Throughout my career as a project manager, I have been through many project audits, but the first one is etched in my memory. During that first audit as a PM, I was asked to show the Microsoft Project schedule of my project. When I showed the schedule, the auditor asked me to then show the…

In Microsoft Project, a baseline is like a “snapshot” of your project before you begin entering actual progress. Following best practices for baselining is essential to the success of any project, but do you know enough about what types of data are saved in a baseline, where to view this data, and how that all…

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1.5 PMI® PDU in the Technical Category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: Project Planning using Microsoft Project [00:00:00 – 00:17:10] In the beginning of this video viewers will learn how to setup a project. This will include setting the Start Date, Calendar, Custom…

I received an interesting question from one of our new clients recently, and I thought you might be interested in the answer. The client wanted to know how to prevent project managers from saving a baseline in their projects, and to restrict all baseline operations to only those who are staff in the Project Management…

The baseline — whether it be about the schedule, the budget or the scope — is essential in projects. Without it you have no way to measure the performance of your work. But there may be a few things you don’t know about baselines in Microsoft Project. In this article I share five facets of…

Often, we see that project timing and project resourcing are managed in Microsoft Project, while project finances are kept in Microsoft Excel. Using the financial governance capabilities in Project is often an unexploited area. If you think about it, this is a waste. Assuming you add rates to resources in Project, that gets you halfway;…

In this article I discuss the project management framework that I have applied in multiple projects (including the one I used in “A Free Project Pipeline Tracker for Excel“). What you’ll find is that it’s simple and uses the most basic of components, yet it’s where every project I’ve ever worked on begins. Let’s begin…

QCheck-IT! is produced by QuantumPM. Product Summary: This free Microsoft Project app helps project managers review the quality of the tasks in their Microsoft Project schedules.. Capabilities: Evaluates a task highlighted in the project schedule and provides: a) Task Audit, which evaluates each task against a list of audit conditions and provides a result; and b) Task…

Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This short video is NOT eligible for PMI® PDU credit. Event Description: In this video viewers will learn how to prepare their schedule to be baselined, they will learn how to baseline, how to clear baseline and learn about the different baselines available within Microsoft Project Presenter Info:…

While PMI’s fifth edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)® Guide is a great source for understanding the theoretical concepts of project management, the 2013 edition of Microsoft Project implements those concepts in a practical manner. While the core concepts remain the same between the two sources, there are some differences in the…