Microsoft Project
Microsoft Project is a project management software product, developed and sold by Microsoft. Microsoft
Project (MSP) is a project management software made for project managers so they can control their
projects. Depending on your plan, Microsoft Project lets you plan projects, assign tasks, manage resources,
make reports and more. It offers a full plate of services and was quick to dominate the project
management software field when it was first introduced.
Microsoft Project Features :
There are lots of useful Microsoft Project features that help you work more productively. Let’s take a closer
look at some of them.
1) Planning and Scheduling :
Planning and scheduling arguably constitute the most important stage of project management. They form
the backbone of the entire project and can either make or break the whole thing.
2) Project Timeline View :
This is one of the best features of Microsoft Project. When you are working on a project, you obviously
want to have everything in one place and keep all schedules synced. But what happens when you need
someone independent of the project team to track your progress and check on how you’re doing?
The answer lies in Microsoft Project’s timeline view. How can you add value to the timeline view? For
starters, you can make some formatting changes. The colors of project phases can be changed, tasks can
be aligned, and various other formats can be adjusted. The process is rather simple. All you have to do to
add something to your timeline is right-click on the task and select the option to add it. You can modify the
formatting to fit an e-mail, presentation, and so on.
3) Collaboration:
Collaboration is an essential part of any project. Each activity involves lots of people, so you’d ideally like to
connect all of them together on a common platform so you can easily share information with each other.
How is collaboration achieved in all of this? Let’s find out.
• File sharing: Microsoft Project allows you to share files with other members of your team. This helps you
ensure all members have any relevant documentation so they can work on the project with minimal
interruptions.
4) Reporting :
Reporting is one of the most important means of tracking a project’s progress, as it allows you to monitor
how much work has been completed and how much remains. Fortunately, Microsoft Project excels at this
task, allowing you to generate great reports with little effort. . Best of all, you can even customize the data
and the structure according to your requirements. The features include burn down reports; an overview of
the entire project on one page; the conditions of available resources and their utilization; a cost overview;
a list of pending tasks; and a list of targets achieved and any upcoming goals.
5) Resource Management :
Microsoft Project offers project managers a great deal of flexibility when it comes to managing project
resources and availability. The resources for a project could be monetary (such as the allocated budget),
the people involved (team members), meeting and work rooms, raw materials, and much more. Obviously,
a project is going to come with certain limitations on the number of resources that can be used. Microsoft
Project’s resource management tools help you track and monitor all available resources and the potential
ways in which they can be used for your project(s). The project management tool also lets you assign costs
to individual resources, allowing you to later analyze whether certain valuable resources are being
overused, underused, and so on.
Every project is unique and has its own resource requirements. This tool allows you to properly assign and
order your tasks based on resource availability and demand, with the added option of committing specific
resources full time or part time, as needed. With this facility, you can also create a pool of resources and
tap into them to complete tasks as your project comes together.
6) Multiple Projects :
Microsoft Project also allows project managers to work on multiple projects on the same platform, making
it easier to deal with different projects in the same company or team. This is defined by the Master Project
Plan. Basically, when you’re working with many different project plans, you can combine all of them to
form one master plan to use as you move forward. This proves extremely beneficial to project managers,
especially if they are juggling multiple projects at once.
Every aspect of a single project tool can be customized to form a master project, be it resource allocation,
project planning, or progress tracking. Even reporting is made easy with the help of multiple dashboards.
This can be put to good use during meetings and presentations.
7) Different Views
Microsoft Project is quite a unique project management tool in that it offers a number of different views.
For instance, you can make use of a Gantt Chart, a resource usage chart, a calendar, and much more.
Essentially, it allows a manager to view the project from different perspectives and representations, all
from one platform. But the best aspect about this feature is that all of these views can be customized
together according to the project requirements and combined to form one big project plan.
Pros and Cons of Microsoft Project :
Nothing is perfect. Even Microsoft Project has its drawbacks. If you’re thinking of trying it out, take a
moment to look over its pros and cons.
Pros :
One of the biggest pros is that it’s Microsoft, and so it integrates with the company’s other products,
most notably Office 365, but also Skype and Sharepoint.
It has a similar interface to other MS products.
It’s been around for a long time, and its features have developed over time.
It’s part of Microsoft and has the reliability and support that coming from such an established
company represents.
It has financial management tools that help project managers with estimating budgets.
It can be licensed as a desktop application. While this might make it seem more like a dinosaur, there
are still organizations that will want this instead of a cloud solution.
It has templates to help users get started, which saves time.
Cons:
It’s a desktop application. Yes, this was a pro, as well, but the number of organizations that want a
project management software that is siloed is rare.
Though MS Project does have a cloud-based solution, it is not very agile. Even with Sharepoint, which
is designed to take advantage of the cloud, MS Project has great limitations on the cloud.
It’s difficult to learn and use. There’s a lot of time and effort, and even intensive training, that must
first be invested in the software before project managers and their teams are comfortable using the
software. This adds time to the project during the implementation stage.
It’s expensive. The prices quoted above, again, are per person, per month. This quickly adds up as you
buy licenses for team members who must have access to the software in order to take advantage of
its collaborative features. Otherwise, it’s more of an expensive tool solely for the project manager.
It’s not shareable. As mentioned earlier, files are saved as MPP, a proprietary format, so that if you’re
not using MS Project, you can’t read those files. This would be less of a problem if the software was
less expensive, but if you must have a MS Project license to view a MPP file, then it adds up. This
creates a lot of unnecessary hurdles when sharing project files.