What are the benefits of Microsoft Projects? -

Microsoft Projects does not manage your projects for you, however it acts as your quick and clever assistant in estimating schedules, calculating costs, balancing resources, displaying progress, and testing what-if scenarios.

How Microsoft Project Helps?

There are 10 project management knowledge areas: integration management, schedule management, scope management, cost management, resource management, quality management, communication management, risk management, procurement management, and stakeholder management.

Project manager is responsible for orchestrating the disciplines of all these knowledge areas in a single project, Microsoft Project does the heavy lifting when it comes to managing the schedule, cost, and resources. Project also helps you communicate the progress and formulate what-if scenarios for responding to risks and changes.

Manage Schedule

With its powerful scheduling engine, Project shines brightest in helping you estimate, manage, and adjust your project schedule. At the start of project planning, you use Project to determine the time-frame for the project start and ﬁnish dates, along with the phases and milestones along the way.

When you specify how long each task will take to accomplish and link together tasks that depend on each other, project calculates the schedule of linked task paths. If the project sponsor needs the project finish date to come sooner, or when an unexpected changes occurs in the middle of the project, you can adjust the timing of one task and all related task change with it.

Any linked tasks are automatically rescheduled. The end date of the project is recalculated

This automatic scheduling and re-scheduling saves you a huge amount of time as you create, track and adjust a project.

As you work through the project life cycle, you enter actual progress in project, such as the Percentage of specific tasks completed. Project updates the schedule accordingly so you continue to see the projected schedules based on work already done. Then if necessary, you adjust the timings of upcoming tasks to ensure that schedule stays on track.

Calculate Costs

Project helps you determine your budget. The majority of most project costs come from team members, with additional costs from equipment, materials, and travel expenses. In Project, you enter the resources required to carry out the tasks, the resources’ cost per hour or per unit, and when and how much they will be needed.

Then when you assign resources to the tasks, project calculates the task based on he cost for the assigned resources. These costs roll up in your project plan to show overall project cost

As you enter actual progress on tasks, Projects updates the costs so you can see actual costs so far and projected costs through to the end of the project.

Balance Resources

Projects helps you keep close eye on how your resources are used over the span of the project. After you assign resources to the tasks, you can see when specific resources are overloaded or under-loaded. You can then adjust the project plan to change resource assignments, adjust the schedule, or change the project scope to remove the over-allocation. he following figure shows the day-wise work plan of project resources. The graph below shows when Jon is working on a project and how is his percentage allocation on the project.

When you are first planning the project, seeing this overall resource picture can help you develop the resource plan, including the types of team members needed, how many team members with specific skills should be recruited, when they are needed and when are they over and under allocated. Your plan might also include equipment and materials needed to carry out the tasks.

Using resources judiciously on the project help you effectively manage the budget, and avoiding skewed resource allocation – downtime at one extreme and burnout at the other.

Communicate Progress

Clear and timely project communication is essential to successful project management. You can use the built in Project Views, reports, and dashboards as is, or customize them as needed to share the most relevant information with your different audiences.

Respond to Changes

A project plan shows how you will accomplish the project scope by the desired finish date and within allotted budget. The plan reflects the perfect ideal. After you start executing the project in real life, however, things change and plan is no longer a perfect.

For e.g. materials that were estimated at $940 now cost $1200. The project sponsor who originally agreed to finish date of December 15 now insists on October 15. Team member you were told would be available in May is not free until July.

These types of changes are inevitable in project. With Microsoft project you can adjust various aspects of the projects to compensate for these changes. If you have several choices to respond to a change, you might even run what-if scenarios in Project.

Summary

Microsoft Project is a powerful tool that supports comprehensive project planning, resource management, and cost management.

You can create dynamic project schedules which adjust the project finish dates based on delays and dependencies on the other tasks. Using comprehensive resource management feature, project manager can balance the workload of the resources.

Its powerful reporting feature allows Project Managers to communicate the project status with team members.