 Welcome to Microsoft Project 2013 Part 1. My name is Debbie Fierst, and I'll be your instructor for this course. I've been teaching Microsoft Project since it was first introduced in the early 1990s. I've taught hundreds of students, and I've managed many projects using this tool. Everything from small projects like planning a surgery to long-term projects like closing down an Air Force base. So I'm very familiar with the tool, and I look forward to helping you learn it. In this unit, we're going to define project management. And then we're going to look at how to navigate and customize the Project 2013 interface. We'll learn how to add tasks to a project, how to add resources to a project, and then how to save our project file. In this topic, we're going to learn how to define project management. We'll call it Project Management 101. Let's start with the most basic principle of project management, defining a project. A project is considered a temporary initiative to create a unique result. So some examples of a project would be building a house. It's a temporary initiative. It's going to eventually be completed, and it's unique. Even if we're using some sort of pattern and we're building the same house, again and again, down the same road, each house is still unique. There's going to be unique issues that arise. It's on a different piece of land. And so that's a great example of a project, a temporary initiative, a unique result. Now that we've defined a project, let's define project management. Project management is the administration and supervision of projects using a well-defined set of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques. Who defines these techniques? Well, in the industry of project management, the Project Management Institute has written a book called The Pimbok, and that's where you'll find the current trends in project management. As far as tools, Microsoft Project is considered one of the most outstanding tools for managing projects. Within the world of project management, we have defined five phases or processes, initiating a project, planning the project, executing, monitoring and controlling, and then closing. Now initiating a project is just getting it started, setting up what we typically call the project charter. Planning is where you set the scope, time, and cost of the project and all the details. That's the tough phase right there, the planning phase. That's where you output your project plan. Then once you've got your plan in place, you're ready to execute. So we go into the executing stage where we actually perform the tasks that we planned. As you're executing, you're also monitoring and controlling what's happening. When you're all done, you close out the project. That's typically when you've built your house or whatever it is that you're doing and it is complete and you're ready to close it out and put a big bow on it and say, we did a great job. Now, in terms of Microsoft Project, that tool is utilized typically most for managing the planning, executing and monitoring and controlling phases. So that's what we'll be focusing on as we learn to use this tool. Since we'll be utilizing Microsoft Project 2013 primarily for the planning, executing, and monitoring and controlling phases, I want to show you that we kind of consider those processes to be iterative, meaning that, as you can see in this diagram, they kind of keep going in a circle as the project goes on. In other words, you don't set a plan for a project and then never plan again as the project unfolds. There's always planning to be done. As a project proceeds, you're going to have new plans that you need to put in place. And as you're executing your tasks in a project, somebody's got to be monitoring and controlling what's happening. So let's take building a house, for example. And let's say we're at the execution stage of putting up our drywall. As someone is hanging the drywall, someone else is monitoring whether that is being done properly and controlling that situation. If we find out that things aren't working the way we had planned, it's possible then that we're going to step back, cycle back to the planning stage and change our plans perhaps for how we're going to do the garage based on how things went with the house on hanging the drywall. Then, when it's time to do the garage, we're back into executing again. Someone is monitoring and controlling that situation and so on. And so you see that this is a great process map showing you how these phases all work together. In addition to our phases that we just discussed, we have knowledge areas inside of the world of project management. And you may find yourself just working in one knowledge area related to a project. Some projects find a project manager who has to work in every area. Others may be so large that there are multiple project managers and they each have their area of expertise. So let's look at some of these knowledge areas. There's one called integration. This is a knowledge area that unifies and coordinates all the many different facets of the project. So an integrative project manager is usually at the top level of managing the project. They're usually going from area to area and making sure everything is working together. They're coordinating. Another knowledge area is scope. This is determining what work is needed to complete a project successfully. So for instance, if I am in charge of doing the drywall inside of building a new house, I'm the expert in that area at determining what is needed and what work is going to be performed to get that drywall done. But I may not know anything about plumbing. I might not know anything about painting. And so someone else might be handling the knowledge area of scope for other areas of the project. Some other knowledge areas are time, cost. Cost is a big one. There are special estimators sometimes on projects who are experts at determining what materials are going to cost, what labor is going to cost. And they only focus on cost. They're accounting types and that's their focus. They could never manage the scope of the drywall. It's just not their area of expertise. We also have quality as a knowledge area. Human resources, right? So there are people who are specializing in getting the right people on the job and assigning them and handling all of the legalities, all of the paperwork to make sure that they're legal and everything is being handled properly and that they're being paid. We have communications. We have risk management. We have procurement. Okay, so these are the primary knowledge areas. So while you might be only knowledgeable about time or cost or quality, it's still helpful to know about the other knowledge areas and have some respect for them. But inside of your project, you may be focusing only on one or two areas. I want to focus on three of the knowledge areas and view them as a triangle. And that is scope, cost, and time. We call these the triple constraint. Because if inside of your project you modify any one of these three things, the other two are going to be impacted. And so I drew a triangle here just to show you. Let's say I have scope here and I have time over here on this side and I have cost down here. And let's take a installation of a refrigerator in a new home that we're building. Okay, we were told that it was going to take one day, oops, that's time, one day, and that it was going to be a certain brand of refrigerator. Okay, so we have a certain brand, a certain type. That's going to be our scope. And the cost was going to be $500, let's say. Okay, so now somebody comes along and they say, I think it's going to take me longer to install the refrigerator. Okay, so they say, no, we estimated a day, but I think it's going to take two days. Well that increases this side of the triangle, right? And there's no way we can increase this side of that triangle without increasing the other two as well, right? Because our installer is going to take double the time, it's going to increase our cost also because we have more labor happening, right? And over here, then scope gets modified as well. So that's why it's called the triple constraint. Because any one of these three things that changes impacts the other two. If somebody says they're going to increase the cost, there's going to be ramifications. Probably the scope is changing. The cost is increasing because they've got more to do. They determined that we forgot some step in the process, something like that. And it's usually going to take more time. Two critical members of the project management team would be the project sponsor and what we call a stakeholder. Typically a project has one sponsor sometimes to or maybe a group is sponsoring the project, but these are people or organizations who authorize, support, and approve the project. So perhaps if we're using the example of building a house, perhaps the bank is building the house, okay? And so it's the bank board who is sponsoring the project. Or perhaps the owner of a homeowner's association is expanding their homeowner area to have an additional home. So maybe a group of homeowners is authorizing the project. Okay, so that would be the sponsor. And they're typically the one that you look to for approval, for support. If you don't keep their support, keep them happy, sometimes the plug gets pulled on the whole project. And then we have stakeholders. Now there's usually more than one stakeholder involved in a project. A stakeholder is anyone who is involved in the project in any way and has some sort of interest in its outcome. There can be internal stakeholders, people who are actually hands-on on the project, right? So the builder is going to be a stakeholder if I'm building a home. The electrician, the plumber, the project manager is a stakeholder, anybody who is involved. And then you can have external stakeholders, people who have an interest in what's going on. Maybe an environmental group is concerned because you're building on a piece of land that's impacting the environment. Or maybe someone inside of the neighborhood doesn't want you building a house there. And so they're actually a stakeholder because they're involved. They have an interest in the outcome of the project. Okay, so we want to pay close attention to our sponsor or sponsors. And all of the stakeholders, a good project manager, has their hand on the pulse of all the stakeholders in trying to keep all those people happy.