Project Management Institute (PMI)® Professional Development Units (PDUs): This Webinar is eligible for 1 PMI® PDU in the Technical category of the Talent Triangle. Event Description: In the first webinar of this multi-part series, Microsoft Project expert Ira Brown will present techniques for initiating a new project that is consistent with established organizational standards. This presentation…

Microsoft Project 2013 has two types of templates: The global template and the project template. Here’s a rundown: 1. The global template acts as a storage facility for built-in and customized Project elements, such as views, tables, groups, filters, and calendars. It also contains the settings for Project options that determine how the program behaves,…

1. Before entering any tasks, you have to specify how many work hours equal a workday by using option Hours per Day on the tab Schedule (ribbon File, item Options). Microsoft Project uses this setting to convert between time units; it is the time unit conversion factor. All durations will be recalculated when you change this…

1. When you schedule electronically, you should not enter start or finish dates for tasks. If you use Microsoft Project to simply capture dates and only dates, you may as well use Microsoft Excel instead. With MS Project, you enter durations and dependencies instead of dates to create a forecast model. The software then calculates start…

In all versions of Project, in a task line, click a Duration cell to activate the spin button control and then click the arrows to increase or decrease the duration value in the cell. Each click changes the duration by one day. The Duration cell initially displays “1 day?” for a new task entry by…

You may be wondering why you can have individual items with slack in your schedule but then have total slack for the whole project show zero. Is there a way to show on your schedule how many days of slack you have for the entire project? The answer is complicated. First, some basics. Slack is…

1. In Project 2010, I always use “Must Finish On” instead of a deadline date for the last task in my projects, in order to cement the task in the schedule. 2. I use “Start No Earlier Than” when something is to be delivered by an external vendor, such as, “Delivery of roof by October…

The following in an excerpt from chapter 4 of Microsoft Project 2013 Step by Step by Carl Chatfield, PMP and Timothy Johnson, MCTS. Download full versions of chapter 4 and 9.   You should consider two general rules when estimating task durations: Overall project duration often correlates to task duration; long projects tend to have…

Percentage Task Duration Complete and percentage task Work Complete Explained. Microsoft project 2010 presents you with a bounty of riches when it comes to task work. But getting there takes a little thought let me explain How many times have you asked one of your colleagues have they finished their task yet, and been told…

There has been a lot of talk this year about the use of drivers in schedule risk analysis. The idea is that the correlations between task durations are the result of one or more outside influences (the drivers) and that their influence on task duration can and should be modeled directly. As a software vendor,…