Managing and Mastering Projects with MS Project

3-Day Skill Development Workshop

Workshop Outline
Current maturity in project management, especially in Schedule development seems to be practiced in a vacuum.  Scheduling tool especially Microsoft Project used for preparing plans on many occasion are sheer representation of an intention that doesn’t reflect the reality or the changing scenario of project events.  Finding answers to resolve critical project issues in balancing time cost and effort happens on the basis of judgment rather than objectively using data and scheduling tools. 

The need is for a role based training and development for preparing organizations and professional to use the Scheduling application in a manner that is consistent with the Global PM Practices, project requirements and with the real purpose and usage of the tool (and not a mere desktop publishing tool to prepare plans).

Workshop Methodology
The program objective is to ensure that knowledge is translated into application and building skills in core PM areas like project scheduling, monitoring and reporting project performance.  The program is a blend of the following:
• 3-days Hands on Workshop
• Self Paced Learning Content
  • Recorded expert lectures on PM Concepts
  • Self-Paced MS Project Tutorials
  • Exercises and Cases for practice
• Post Program review and feedback of participants live project plan

Who Should Attend
• Managers and Project Team Members with at least 4-5 years of work experience in a project environment not necessarily as a Project Manager.
• Middle level executives responsible for managing change and new initiatives.

Workshop Content:
• The Characteristics of a Schedule Plan – Building a Managerial Perspective on working with a tool
• Your Job Tool Job – What you need to do and what the tool will do
• Developing  and Optimizing a Project Plan – The practice of developing a schedule plan that reflects the reality of constraints and optimizing it for resources
• Monitoring and Controlling a Project – Keeping an eye on the schedule and predicting the outcomes
• Project Reporting and Communication – Create reports
• Managing Multiple Projects and Program – Working with shared resource and dealing with interdependencies

Workshop Objectives
The unique pedagogy of a practitioner based professional hands on skill development workshop on Microsoft project will help managers achieve the following:
• Describe how PM principles gets integrated and mapped to a planning software (Microsoft Project) application
• Master the tool from a managerial perspective along with skills development
• Address practical issues of developing a schedule plan like level of details and resource based scheduling among others
• Learn best practices in improving the quality of schedule plans
• Exploit the tools to derive answers to project management issues and challenges
• Develop integrated control mechanism to monitor both time as well as cost/efforts
• Get support and feedback on the their project plan at the end of the course

• Building a PMO
• Defining and Managing Project Portfolio
• Leveraging Stakeholder Relationship
• Measuring Project Performance