Given the fast paced, digital nature of global business in 2021, it is important to implement processes and software that will maximise efficiency and increase productivity wherever possible.
As a growing business, it can often feel like your team managers may be spinning a lot of plates at once. With spreadsheets and email chains galore, sometimes it can feel impossible to keep projects organised and deliver on time. But, what if you could provide a platform that enables your project manager to manage large teams and multiple tasks simultaneously in one place?
Microsoft Project is a project management programme made with project managers in mind, to help them plan their projects from end to end. Microsoft Project lets you assign tasks, manage resources and budgets, build reports and more.
What are the main features of Microsoft Project?
Planning and Scheduling - Create gantt charts to visualise your project and prioritise tasks. Managers are able to set deadlines, check ins and task completion dates visible to all team members. Colour coding, calendar views and project phases are all features that help to visualise project timelines.
Collaboration - Your entire team can view the project, sharing files, assigning tasks and ensuring that all team members have the documentation they need to deliver on time. Microsoft Project allows you to keep all team members in the loop and aligned as you move through project deadlines and task deliveries.
Resource Management - Resource management can vary from managing budgets and the team members involved to managing raw materials and meetings required. The project management tool helps you to track all available resources, assign costs to individual resources and then later analyse the effectiveness of these resources.
Reporting - As reporting is one of the most important means of tracking a project’s progress, this is one of the best features of Microsoft Project. You can customise the structure and data to suit your needs and build reports in a matter of minutes.
Project Timeline views - Microsoft Project allows you to create multiple views of the same project, including a gantt chart view, calendar view and resource usage chart. The project timeline view allows project managers to view the entire project in one place with a top down view. This view is also perfect for presenting to important stakeholders or including within emails.
How will Microsoft Project increase my team’s productivity?
The range of features named above are just a few of many features that allow your team to customise to their needs in order to match the requirements of each individual project. The one size fits all approach cannot be applied to this software, as the inter-changeable views, permissions and custom built reports can be built to match any project brief or specification.
Microsoft Project fully integrates with the rest of the Microsoft office suite, meaning that the software can be used in unison with Microsoft Teams, Skype, Sharepoint etc - perfect for all of your team’s collaboration needs and ensuring perfect alignment of tasks and responsibility across all platforms.
Microsoft Project also helps to prevent over allocation of tasks and staff burnout, through the ability to foresee tasks ahead for all users. It can also be helpful to project leads, as you can set reminders, set warnings if team members are over signed tasks and it can even ensure that tasks are assigned in line with shift patterns and team structures.
How Can F1 help you?
The main drawback of Microsoft Project is it requires specific software training in order to be utilised effectively within your team. F1 can facilitate all of your training needs for Microsoft Project, for all team members across different levels of proficiency in the Microsoft office suite.
Microsoft Office Project Intro Format: 2 Days This course is designed for project managers or people that are involved with the administration of managing a project. It is particularly useful for people who have been using Project and are struggling with the logic of how Project calculates dates and durations.
At the end of this course your team will have a good working knowledge of Microsoft Project and they will feel confident using Project to define, schedule and monitor tasks using a variety of tools and views.
Microsoft Office Project Intermediate
Format: 1 Day Our Microsoft Project Intermediate course is suitable for those with basic working knowledge and experience of MS Project. This course is designed for those users who wish to improve their current knowledge of Project to take advantage of the more complex features.
On completion of the course, delegates will use project to help manage their resources and costs; to set plans, deadlines and schedules. At this level they will be able to track their project and create and print Gantt charts and reports.
To find out more about these courses, contact us.
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