Learning Objectives

The following are the learning objectives we aim to accomplish with this book. After reading this book you will:

• Understand project management terminology aligned with the PMBOK 2004 edition ^[6]

• Be able to create a valid and dynamic model of your own project:

  • Choosing the options and creating the project calendar

  • Entering tasks, estimates, dependencies, constraints, resources and assignments

• Be able to assess if you implemented the best-practices of scheduling established by IIL based on research of over one thousand real life schedules

• Know how to optimize the schedule to meet deadlines and budget restrictions while keeping the workloads of the resources within their availability

• Be able to create reports and custom views for the project that meet the need of stakeholders

• Know how to efficiently update the schedule when the project is running to continuously forecast the project cost and finish date

In general, you should feel very comfortable with Project 2003 and have a good understanding of how the tool functions and behaves. This knowledge will enable you to efficiently and effectively manage your project(s) after you finish reading this book. We will now outline the topics that will address these objectives.

Outline of This Book

First you initiate the project, then you plan it, and while you execute it, you monitor and control it. At the end, you close it out. Sometimes you may have to re-plan the project while it is running. The...