Managing Your Projects with Project

The best project management tool in the world can never replace your own good judgment. However, the tool can and should help you accomplish the following:

• Track all of the information you gather about the work, duration, costs, and resource requirements of your project.

• Visualize and present your project plan in standard, well-defined formats.

• Schedule tasks and resources consistently and effectively.

• Exchange project information with other Microsoft Office System applications.

• Communicate with resources and other stakeholders while you, the project manager, retain ultimate control of the project.

• Manage projects using a program that looks and feels like other desktop productivity applications.

The Microsoft Office Project 2007 family encompasses a broad range of products, including the following:

• Microsoft Office Project Standard 2007   Windows-based desktop application for project management. The Standard edition is designed for the single project manager and does not interact with Project Server.

• Microsoft Office Project Professional 2007   Windows-based desktop application that includes the complete feature set of the Standard edition, plus-when used with Project Server-additional project team planning and communications features. Project Professional plus Project Server represents Microsoft’s enterprise project management (EPM) product offering.

• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007   Intranet-based solution that enables enterprise-level project collaboration, timesheet reporting, and status reporting when used in conjunction with Project Professional.

• Microsoft Office Project Web Access 2007   Internet Explorer-based interface for working with Project Server.

• Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007   Portfolio management solution.

Tip 

To learn more about the new features in Project 2007 as well as the differences between the Standard and Professional editions, check out the Project area of the Office Online Web site at microsoft.com Find it on the Web at www.office.microsoft.com, and then navigate to the Project page. For a list of the products that make up the Project Server-based enterprise project management, see “Understanding the Key Pieces of Enterprise Project Management” in Chapter 20.

Most of the chapters in this book focus on the feature set of Project Standard, the entry-level desktop project management tool. The chapters in Part 4 introduce you to the EPM features available with Project Professional and Project Server. All content in this book that applies to Project Standard also applies to Project Professional, so you can use either edition of Project to complete Parts 1 through 3 of this book. If you have Project Professional and access to Project Server, you can also explore the features introduced in Part 4. Otherwise, you can browse through Part 4 to help you decide whether you or your organization should be using Project Professional and Project Server.

What Can a Scheduling Engine Do for You?

Many projects are not managed with a real scheduling tool, such as Project, but they should be. It’s common to see task and resource lists from spreadsheet programs, such as Microsoft Office Excel, or even nicely formatted Gantt charts from drawing programs, such as Visio. One big advantage that Project has over such applications is that it includes a scheduling engine-a computational brain that can handle issues such as ripple effects when task 1 in a 100-task sequence has a change in duration. This scheduling engine can also consider nonworking time, such as weekends, when calculating a task’s start and finish dates. Applications such as Excel and Visio might have a place in your project management toolbox, but you’ll need a scheduling engine such as Project to truly be successful.