Do you want to learn Microsoft Project but you have NO prior experience with it? With this e-course for beginners you will be able to report your project status and major milestones using MS Project, complete and within 10 minutes. To make your life easier, we only focus on the most important buttons.

What will you be able to do after the course?
In this online training you will learn step by step how to provide a weekly status update to your manager or client on the overall project status and the expected delivery dates for your main deliverables.

The complexity of MS Project is kept low as your main focus is to get familiar with the interface of MS Project and what the purpose of using this program is. There will be absolutely no reason why you should not be able to deliver a report to your stakeholders within one day after you finished the course, in a format they will love.

This is the first Maturity Level in our series of five, after which you are a true heavy-weight in MS Project scheduling and after which you will have a project schedule and reporting structure that outperforms 95% of all the project schedules out there.

You have only limited MS Project Scheduling skills? After taking this E-Learning Course you will be able to translate the total set of activities to complete your project scope into a MS Project work breakdown structure; complete and well-structured.

The E-Course on Maturity Level 2 is about creating the backbone for your schedule, with tasks, summary tasks, but also with a baseline so you can already start learning from the quality of your estimates. You will learn a method to come up with estimates that have the right mix between being SMART and covering enough risk contingency.

A custom view that you will receive from us will then tell you how good the estimates were. For instance, you could see that certain tasks always take about 30% longer, so you are able to determine the common cause and take measures to avoid this in the future.

In this second e-course Maturity Level in our series of five, there is still little automatic behavior from MS Project that could jeopardize your mission to set up a comprehensive reporting cycle to your stakeholders. Instead, you will become very familiar with MS Projects interface to be able to make small changes fastly and accurately.

You are responsible for project planning and already have a basic plan in MS Project? After taking this course you will be able to construct a project schedule that forecasts your project reliably applying MS Project best practices and that is recalculated after only one edit.

What will you be able to do after the course?
The purpose for this Level 3 is to automate your schedule in such a way that it is:

* Valid: It must produce accurate forecasts
* Dynamic: It must update it self as much as possible. He estimates that for a 100 task / 3 month schedule about 50 hours of schedule maintenance is saved when you have a dynamic schedule. Only one change should be enough to calculate the rest of the model (just like you expect from Excel)
Robust: It must be able to deal with multiple scenario’s, like scheduling forwards and scheduling backwards
* Model: It must be a simplification of reality with only capturing those things that are important in this project – it should not resort into a checklist for all small activities
* Forecast: Checklists, task manuals, meeting schedules, database of historical estimates are reasons to have schedules, but the primary reason should be to forecast your major milestones.

Since this is our goal for this e-course "Critical Path Management" Maturity Level 3, we will focus on having a complete and correct network logic, minimize the use of date constraints, keep all completed work in the past and all work thats still needs to be done in the future. Four simple principles, that if maintained, will make you very happy with MS Project. But if not maintained, will guarantee a misbalance between the effort you put in your scheduling work and the benefits you reap from it.

You are responsible for project planning and already have a reliable schedule? This E-Learning Course about resource management in MS Project will teach you to explain how the (un) availability of resources affects the project by applying MS Project’s resourcing features.

What will you be able to do after the course?
At this point you have a perfect model of your project that will forecast your main deliveries. By now, we can promise you that your schedule already outperforms 80% of the schedules being made throughout the world.

It could be though that it is not realistic enough yet, as resources induce many additional dependencies. You could think of shortage of resources with a certain skill set, holidays, or responsibilities in other projects. If you or your organization require more, this step 4 will explain you how to achieve that.

First of all, a resource is any means that needs to be used for tasks and thus projects to complete. Think of people with certain skills, test machines, facilities, money etc. Apart from resources there is a responsible person, who does not necessarily need to spend time on a task to complete. Resources should only be assigned to tasks, when doing this has a significant impact to the quality or duration of the schedule.

Also note that as a communication means, a schedule could have different audiences:

- Bottom-up – only use resources for those tasks that affect the critical path
- Top-down – use resources for all your tasks as you use your schedule to communicate their workload and what is expected of them
- The goal of planning with resources it to be able to determine what is needed of the variable parameter(s) to achieve the project goal:

- Scope and timing with constrained resources
- Timing and resources with constrained scope
- Scope and resources with constrained timing
- We will explain you how you can use the resource leveling features in MS project to explain for which of these three parameters you need help or a decision from your manager or steering committee.

Your MS Project skills are already on a high level but you did not work with costs yet? After taking this E-Course you will be able to value the projects cost and earned value applying (cost) resources, baseline and rates.

Why THIS course?
Many, many times we see that where project timing and resourcing is kept in MS Project and project finances are kept in Excel. Using the financial governance capacilities in MS project is often an unexploited area. This is waste, because only adding rates to resources will already bring you half way. MS Project can calculate anything for you directly from your schedule.

The trick here is also to keep the right balance between the amount of input and getting valuable output. Remember MS Project is not meant to be accounting software, MS Project is a modeling tool which should deliberately simplify the reality. Accountants cannot permit to simplify. Neither will it serve as an invoicing system.

What will we do in this e-course?
Enter a project budget for main cost types, compare planned cost against actual cost. Predict eventual cost at project complete based actual progress, provide burn-down charts and earned value metrics to qualify the projects’ performance. All the things required to be able to perform quality cost control.