Task 2 in the following screenshot. Task 3 and Task 4 in the following screenshot. So essentially, one would believe that with these 3 days Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the duration calculated would be 3 days.
But MS Project calculates it as 4 days. So one needs to be careful when choosing the start date of the task. Because for any successive operation, MS Project considers that Task 6 will take 4 days. The next time, you change the start date, the Finish date changes to reflect this 4-day duration. Elapsed Duration is the time that elapses while some event is occurring which does not require any resources.
Elapsed duration for a task can be used in instances where a task will go on round-the-clock without any stoppage. A normal workday has 8 hours, and an elapsed day duration will have 24 hours. The task also continues over non-working holidays and vacations and working days. So 1ew is seven hour days. And it takes 4 days for this to happen. It does not need a resource or a work effort, and all you are doing is waiting for it to dry.
You can use 4ed as the time duration, which signifies 4 elapsed days, the paint can dry regardless of whether it is a weekend or if it falls on a holiday. Here in this example, the drying occurs over 24 hours over the weekend.
In Project Management, Milestones are specific points in a project timeline. They are used as major progress points to manage project success and stakeholder expectations.
They are primarily used for review, inputs and budgets. Mathematically, a milestone is a task of zero duration. And they can be put where there is a logical conclusion of a phase of work, or at deadlines imposed by the project plan.
In Method 2, a task was converted to a Milestone of Zero duration. But one can also convert a task of non-zero duration into a Milestone. This is rarely used and causes confusion. There can be a huge number of tasks in a project schedule, it is therefore a good idea to have a bunch of related tasks rolled up into a Summary Task to help you organize the plan in a better way.
It helps you organize your plan into phases. In MS Project , you can have several number of sub-tasks under any higher level task. These higher level tasks are called Summary Task. At an even higher level, they are called Phases. Remember because summary task is not a separate task entity but a phase of the project with several sub-tasks in it, the duration of the summary task is from the start of the first sub-task to the finish of the last sub-task.
This will be automatically calculated by MS Project. Of course, you can enter a manual duration of the summary task as well which could be different from the automatically calculated duration. MS Project will keep track of both but this can cause significant confusion.
In most cases, you should ensure that there is no manually entered duration for any task you will be using as a Summary Task. Let us use the following screenshot as an example. If you would like to group Task 4 and Task 5 into a Summary Task 1. You can do it in two ways. You can rename the Task.
Here it is renamed as Summary Task 1. Once you have a list of tasks ready to accomplish your project objectives, you need to link them with their task relationships called dependencies. For example, Task 2 can start once Task 1 has finished. These dependencies are called Links. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK Guide does not define the term dependency, but refers to it as a logical relationship, which in turn is defined as a dependency between two activities, or between an activity and a milestone.
In MS Project, the first task is called a predecessor because it precedes tasks that depend on it. The following task is called the successor because it succeeds, or follows tasks on which it is dependent. Any task can be a predecessor for one or more successor tasks. Likewise, any task can be a successor to one or more predecessor tasks. Most used. One does not have to finish collecting survey response before starting the tabulation.
Select the two tasks you want to link. In the following screenshot taken as an example, we have selected names, Task 1 and Task 2. In this method, you will select a group of task, and link them all with Finish-to-Start relationship. All tasks get linked. To select non-adjacent tasks, hold down Ctrl key and select each task separately. If you are in Manually Scheduled mode, any change in duration of the predecessor task will not reflect on Start date of Task 4.
Now when we change the Duration of Task 3 from 5 to 7 days, the start date is not automatically updated for Task 4 in Manual Scheduling. MS Project by default sets new tasks to be manually scheduled.
Scheduling is controlled in two ways. It calculates values such as task durations, start dates, and finish dates automatically. It takes into accounts all constraints, links and calendars. For example, at Lucerne Publishing, the new book launch plan has been reviewed by the resources who will carry out the work and by other project stakeholders. Although you expect the plan to change somewhat as you learn more about the book launch, you now have enough confidence in the overall plan to switch from manual to automatic task scheduling.
If you want to change the mode for a particular task, say Task 5 in the following example. Click on Task Mode cell in the same row. Then, click the down arrow to open a dropdown box, you can select Auto Scheduled.
Toggle the scheduling mode of the plan by clicking the New Tasks status bar at the bottom-left and then selecting Auto scheduling mode. Go to File tab and click Options. In project management terminology, resources are required to carry out the project tasks. They can be people, equipment, facilities, funding, or anything except labor required for the completion of a project task.
Optimum Resource Scheduling is the key to successful project management. Travel expenses, food expenses, etc. For example, paint being used while painting a wall.
People resources will have limited work hours, say 6, 8 or 12 hours. Equipment resources have different working capacities of 2, 8 or 24 hours and could have maintenance breaks as well. Also note, that it is possible multiple people resources might be using one equipment resource, or one equipment might be accomplishing multiple tasks.
Max Units field represents the maximum capacity of a resource to work on assigned tasks. The resource is available full-time on each workday. If a resource does not represent an individual person but a job function, where a group of people with the same skill set can work on the task, we can enter larger Max Units to represent the number of people in the group. Units would mean you expect the resource capacity to be lower than a full-time resource.
You can enter standard rates and costs per use for work and material resources. You can also enter overtime rates for work resources. Standard rates are calculated on per hour basis. Costs per use on the other hand are costs that do not vary with task. Cost per use is a set fee used up to complete a task. Like paint being used while painting a wall.
People resources will have limited work hours say 6, 8 or 12 hours. Equipment resources can have different working capacities of 2, 8 or 24 hours and could have maintenance breaks as well. Also note that it is possible multiple people resources might be using one equipment resource, or one equipment might be accomplishing multiple tasks. Cost resources do not use pay rates. Remember cost per use and cost resources are two different things.
Cost resources are financial cost associated with a task, like travel expenses, food expenses, etc. The cost value of cost resource is only assigned when you assign cost resource to a task.
You can then see the cost per resource and cost per task as well as costs rolled up to summary tasks and the entire plan. MS Project will not automatically apply overtime calculations. In the following example, the resource Rasmus is left at zero. Hovering over it will make the note appear. You can use a cost resource to represent a financial cost associated with a task in a plan. Examples of cost resources are travel, food, entertainment and training. So it is obvious that cost resources do no work on a task and do not affect scheduling of a task.
Once the task and resource list are complete, resources need to be assigned to tasks in order to work on them. With MS Project you can track task progress, resource and tasks costs. After assigning resources to tasks you can view the cost, duration and work required for the plan to complete.
In the Gantt Chart view, you can also look at the project summary task, to note the duration, start and finish dates of the plan.
In the following example, Assign Resources is the project summary task identified as Task 0. Cost for each task gets rolled up into summary tasks, and then ultimately to project summary task. Once your project plan is ready in MS Project, it becomes essential for a project manager to measure the actuals in terms of work completed, resources used and costs incurred and to revise and change information about tasks and resources due to any changes to the plans.
A Project Manager should not assume that everything is progressing according to plan and should always keep track of each task. Resistance to formal tracking of project management data is normal. You can overcome resistance to tracking by explaining your expectations, explaining the benefits of tracking, and training people to track the task themselves. To evaluate project performance you need to create a baseline against which you will compare the progress.
One needs to save the baseline, once a plan is fully developed. Of course, due to rolling wave planning or progressive elaboration needed to manage projects one can always add new tasks, resources, constraints and costs to the plan. Also note, it makes sense to save the baseline before entering any actual values such as percentage of task completion. These multiple baselines seem contrary to the definition of baseline. You are preparing for a risk event. You want to develop separate baseline plans for risk response and recovery.
You are accommodating a big change request, you might still want to keep the original plan for future reference when communicating with a stakeholder. As time and work progresses on a project, you might need to change the baseline as well. This does not affect the baseline values for other tasks or resource baseline values in the plan. You can save up to 11 baselines in a single plan. The first one is called Baseline, and the rest are Baseline 1 through Baseline It can be used as a project marker.
It is visually easy to see how off-track or on-track the project progress is. Because it only specifies dates, it is simple, clear and easy information. If all tasks have started and are finished as scheduled, you can record this in the Update Project dialog box. But sometimes this approach might be fine when the actual work and cost values generated are close enough to your baseline schedule.
Check marks will appear in the indicators column for tasks that have been completed. On the right in the Chart portion, progress bars are generated in the Gantt bars of each task. Click on Task you want to update. For this task, initial scheduled Work was 16 hours, because 24 hours is greater. In the example, a Baseline is saved, because the Baseline does not change and is used as a comparison. One does not have to finish collecting survey responses before starting the tabulation.
In this relationship,. Under Lag heading column, enter the lag in terms of hours, days, weeks, or years. You can also apply lag or lead as a percentage. As Soon As Possible means the task starts as soon as the project starts, if there are no dependencies that would delay it.
So, no fixed start or end dates are imposed by this constraint type, but of course predecessor and successor dependencies are maintained. If you use Tasks Constraints, you limit your scheduling flexibility, where MS Project will fix a particular start or finish date of the task according to the constraint. It is a better idea to use a Deadline Date which has no effect on the scheduling of a task or summary task.
MS Project will alert you with a red exclamation symbol in the indicators column, if the scheduled completion of the task exceeds its deadline date. Enter the cost under the Fixed Cost column for the task of interest. Status meetings, status reports, inspection dates can recur with a particular frequency.
In MS Project , you can specify recurring tasks without having to assign tasks each time separately. You can also assign resources to these task. You can also choose a specific time for the task to start as well. You can add time value in the Start box for Recurring Task Information dialog box to change this. In the following figure, start time of AM is entered. Critical Path is the succession of connected tasks that will take the longest to complete.
Critical path can be a single sequence of tasks a single critical path or there can be more than 1 critical paths for a single project. While schedule changes are made, it is also likely that the critical path will change from time to time. One needs to always focus on the Critical Path first, when one wants to apply fast-tracking or crashing to shorten the project duration. All task bars in the critical path, in the Gantt Chart View on the right, will turn Red in color. Gantt Chart View displays some limited resource information, as shown in the following screenshot.
It summarizes whether there may be a problem by the red over allocated icon in the indicator column. The Resource Usage view displays resources and all tasks assigned to them underneath the Resource Name. The left-hand side of the screen lists the Resources and the Task Names together with columns of total information for the resource or assignment.
The right-hand side shows a time-phased view. One would need to either change the scope reduce the amount of work , assign more resources, or accept a longer schedule to resolve overallocation.
By changing its lead or lag time when the resource has more tasks assigned than can be completed during a given time period. If you add delay that is less than or equal to the amount of slack on the task, you will not affect the finish date of the project. You can also right-click on the Time-phased grid in the right hand side window to display amount of overallocation by switching on overallocation.
Now you can reduce the assigned hours. Many training guides on technology are primarily manuals on features and functions of the software. The goal of this book is to show why those features and functions are important from a project management standpoint based on PMI's Project Management Body of Knowledge , and then demonstrate how to effectively leverage that value through the use of Microsoft Project This is the third edition of a text that has been well-received by the project management community across 25 different countries since the release of Project The information in this book was selected based on Project Assistants' 25 years of project management consulting, Microsoft Project training, and managing real-world projects with Microsoft Project.
Included with the book are hands-on exercises with step-by-step illustrations built from actual Microsoft Project files that can be downloaded from our training webpage. There is a robust index as well as intuitively organized and clearly delineated sections, chapters, and sub-sections for easy reference. Each chapter has a learning-oriented structure with objectives at the beginning and questions at the end that reinforce those points of emphasis.
We also provide all answer keys and supporting PowerPoint slides for academic instructors upon request. Get more done quickly with Project Jump in wherever you need answers-brisk lessons and colorful screenshots show you exactly what to do, step by step.
Quickly start a new plan, build task lists, and assign resources Share your plan and track your progress Capture and fine-tune work and cost details Use Gantt charts and other views and reports to visualize project schedules Share resources across multiple plans and consolidate projects Master project management best practices while you learn Project Look up just the tasks and lessons you need.
No matter your level of training or experience, this book will show you how improve your project management with Microsoft Project This focused, user-friendly approach uses a proven two-page layout that allows students to work through an entire task without turning the page.
Clear Learning Outcomes outline the skills for each lesson, while large full-color screen images reflect exactly what students see on their own computers. Each module begins with a brief overview of the principles covered in the lesson and introduces a real-world case scenario to engage students and reinforce critical skills to make them successful in their educational and professional careers.
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Continuing the tradition started by msProjectExperts many years ago, the latest version of this "blue book" lays out everything a project manager needs to know to effectively use Microsoft Project with either Project Online or Microsoft Project Server Beginning with an overview of Microsoft's project management tools, Managing Enterprise Projects: Using Project Online and Microsoft Project Server follows the normal project management life cycle of Defining, Planning, Executing, and Controlling to show you how to effectively use these tools at each step of the cycle.
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NET Core framework. GraphQL is a language for querying or manipulating resources or data against data sources such as databases.
In addition, graphql also provides a runtime for processing queries and other graphql objects. The language and runtime were originally built by Facebook in to be used internally. In graphql began to be published in open source to the public. Several leading companies including Facebook itself already use graphql such as github, pinterest, airbnb, paypal, twitter, and others. There are several things that distinguish graphql from rest services, including: - GraphQL provides data according to your needs, nothing less and nothing more.
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NET Core according to the needs in the field. Hopefully this book can be another alternative as a learning resource for exercises, tutorials, or a reference for those who want to learn the backend programming of GraphQL API Services with ASP. This book will help you quickly write efficient, high-quality access-database-driven code with Java.
