Microsoft Project - Project Planning Tool
The ideal tool allows the user to leverage their skills and expertise to produce artifacts more efficiently and of, perhaps, superior quality. This tool should be as transparent and intuitive as possible. This allows the user to focus on creation of content, rather than manipulation of the tool. Microsoft Project fulfills this role admirably for our planning process. It allows us to capture tasks, express dependencies and allocate resource appropriately.
Application
Our challenge is always to implement tools that maximize our effectiveness and enhance our ability to deliver quality solutions to our clients. In order to maximize our effectiveness, we evaluate a number of factors. Among these are ease of deployment and training, enhancement of our capabilities, penetration within the marketplace, and, of course, total cost of deployment and ownership.
The Solution
When we initially evaluated implementation of a project management tool, we had to take a serious look at Microsoft Project. We decided to adopt Microsoft Project as a portion of our strategy largely due to the universal acceptance and use by our target customers, its consistency and integration with the Windows product family, and the speed with which we could create tactical plans.
An additional requirement was the ability to integrate our planning process with our time accounting and customer billing system. We found that by adopting Microsoft Project and dotProject we could meet all our objectives. We had the benefit of tools whose output could be included as part of our methodology and had wide acceptance with our clients, as well as open source tools whose functions could be tailored to our specific requirements.
Features
Our methodology is deliverables driven. We produce tangible products that allow management principals to accurately gauge and track progress. There is tremendous value in having consistent deliverables. Consistency allows us to understand how these deliverables will effect later phases. To create this consistency, we maximize our use of templates through out the methodology. Project allows us to create, modify, use and distribute these templates. It allows us to utilize templates that have our methods' work breakdown structure. It allows us to attach template deliverables to the relevant tasks within the Work breakdown structure.
We always are engaged in multiple projects. This challenges us to assure our resources are appropriately scheduled and available. Microsoft Project's share resource pool aids greatly in our ability to manage these cross project resources.
Benefits
The benefits that Microsoft Project brings to use may be summarized as:
- Customer acceptance
- Integration with a wide variety of additional products
- Ease of implementation
- Availability and cost
For more information, please see Microsoft's Office Project.
Microsoft and Microsoft Project are registered trademarks of the Microsoft company all rights are reserved