work on projects.
• Adjust the maximum capacity of a resource to
do work.
• Set up cost information for work resources.
• Change a resource’s availability for work.
• Enter cost resource information for financial
tracking.
• Record additional information about a resource
in a note.

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 Types of Resources
• Work resources include the people and
equipment needed to complete the tasks in a
project.
• Cost resources represent a financial cost
associated with a task that you need to account
for. Examples include categories of expenses
like travel, entertainment, and so on.
• Material resources are consumables that you
use up as the project proceeds. For example, a
construction project might need to track steel
or concrete as it is used throughout the project.

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 Work Resource Examples
• Work resources are the people and equipment that do the
work of the project.
• Project focuses on two aspects of work resources: their
availability and their costs.
• Availability determines when specific resources can work
on tasks and how much work they can perform, and costs
refer to how much money will be required to pay for those
resources.

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 Work Resources (Chapter 3)
• Most people resources have a working day of typically 8
and usually no more than 12 hours, but equipment
resources might have much more varied capacities for
work, ranging from short durations (followed by
maintenance) to around the clock without interruption.
• You do not need to track every piece of equipment that will
be used in your project, but you might want to set up
equipment resources when
– Multiple teams or people might need a piece of
equipment to accomplish different tasks
simultaneously, and the equipment might be
overbooked.
– You want to plan and track costs associated with the
equipment.

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 Resource Sheet
• Specifying that a resource has 100% maximum
units means that 100 percent of that resource’s
working time is available to work on assigned
tasks in the project plan.
• Project will alert you if you assign the resource
to more tasks than they can accomplish at
100% maximum units (in other words, if the
resource becomes overallocated ). 100% is the
default Max. Units value for new resources.

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 Assign Resources
• Under Gantt Chart view
• Resources tab  Assign Resources

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 Resources Assigned Displayed

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 Assigned Resources
• Assigned resources using
– Assign Resources dialog box
– Assign resources in the Task Form (Task
Details)
– The Resource Names column in the Gantt
Chart view.
– On the Resources tab of the Task
Information dialog box

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 Costs
• Work resource costs, such as a person’s
standard pay rate times the amount of work
they perform on the task.
• Cost resource costs, which are a fixed dollar
amount that you enter when assigning the cost
resource to a task.
– The amount is not affected by changes in duration
or any other schedule changes to the task, although
you can edit the amount at any time.
– You can also see cumulative costs resulting from
assigning the same cost resource to multiple tasks.

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 Cost Resource Assignment

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 Key Points on Resource Assignment
• In Project, a task normally has work associated with it after a work
resource (which can be people or equipment) has been assigned to
the task.
• You must assign resources to tasks before you can track
resources’ progress or cost.
• Project follows the scheduling formula Duration × Units = Work.
• Effort-driven scheduling determines whether work remains
constant when you assign additional resources to tasks. Effort-
driven scheduling is turned off by default.
• The easiest way to understand effort-driven scheduling is to ask
yourself this question: If one person can do this task in 10 days,
could two people do it in 5 days? If so, then effort-driven
scheduling should apply to the task.
• Actions lists appear after you perform certain actions in Project.
They allow you to quickly change the effect of your action to
something other than the default effect.
• Assigning cost resources allows you to associate financial costs
with a task other than those derived from work or material
resources.
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