Not included in the Microsoft Office suite since its last version, Microsoft Project is one of the programs you may be unfamiliar with. It’s a bit more complicated and a lot more business minded, so there’s really not a chance you would ever have this program for personal use. However, one class program later and you could be mastering this extremely helpful program. Microsoft Project is like a computerized project manager for your company. It can work with scheduling and budgeting to make realistic plans, track progress, and keep everything where it should be timewise and financially. Steven Patterson, owner of The ACTS Learning Center in Florence, Kentucky, explains how Project can be one of the best assistants you’ve ever had in your business.
Microsoft Project is known as project management software, and it is somewhat more technical than other Microsoft Office programs. The program can help companies develop planning; create and assign tasks throughout the company; track and analyze projects’ progress; monitor and control a budget; and organize resources.
The most basic step of learning Project is the first step, and that is access. You can set up Project so you can share the information with your entire company, but you can control who sees what by assigning everyone to levels. These levels delegate what each employee has access to. For example, you may want all of your employees to be able to see the schedule for your new project, but they should not be able to see the payroll data of the budget schedule.
The next step is the essential tool of Project, which will translate into other features and commands, and that is scheduling. Scheduling is the hub, if you will, of Project’s functions. You create a schedule of a project. Now you can track the progress on that project with the schedule and updated task progress that employees can enter. You can track what resources will be needed on what days for what tasks, what will be done on what days, which employees will be on which jobs. You can create a budget and apply it to the schedule, and analyze the cost of tasks, labor, and material. You can then spread the budget over the timeline to see how the money is in fact being spent.
Going further, you can turn your schedule into a calendar so you will be reminded of events, and you can notify others of the timeline. You can also generate reports to track the company’s progress and budget, and to use in order to inform bosses, backers, or clients. You can even use Project to predict trends and make calculations. For example, don’t know how much of a particular resource you need to finish that job on that day next month? You can enter certain variables, for example, time, number of employees, area being covered, or what is needed, and Project will calculate how much of that material you need. It can tell you when you should expect to finish a job, how many people you will need. It also lets you keep track of when these resources are actually available and when they are not.
You can also import and export information from programs like Visio, in order to take information and insert it into these plans and schedules. Project is a program that a class is basically necessary in order to learn it. A lot of information, terms, commands, and processes are there to access different features. But like most Microsoft Office programs, these processes will not prove overwhelming or too much to remember because they all fit together and make sense in the ways to accomplish things on Project. You will remember to do this process to get to that one. And once you learn it, you will be surprised at just how organized and productive you can keep your business.
