Why use Microsoft Project?

So you've learned about the project management basics. That's a real, quick overview in our first movie. There are reams of books and project courses that you could take to learn about how to do project management. That was just a very easy overview for you. Now what we're going to take a look at is Project 2007 and why that's important to be using when you are trying to manage a project. The first thing that project 2007 is going to do for you is that it's going to help you make better time estimates, in terms of your tasks.

It's going to help you identify the start and end dates of particular tasks, and it's going to track for you how long that task actually took, so you can compare that against your budget. It's also going to help you see what will happen to your overall project timeline if that estimate was wrong. It also helps you update your project data much easier, and keep your progress of your project on track. It's much, much easier than using handwritten to-dos and notes and tracking, which are usually obsolete by the time you finished writing them.

Adding in the progress for each of these particular tasks will help you with real-time reporting. So as you update your project, you will be able to see the calculations and updates automatically done by Project 2007 to your project costs and timelines, so that you can see and anticipate any changes that you need to make before they become critical. It helps you control your project work, schedules, and costs, so that you can see different choices as you go through the project lists.

It also helps you keep your team aligned, so that everyone is in sync with what needs to be done where, and you have real buy-in from your team members. There are two different versions of Microsoft Project. We have the one that we're going to be talking about, the Standard version, but you also have a Project Professional 2007 that's available. The Project Professional 2007 allows for enterprise project management capabilities. It needs to be connected to a Microsoft Office Project Server 2007.

So these are for larger organizations that need to use a common resource pool and that need web access available for the different participants in order to do updating and reporting. We won't be covering the Professional system on these sets of movies. We'll be concentrating on the Standard version. But most of the information and techniques that you'll see in these movies are easily portable to the Professional 2007. In our next video, we're going to take a look at what's changed in Project 2007, for those of you that are familiar with working in Project in previous versions.