Project Management

By Anjana C.S.

Stylus Systems is a Internet Technology company located in Bangalore India. One of our mottos is "a quality process creates a quality product." Please keep this motto in mind as you learn from this online course. Please contact us if you have any programming needs.

Introduction and Review

If you are ever responsible for coordinating a variety of specific tasks that must be completed within a specific timeframe for a set amount of money, you are a project manager, then this tutorial is for you.

Developing a software product, publishing a newsletter, implementing a training program, starting a new business or even building a new home are some of the projects that millions of people embark upon everyday. How does Microsoft Project 2000 help you do this? It helps you put together a plan of action, fill in and organize all the details that must be completed in order to achieve your goal. Right from building a new project to preparing your project for publication, tracking progress, analyzing costs, assessing the quality of your project and managing multiple projects, Microsoft Project 2000 does it all.

Project 2000 is based on the Office 2000 software model and is the newest version of this software. What's new in Project 2000? Apart from being an easy and flexible tool it expands into web compatible software, thus enabling easy communication. It expands the workgroup features that originally appeared in Project 98. Along with Microsoft Project Central 2000 and Microsoft Internet Information server, members in any team can view project data with any browser and exchange information easily, irrespective of their locations. A project can be saved into the corporate Intranet and email workgroup features can then be used for communication. Programs such as text readers and speech recognition software can be configured easily to work with Project. To summarize, Microsoft Project 2000 helps you stay in control with minimum effort and in minimum time.

Before we begin our first lesson, let us acquaint ourselves with a few terms and definitions that will be used often.

Tasks:

They are a division of all the work that needs to be completed in order to accomplish the project goals.

Scope:

of any project is a combination of all individual tasks and their goals.

Resources:

can be people, equipment, materials or services that are needed to complete various tasks. The amount of resources affects the scope and time of any project.

The Microsoft Project 2000 communicates with you through its interface - charts graphs and sheets, menus, toolbars and dialog boxes.

At the top of the window you see the customary the Title Bar that will indicate the name of the project that you are working with.

a) Toolbars provide shortcut access to frequently used functions. Although Microsoft Project displays only the Standard Toolbar and the Formatting Toolbar, Microsoft Project has 12 toolbars in all. To display the remaining toolbars, choose View, Toolbars from the menu and click an unchecked toolbar to display it. To view more information about that toolbar, click on its name to display its buttons and their descriptions. Microsoft Project also allows creating your own custom toolbars in Microsoft Project 2000.

The entry bar displays progress messages during actions.

Status bar at the bottom of the window displays messages and information when certain actions are in progress like entering data, opening or saving a file.

The View bar on the left is a scroll-down bar that displays a column of icons representing various views.

Before embarking on the project you need to put down a few key points very clearly -