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Microsoft Project ADVANCED: Project Management Technics 3PDU

Name: Microsoft Project ADVANCED: Project Management Technics 3PDU
Rating: 4.4 (1169 reviews)

MS PROJECT 2016 ADVANCED Project Management Techniques -incl Enterprise level. HANDS-ON from #1 BESTSELLING INSTRUCTOR

Created bySrikanth Shirodkar

Last updated 11/2018

English

What you'll learn

Learn the TOP 10 PITFALLS of using Microsoft Project - this is my summary from more than 5000+ assignments from 17000+ learners. INCREDIBLY POWERFUL & SIMPLE!!!
Learn to create "MASTER PROJECTS" - The one Project to rule them ALL!!!
Learn to create and use "RESOURCE POOLS" - an Enterprise level solution to handle thousands of resources.
INCREDIBLY powerful Custom Fields - SIX hands-on exercises - fully replicable!!
Learn to Use Project in EVERY STAGE of project management - Initiation, Planning, Execution & Control - and finally Closing.
Identify REAL LIFE problems - scheduling, costing, resourcing, work allocations!

Course content

7 sections • 34 lectures • 3h 11m total length

Introduction and WELCOME3:35
Hello and a warm a welcome to my Microsoft Project ADVANCED course. In this lesson, I will show a few points that will get you the best learning experience for this course.
How to learn from this course - Udemy's course dashboard
How to get MAXIMUM benefit from this course
Basics about this course
How to get support
Bonus goodies
Top 10 pitfalls of MS Project - and how to avoid them16:18
In this lesson, I will enumerate the top 10 pitfalls while using Microsoft Project.
This is a compilation I created after reviewing more than 500 assignment submissions from my students. And it further corroborates what I have seen professionally.
What is a Master Project?4:35
A simple low-cost solution is to use the "Subproject" feature in Microsoft Project to create what is called as the "Master Project". I will show all this hands-on soon but understand that you can create a permanent hierarchy of projects such that - you can view everything together, update in a distributed fashion, create reports that cut across projects and you can even create dependencies between different projects!
Creating a "MASTER PROJECT"4:42
In this lesson, I will demo all the major operations with Master Projects one by one. Resources will be attached with this lesson - so you should replicate everything hands-on, by yourself too, for practice.
MASTER PROJECT - Read, Link, Update and Delete6:39
Social Networking for your Project Plans5:04
Every non-trivial project plan exists inside an ecosystem of different project artefacts.

At the conception stage, the ecosystem might just be a proposal document of some sort. And then later, every associated department, every phase, every review, every SME and every change request will typically generate some sort of documentation - which has some impact on your plan design. Specifics will vary according to your business domain, your organization, quality regulations and various other factors.

The point to note, is that your Project Schedule, will be a part of this ecosystem of Project Documents. And these will be the non-functional constraints for your project plan.
File Handling: 10 Super Tips6:39
In this lesson, we discuss 10 tips specific to file manipulation. If you handle a lot of multiple files, like me - or focus on a single project file for a long time - in either situations, these file handling tips will be useful.

Resource Pool - THE CONCEPT6:10
In this lesson, I will introduce the concept of Resource Pools - why they are incredibly cool and how they can solve many resourcing problems for you. This lesson is a bit of theory and later you will see everything in action.

Problem Definition is very simple - the question is: "how do you efficiently manage running multiple projects with the same set of resources?". What is the OPTIMAL way to manage multiple simultaneous projects with a given set of resources?

There are 3 solutions.
Three Techniques to create a Resource Pool9:10
A Resource Pool is essentially just another Microsoft Project file - specially designated as such - despite everything that it can do.

In this lesson, I am going to show you 3 techniques, in increasing complexity, to create a Resource Pool - and also one important pitfall that you must avoid. Follow along hands-on with this lesson - you can find all resources attached with this video.
How to connect to a Resource Pool - 3 Examples4:30
In the previous lesson, I showed different techniques to create a Resource Pool. In this lesson, the focus is on CONNECTING projects to resource pools. There are several nuances that we will discuss through examples.
Shared Resources - The Nitty Gritty Details5:03
In this lesson, we will dig deeper into Resource Pool really works. So far I have been showing you a carefully handheld view of these complex topics.

I will highly recommend that you experiment deeply with Resource Pool and Master Projects before you start implementing them in your work. Be assured that you will have rich dividends for your efforts.

There are a lot of intricacies that can not be covered in these lessons - nor can they be demonstrated in lessons. For example, I discovered while creating this lesson that EVEN if you copy and change resource pool file names, once they have been connected, MS Project faithfully keeps track of internal sharer file connections. If you create replicates, they will create duplicate connections to the pool - and so on.
Three Types of Access Modes - Resource Pool4:14
You already know that 2-way communication between the projects and the resource pool will be possible. All of this is implemented at a "file infrastructure" level (- and obviously not through a client-server architecture design).

As far as possible - try to manage resource specific information in the Resource Pool - AND schedule specific information through the Sharer project files. This is the ideal underlying design that you should aim for. As always, there will be exceptions to this - but exceptions are OK, as long as you know what you are doing.

Going further on this topic, it will become obvious to you that file access modes become important. MS Project manages all of this behind the scenes - but you ALSO have to also understand how this works.
Automated WBS Code Definition4:14
If you have been noticing, through my previous courses and this one too - whenever I want to refer to a particular task - I just use the line number. I refer to them as "Task #2" or "Task on line #10" and so on.

This works perfectly fine in this course, but if I want to take tasks outside of Project, this system is obviously inadequate. These line numbers don't mean much outside Project.

There is a simple nice feature we can use to give unique ID's to individual tasks.

Planning according to Work or Duration8:00
The whole focus of this section is upon the Planning process.

In this lesson, I will show how you can get a very fine control of Tasks - so that your planning exactly matches your design. We will glimpse a little bit, into the inner workings of Projects algorithms. You will also see that after 2 or 3 levels of manipulation - there will be times when the algorithms will act funky! Don't be apprehensive - but there will be situations where we will not get full clarity on how the algorithm works. My intention in this lesson is to show you how to get complete control over your tasks - and show you "warts and all".
Powerful custom fields - part 13:13
Over the next few lessons, I will introduce an extremely powerful feature of Microsoft Project, called as "Custom Fields".

"Fields", you can say, are the fundamental building blocks of Project. Table columns are built from "fields".
Powerful custom fields - part 23:12
In this lesson, we will continue to understand Custom Fields further. This is essential before starting usage examples.
Custom fields - Example 1 - Simple Data2:47
In this lesson, you will see the first Custom Field example.

On the screen now, I have the same project file for the eCommerce Software Test plan. You should download these resources and practice along.
Custom Fields - Example 2 - Calculated field values6:14
In the previous lesson we added a simple custom field to hold the number of test cases scheduled to be performed in our project for every module. This data normally would come in from the team lead.

As the project manager, I want to add a layer of metrics to this now.
Custom Fields - Example 3 - Handling Summary Tasks3:23
Let's take a few minutes now to understand Summary Tasks even more deeply.

Summary tasks are very useful because they provide better readability, a logical grouping - and the best benefit they provide is a meaningful rollup of values. So far, we would have used Summary Tasks - and it would have made perfect sense logically - but now let's observe this a bit more deeply.
Custom Fields - Example 4 - Graphical Displays4:45
In this lesson, we will jazz up the custom field with a bit of graphical displays.

Graphical Indicators allow you to understand information very quickly. They help to draw your attention very quickly to specific tasks that need your attention. If we just present lots and lots of numbers, it will be difficult to analyse the data rapidly.

We will continue with the same plan from earlier.
Custom Fields - Example 5 - Taxonomy5:30
On large sized projects, you will need SEVERAL techniques to slice and dice your schedule data. Of course, Project provides an incredible tool set right out of the box, on the View tab - Data section - especially the "Filter" and "Group by" features.

In this lesson, we will create a new taxonomy of tasks using custom fields. This technique is ESPECIALLY important in organizations or departments that define their own internal process taxonomies.
Custom Fields - Example 6 - Programmed formatting4:21
In this lesson, I will show a very interesting usage of custom fields through which you can program formatting of your Gantt chart.

First let's see the end result. I have the same project plan from earlier lessons - but notice that this time some of the tasks in the Gantt Chart have a different color.
Overallocation Desensitizing - 3 Advanced Techniques6:06
In this lesson, I will show an advanced concept called as "Desensitizing Overallocations". There are several implications to this concept. I will implore that you use this concept with SELF DILIGENCE and within the boundaries of professional ethics.

The essence of this concept - is to make MS Project desensitized to overallocations. WHEN will you want to do this? Typically in the early stages of the project - like in the planning phase - when you have to share early versions of the plan.
Summary task assignment PITFALLS3:59
In a previous lesson, I had mentioned that it is a bad practice to make assignments to Summary tasks. In this lesson, I will elaborate on this and show a very simple case study that shows the issues that occur.

Understanding Earned Value Analysis - FUNDAMENTALS6:06
In this lesson, I will give a gentle introduction to Earned Value Analysis (shortened as EVA), the best practices and pitfalls. Just enough to get you started and to add value to your skills. Indepth theoretical understanding of EVA is out of scope for this course.
Planning a project to track Earned Value4:50
Earned Value Analysis is a rigorous methodology. There is a certain extra investment, in time and effort, that has to be made by all stakeholders, to make it successful. If this extra investment is worthwhile to your situations then you should go for it, else not.

On the other side of the spectrum, I have seen project managers who complain that EVA data is not available to them - even though they have not gone beyond creating a schedule - no resource assignment, progress tracking.

That is precisely the objective of this lesson. I will enumerate all the items that should be in place if you are going for EVA.
Percentage Complete vs. Percentage Physical Complete1:42
Planning to Track Progress in the future6:35
For you to successfully track your project - all the way from beginning to completion - WHAT planning and groundwork has to be done upfront? This question is the focus of next 2 lessons. MS Project will, of course, be in the center of this domain agnostic lessons.
IMPORTING Update Tracking Information10:37
Remember the case study from previous lesson, where you were managing a 50 member team over a 1 year project, i.e a 50 person-year project. In projects that are comparable to this sizing or much more, the tracking work becomes pretty complex for Project Managers.

There will be thousands of lines to update - so that might take 1-2 days by itself. By the time you complete the project update and report - you are ready to update again!!!

In this lesson, I will show how you can import progress information directly into your Project Schedule.

IMPORTANT: Understanding Work Formula Basics7:58
Basics of Baselines2:36
When you have created a project schedule that satisfies all the requirements of your project - including the scope of the project, available resources, limitations of time and budget and of acceptable quality considerations - then it is time to go to the next step.
How to Create a Baseline - Variance Table 1017:02
When you have created your schedule and set your baseline, you are ready to begin the Executing and "Monitoring and Controlling" process groups of your project. These two process groups overlap and will recur cyclically during the project life cycle. Work on a project begins (Execution), and you must track and analyze the actual work as compared to the baseline and make adjustments based on actual data (the Monitoring and Controlling part).

In order to accurately analyze your project’s progress, two things must happen. First, you must set your baseline when your schedule is complete before any work begins. Then, you must accurately track the actual progress on your project.
ADVANCED TRACKING of your Project10:50
In this lesson, we will look at some more ways to track your schedule and see Project's calculation algorithms.

Requirements

You SHOULD ALREADY have basic and intermediate level skills with Microsoft Project. This is an ADVANCED course.
Microsoft Project 2016 30 day Free Trial version can be used - if you don't already have this
Basic proficiency with Windows UI
Some familiarity with MS Office will make things even easier - but not absolutely required

Description

This course is the FIRST, ONLY, and most comprehensive ADVANCED Microsoft Project course that brings the THREE ASPECTS TOGETHER - 1) ADVANCED Microsoft Project Concepts and Techniques 2) Project Management Principles AND 3) hands-on exercises. NO OTHER book, tutorial or course offers these unique set, anywhere on the internet.

Before you read further, see what my students are saying about my Microsoft Project courses:

"Full marks - met and exceeded expectation. Gladly recommend to anyone grappling MS Project. The PDUs are a great bonus too..." - an esteemed learner.

"He is fantastic, knowledgeable and experienced. I liked the in depth explanation of all the topics he discussed" - another esteemed learner.

"Amazing course. Thank you so much. I learned so much and I am excited to continue to enhance my abilities in MS Project 2016. I will definitely use your exercises as a great reference in the future. Take care!"

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Microsoft Project is a beast of a software application - almost 30 years of history! Released mid-1980's on MS-DOS. So, it has every imaginable feature built into it by now - and then even some more.

My promise to you: By the end of this course - you will be incredibly comfortable with Advanced Microsoft Project concepts and techniques - and you will be able to use Project like a BOSS. You will be able to create, manage and track world class schedules - with complex requirements of resources, allocations, budgets, reporting and tracking - all the way to project completion!!!

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Do you want to Master the World's Most Popular Project Management tool? Learn Microsoft Project 2016 in this Comprehensive Course.

Learn the LATEST version - Microsoft Project 2016 - -and stay miles AHEAD of the curve
BONUS: Approved for 3 PMI PDU points, under Category 'B'. A lesson included on how you can claim this.
Earn promotions with your new skills - Become INDISPENSABLE in your Organization.
BONUS - more than 40+ Project File downloads - PRACTICE EXACTLY what is shown in each and every lecture
By the end of the course - you will be able to SOLVE the TOUGHEST issues on project scheduling.
YEARS of experience has be condensed into this course - with generous tips, tricks, best practices, pitfalls - in each and every concept lesson.

A review from a MS Project learner in my course: "I know the above tag is a oxymoron but then it is. A complete course is a detailed to perfection which i did not came across many courses. Srikanth as a tutor/ trainer is very good. Highly Recommended !!!!!" - by another esteemed learner.

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Learn Microsoft Project 2016 ADVANCED to create INCREDIBLY POWERFUL project schedules.

Learn the TOP 10 PITFALLS of using Microsoft Project - this is my summary from 5000+ assignments from 17000+ learners. INCREDIBLY POWERFUL - AND SIMPLE!!!
Learn to create "MASTER PROJECTS" - The one ring to rule them ALL!!!
Learn to create and use "RESOURCE POOLS" - an Enterprise level solution to handle thousands of resources.
INCREDIBLY powerful Custom Fields - SIX hands-on exercises - fully replicable!!
Learn to Use Project in EVERY STAGE of project management - Initiation, Planning, Execution & Control - and finally Closing.
Identify REAL LIFE problems - scheduling, costing, resourcing, work allocations!
Use DYNAMIC REPORTS - powerful, automated, DYNAMIC reports and dashboards
Save Hundreds of hours and Thousands of dollars - by using resources OPTIMALLY, identifying, preventing and mitigating RISKS
De-mystify the 100s of features in Microsoft Project - Views, Tables, Charts, Formatting, Multiple detail windows etc.

From another learner:

"Thanks for this superb course - I needed to get fully hands on with MS Project fast - and this course has me up and running like nothing else. Have become quite proficient and have others in the office asking my help. Highly recommend this course." - by Chia Lin

What am I going to get from this course?

A step-by-step HD video tutorial showcasing ADVANCED level topics.
Video lectures, extensive resources, 40+ downloadable exercise Project files, PDFs etc
EVEN MORE: exercise files have BEGIN and FINISH versions - which allows you to REPLICATE EXACTLY what is shown in the lecture.
EVERY concept is LOADED with tips, tricks, pitfalls from years of hands-on experience
Practice Assignments in exercises, quizzes to self-test your knowledge

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Important information before you enroll:

In case you find the course useless for your career, don't forget you are covered by a 30 day money back guarantee, full refund, no questions asked!
Once enrolled, you have unlimited, lifetime access to the course!
You will have instant and free access to any updates I'll add to the course.
Check out the curriculum and the FREE lectures for a course preview

"Excellent course. A well-chosen level of information: from the basic (but not obvious) to advanced (but without a huge amount of details, which are not possibly to remember). Very good way of communication. No inconveniences often encountered in other courses like the useless movements of the mouse, clicking on everything what’s possible, repeating sentences several times etc...Thank you very much." - by Mr. P. Nowakowski

DON'T WAIT - ENROLL INTO THIS COURSE NOW - JOIN OVER 15,000+ LEARNERS WHO HAVE TAKEN MY COURSES.

Who this course is for:

Experienced PMs with basic/intermediate Project 2016 experience
Self taught users of Microsoft Project - who only used it only for basics - like creating a schedule
Senior and Executive Management- Handling one or many PMs, projects amd budgets - this course will benefit you a lot too
Users of OLD versions (say, MSP 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013) - who want to see and prepare for the latest and the greatest
I do NOT teach the art and science of Project Management itself - this course is not the place for that. However, you will learn a lot if you are new to Project Management.
Learners from my "Microsoft Project 2016 Beginners" course!

Microsoft Project ADVANCED: Project Management Technics 3PDU

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Project Conception Stage7 lectures • 48min

QUIZ 1: Top 10 Pitfalls in Microsoft Project0

Project Initiation6 lectures • 33min

Project Planning - Part 111 lectures • 52min

Advanced Planning Microsoft Project - Part 25 lectures • 30min

REFERENCE MATERIAL - See here for a quick recap of Fundamental Concepts4 lectures • 28min

BONUS1 lecture • 1min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: