Microsoft Project is a powerful tool for project management, but it can also be challenging to use effectively. In this blog post, we will share some tips and best practices for monitoring your project progress, status, and performance with Microsoft Project.
- Define your project scope, schedule, and budget clearly and realistically. Before you start tracking your project, you need to have a clear and realistic plan of what you want to achieve, how long it will take, and how much it will cost. You can use Microsoft Project to create a work breakdown structure (WBS), a Gantt chart, and a budget table to define your project scope, schedule, and budget. Make sure to align your project plan with your stakeholders' expectations and requirements.
- Update your project regularly and accurately. Once you have a project plan, you need to update it regularly and accurately with the actual progress, costs, and issues that occur during the execution phase. You can use Microsoft Project to enter actual work hours, costs, start and finish dates, and percent complete for each task. You can also use Microsoft Project to track issues, risks, changes, and deliverables using custom fields, views, and reports.
- Use baselines and variance analysis to compare your plan with reality. A baseline is a snapshot of your project plan at a certain point in time, such as the start or the end of a phase. You can use Microsoft Project to create and save multiple baselines for your project. By comparing your current plan with a baseline, you can see how much your project has deviated from the original plan in terms of scope, schedule, and budget. You can use Microsoft Project to perform variance analysis using fields such as baseline work, baseline cost, baseline finish date, work variance, cost variance, and finish variance.
- Use earned value analysis to measure your project performance. Earned value analysis (EVA) is a method of measuring your project performance by comparing the planned value (PV), the actual cost (AC), and the earned value (EV) of your project. You can use Microsoft Project to calculate and display EVA metrics such as schedule variance (SV), cost variance (CV), schedule performance index (SPI), cost performance index (CPI), estimate at completion (EAC), estimate to complete (ETC), and variance at completion (VAC). EVA can help you identify potential problems and take corrective actions early in your project.
- Use reports and dashboards to communicate your project status and progress. Microsoft Project offers a variety of reports and dashboards that you can use to communicate your project status and progress to your team members, stakeholders, sponsors, and customers. You can use Microsoft Project to create and customize reports such as task status report, resource status report, cost overview report, milestone report, risk report, change request report, etc. You can also use Microsoft Project to create and customize dashboards such as timeline dashboard, burndown dashboard, resource allocation dashboard, etc.
By following these tips and best practices, you can monitor your project effectively with Microsoft Project and ensure its success. You can read lot of Microsoft Project Tutorial here