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hello there and welcome to I call some

Microsoft Project 2019. my name is

Deborah and I'm your instructor on this

course now if you've studied Microsoft

project with Simon says it before then

you may have come across one of the

other project courses that we have

available so you can see we have basic

and advanced versions for 2016

2013 and also 2010. now as I mentioned

at the start my name's Deborah and I'm a

moss certified tap accredited it trainer

and I've been working in the IT training

arena for about 11 years now and I have

a background in the IT industry and I've

been working in the IT industry for

about 24 years so quite a lot of time

I've worked in both the public and the

private sector and I've conducted

predominantly Microsoft training across

roughly 25 different countries and I've

for Microsoft Project in classrooms many

many times and my own experience extends

to work in both the private and the

public sectors in the UK and also in

Australia so hopefully that gives me a

really good foundation in which to be

presenting this course for you today now

I mentioned just now that you may well

have studied Microsoft project with

Simon says it before and I'm going to

assume on this course that you have

pretty much no knowledge of Microsoft

Project this really is a course that's

aimed primarily at people who are new to

using Microsoft Project so if you have

used it before you may find that some of

the early sections involve material that

you're fairly familiar with but

particularly for the first two or three

sections I do suggest that you go

through them because in those I'll cover

some of the main aspects of project 2019

that may be different from the version

of project that you're used to and I'll

also cover things like what's new in

Project 2019 if you are completely new

to Microsoft projects and I appreciate

that many of you will be I will be

assuming that you're familiar with

Windows software so you know how to do

some basic things like copy and paste

and to some extent I'll assume that you

may have used the Microsoft ribbons

before although I will explain it just

in case you haven't

and in particular I will assume that you

have a good basic knowledge of project

management itself so you'll know what I

mean when I talk about things like

schedule resources and over allocation

if you don't understand some of those

basic concepts in project management you

probably need to cover a bit of basic

material on project management in

general first before you go through this

course because this course does very

much rely on a reasonable knowledge of

what's involved in managing a project

now one thing I'm not going to do is

assume that we're managing projects in a

particular field my Fields always tended

to be I.T one way or another but in fact

the main sample projects that I'm going

to use on this course don't really have

anything to do with it at all we're

going to refit a bathroom or rather you

are and I'm going to organize a wedding

now neither of those have anything in

particular to do with it

now what you can see here is the project

professional 2019 start screen and we're

talking about the desktop software here

we're not going to be covering things

like Project online in this course so in

the next few sections we're going to

talk about the structure of the course

and in particular I'm going to start to

talk about the projects that we're going

to work through as we're working through

the course so essentially if you already

have project installed on your PC you

can skip the next section and go

straight to the one after that where I'm

going to talk about the structure for

those of you who don't have project or

already installed on your PC you'll need

to go through the next section with me

and I'll explain what your options are

so that's it for this section I will see

you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019.

in this section I want to talk about the

versions of Microsoft project that are

available and for those of you who don't

yet have Microsoft Project installed I

recommend the version or versions that

are most appropriate for use on this

course

so I'll talk briefly about acquiring and

installing project 2019 now one thing

you'll hear me say quite a bit on the

course about Microsoft products is that

I'm looking at a page on microsoft.com

here that's probably going to be

different by the time you come to look

at it they tend to change these pages on

a really regular basis which in itself

is fine but it means that I need you to

basically search for the equivalent of

this page if you want to get the latest

information now what's important about

this page is that it gives us a nice big

link to jump to all the different

Microsoft Project products that are

available through the Microsoft website

so let's click on see products and

pricing

and what you'll see first are two tabs

at the top here cloud-based Solutions

and on-premise solutions and you might

be thinking to yourself well what's the

difference between the two well the

cloud-based Solutions which we see here

which if I'm honest is Microsoft's

preferred solution this relates to

Office 365 which is probably a term that

you've heard of floating around even if

you haven't used it

and there are three options here for

Office 365 Project online Essentials

Project online professional and project

online premium and each one of those has

various advantages and disadvantages to

buying it now the cloud-based Solutions

are subscriptions that means you pay a

monthly subscription in order to

essentially rent that software from

Microsoft but what it also means is that

if you do buy an Office 365 subscription

it means that your version of project

will always be kept up to date

automatically which is a really really

good feature it means that you don't

have to buy the next version of project

in order to keep up with the latest

updates

so the subscription option is a really

good option

now this course is Project 2019 and that

comes under this second option

on-premise Solutions on-premise

basically means a one-time Standalone

purchase so you can see here the prices

are a lot higher and we have two options

that we could buy if we wanted to

project standard and project

professional and you can see the

difference between the two of them there

so project standard is on-premises

project management for those who don't

need collaboration tools and other

Advanced features

and project professional as you would

expect is a comprehensive on-premises

project management solution so which one

you choose is entirely up to you now

project 2019 is only available as an

on-premise solution essentially this

latest version 2019 is really for people

who haven't subscribed to office 365.

so it basically brings project 2019 in

line with all the updates that are

constantly happening in the Office 365

versions of project

so essentially if you've had in the past

project 2016 through Office 365 it's

going to be very very similar to the

on-premise version of project 2019 so

there will be a lot of crossover a lot

of the things available in 2016 are

available in Project 2019 there's really

not too much of a difference between the

two but as we said our focus on this

course is in Project 2019 so in terms of

acquiring the actual software if you

don't have it on your PC you can see

there you have a buy Now link and I'm on

the US version of the website which is

why it's in dollars so if I was going to

purchase project standard I could click

on buy now and that will take me through

to my cart where I can purchase project

standard 2019 and that will come to you

as a digital download so you can

literally click on the link and it will

start off the project installer so very

very simple to install now I can't give

you exact installation instructions

because that will depend on a lot of the

settings that you have on your PC but

I'm sure we've all downloaded and

installed things in the past it's always

a very straightforward process so I

don't envisage you having too many

problems with the actual installation of

the software

so there we go install the software and

then you'll be ready to start off the

course

I'm ready to start I hope you are as

well please join me in the next section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project

2019. in this section I'm going to take

a very quick look at what's new in

Project 2019

and one of the reasons that it is a

quick look is that there isn't really

very much of a difference between

project 2019 and project 2016 in terms

of functionality that's specific to

project so I'm currently looking at one

of the pages on office.com and it's

called what's new in Project 2019

now as I pointed out before I normally

say at this point that you need to check

the latest information well I don't

expect they're going to put anything

else new in Project 2019 so when you

come to watch this video I don't expect

any other additions but let's go through

some of the main points anyway because

there are just a few of them so the

first thing it says here the opening

paragraph is if you're upgrading to

project professional 2019 from 2016

you'll still have all of the features

that you're used to and you'll notice a

few new ones as well and this is a

really interesting one actually linking

tasks using a drop down menu

so instead of having to remember the ID

of a task when you're linking tasks

together what you can do is just click

in the predecessors column and from the

drop down arrow you'll get a list of all

of the different tasks so you can create

links between them very easily so that's

a really nice new feature in 2019 you'll

also see the addition of a task summary

name field and as it says in here with a

long list of tasks it can be difficult

to know what a task is indented under in

the overall project plan so the task

summary name field is a read-only field

and it shows the name of the tasks

summary task so again that's going to be

really helpful now I realize at this

stage in the course this is probably

going to mean nothing to you but as I

said there are only three or four new

features in here so I thought I might as

well highlight them to you another new

feature is the timeline bar labels and

task progress

so this is a really good one as well so

our timeline bars which we're going to

build up as we go through can now be

labeled so it makes them a little bit

more meaningful because you can have the

name of the task and also the task

progress shown right on the tasks

themselves so it makes it very quick to

illustrate your plan and the work in

progress when sharing status and of

course there's always improvements made

to accessibility with each new release

of Microsoft Office so in 2019 it's now

a lot easier for Windows narrator and

other assistive technology to read more

elements of project which is always an

excellent feature to have for anybody

who has impairments in that area and

then you'll see at the bottom of that

page we have some basic tutorials for

adding tasks in project and also a

project quick start guide so as you can

see not too many changes in there but

the ones that they have made are very

useful and very important

the other thing that I think is always

really helpful when you're going into a

new version of a piece of software is to

have a look on the Microsoft site at

some of the blogs related to project and

there's so many of them down here but

those can also be really helpful and

provide you with extra information when

it comes to putting together your

projects so I would definitely check out

the blog site within microsoft.com and

that's it really short and sweet with

regards to changes that's what's new in

Project 2019 in the next section we're

actually going to get started on a

project so please join me for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019

in this section I'm going to take you on

a tour of the project workspace and

we're also going to start creating a

very simple project and I'll use that

very simple project to demonstrate key

points concerning the project workspace

now you've already seen this start

screen and you'll probably see this

quite a few times during the course

although as you'll see a little bit

later on you may want to disable the

start screen once you really get used to

using project 2019 you might decide that

you can get along perfectly well without

it now let me give you a quick tour of

the start screen itself over on the left

we have an area which gives us links to

existing projects we have a recent

section just there at the top and

currently for me this section is empty

once we start working on projects you'll

start to see a list of recent projects

appear just there and then below that

there is a link to open other projects

which gives us access to a Windows

browse dialog so you can browse your

computer you can browse any network

locations you have access to and you can

browse Cloud areas such as your OneDrive

storage now we're going to start with a

new project so we won't be using that

part of the start screen on this

occasion in the top right we have some

standard Windows buttons the little

question mark is help note the screen

tip there for help F1 is the keyboard

shortcut then we have the minimize and

we have the maximize or restore

depending on whether your screen is

currently maximized or not and then we

also have a close button below that we

have my name and the account under which

I'm currently running project 2019. if

you're the only person that uses this PC

and if you're the only person that uses

project on this PC and you only have one

account that you ever run project under

then this will always indicate that

account

but if for example you sometimes use a

work account and sometimes a personal

account if you share this PC with

somebody else you may want to switch

between accounts and you have a facility

just here to switch accounts I'll

demonstrate that for you a little bit

more fully later on now let me talk

about the rest of the start screen and

I'm going to say this once more you may

not see exactly the same as me it would

depend on a number of things but almost

certainly the first thing you will see

here is a blank project thumbnail

I'm going to click on that in a little

while and we're going to create a new

blank project so essentially blank

project is the starting point for a new

project let's run through some of these

others first of all though if you run

projects that have an element of

similarity maybe you do building

projects marketing projects then you may

already have a project that you'd like

to base a new one on and the second

thumbnail here new from existing project

enables you to use an existing project

as a starting point for a new one the

third thumbnail new from an Excel

workbook lets you create a project from

an Excel workbook

and what this basically means is that

you have perhaps a list of tasks on a

worksheet in an Excel workbook and you

want to make a list of tasks the

starting point for a project the fourth

thumbnail new from SharePoint task list

is a pretty similar kind of thing but in

relation to sharepoints so if you have a

list of tasks in Microsoft SharePoint

and you want to use those as the basis

for a project you can use that option

now the other thumbnails all correspond

to different standard project templates

so if I were working on a software

development project I could use the

first template there software

development plan and it would get me

started on a typical set of tasks as a

starting point for a software

development project now you'll see a

whole list of these templates

these templates you may think of in the

old terminology as boilerplates but

nowadays we generally call them

templates and there are lots and lots of

them there so residential construction

is there for example new business plan

is another one but there are available

online many many templates that you can

base new projects on and there is a

search facility at the top here so if

you wanted a project plan for a

particular thing you could do a search

here in fact there are some standard

searches suggested searches as they call

them underneath so we have projects

schedules themes analysis so on and so

forth let's suppose those and this is

definitely potentially going to be very

useful I wanted to look for a project

plan for a wedding

so let me do a search on a wedding

this of course is an online facility so

I need to be connected to the internet

and let's click the magnifying glass

and it comes up with a wedding planner

if I were to click on that wedding

planner

then I would see a little bit more

detail about what this wedding planner

is

so it shows me the first few tasks it

gives me a description it says wedding

planner provided by Microsoft

Corporation

it tells me how big it is

and it gives me a little bit of a

description about the wedding planner

and then I could use that to create a

wedding plan and in fact it's not very

far removed from what I'm going to be

doing a little bit later on

but let me just close that for the

moment

and go back to this screen because apart

from giving me potential project

templates for a wedding there are search

results from other office applications

let's look at PowerPoint for instance

there are three items found in relation

to PowerPoint

now each of these is a template for a

PowerPoint presentation

so there's a picture frame wedding photo

album

a wedding seating arrangement plan and

also a simple wedding photo album

now there are other suitable wedding

related artifacts that can be used in

word publisher and Excel so we're not

really going to cover that on this

course but they can be very useful links

to other artifacts that you can use with

the other components of office

having taken a look at that let's go

back to the start screen and we just use

the back button up here

and we're going to create a blank

project now as soon as I do this I want

you to look at the bottom left hand

corner of the screen because a little

message will pop up just for a few

seconds that you'll get used to seeing

and after a while you'll probably just

ignore it but I need to explain it to

you briefly now and then in a little bit

more detail later on

so click on blank project and then look

down immediately in the bottom left hand

corner

and you'll see a message that says new

tasks are created in manually scheduled

mode

as you'll see later on there are two

modes of scheduling there's manually

scheduled and there's Auto scheduled

most of the time I tend to work in

Auto's scheduled mode and after you've

been using project for a while you will

choose the mode which you prefer the

fact that I currently have this in

manually scheduled mode and you may or

may not have it in manually scheduled

mode really doesn't matter at the moment

we'll come back to that a little bit

later on what we need to concentrate on

here is the workspace overall so first

of all in the top left hand corner you

have the quick access toolbar that I

mentioned earlier on in the course you

may not see quite the same buttons as me

there but we'll come back to that in a

couple of sections time

and in the top right hand corner you

have some standard Windows buttons let

me just hover over those

so you have minimize

restored down

and also a close button the main ribbon

is this so it's the big block right

across the screen very near the top I'm

going to explain the ribbon to you in

quite a bit of detail again in a couple

of sections from now

above the ribbon in the middle is the

name of the current project we've just

created a project so by default it's

called project one if we created another

one by default it would be called

project two and so on now below the

ribbon we have something called the

entry bar and the entry bar is something

that we can use to enter and edit data

into our project you may or may not have

the entry bar shown if you don't see

that then don't worry I'm going to show

you in a while how to show that if it

isn't already shown

basically the kind of thing we use the

entry bar for is this if I want to enter

the name of the first task in my project

I can click in the task name field there

and then if I click in the entry bar I

could call it task one

having typed that I can click on the

tick mark to the left of the task

and that will become my first task

if I click down to the next row

and maybe I intend to type tasks too I

could type task two

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change my mind and click on the cross to

the left of the task entry bar

and that will cancel whatever I'm typing

so that's the entry bar more on that

later below the entry bar we have the

timeline I mentioned the timeline much

earlier on when I was talking about

what's new and the fact that you can

have several timelines now in Project

2019 you may or may not see the timeline

if you don't see it you can show it by

going up to the ribbon and clicking on

view

and roughly in the middle or just to the

right of the middle you see a command

there or a check box that says timeline

if I uncheck timeline you can see the

timeline disappears check it again and

it comes back again

so that's the timeline when I've got

some tasks it will show those tasks on

the timeline

now in fact I've just entered one task

there it hasn't got any work in it and

the timeline can be set to run over a

period of time

Now by default my new project is

starting today so that's March the 4th

and because I haven't got any tasks or

Works scheduled at the moment you'll see

on the right hand end of the timeline It

also says March the 4th

So currently it's not the most exciting

project in the world

below the timeline is the main project

window and by default on my installation

I show a Gantt chart

and a Gantt chart actually comprises two

parts it comprises the list of tasks

it's actually a table and we refer to

this as the table

and on the right we have the chart

itself which is normally a pictorial

representation of the tasks in my

project now you may or may not have a

Gantt chart shown if you don't have a

Gantt chart shown you will find out soon

how to show a Gantt chart there

and there will be situations when you'll

want to see one of the many other types

of chart that you can show in the main

body of the display there in the main

window

now just to give you a little bit more

of an idea of how that's going to look

let's go back to that first task task

one

I'm going to click in the duration

column

and I'm going to say that this is a two

day task

click elsewhere

and there is my gamp bar for a two-day

task

now there are various things about that

bar in terms of its color its ends and

so on they each have significance and

we're going to talk more about those

later on but basically as we start to

build up a schedule we build up entries

in the table on the left and each of

those will be represented by a gamp bar

or other appropriate symbol in the

charts on the right

the next aspect of the workspace to look

at is the status bar across the bottom

of the project window at the left hand

end there are optional pieces of

information

one of the ones that's shown there is

new tasks are manually scheduled which I

mentioned earlier on in this section

and at the right hand end there are

controls for the view so we can do

things like choose the view of the

project we currently have and we can

also use the zoom controls and again

more on those later and the last part of

the workspace that I want to look at is

What's called the backstage or backstage

view now what we're looking at here is

effectively a project it's a very simple

project with one task in it at the

moment but this is where we work on the

contents of our project the

administration of projects are doing

everything from saving them to printing

them to maybe sharing them that's all

done in What's called the backstage view

or just backstage

and if I go into backstage View and you

can do that by clicking on file

you'll see that backstage view has a

load of options so we have info new open

save save as print share export close

account feedback and options and we'll

be dipping in and out of here as we go

through the course it's also for example

in the backstage view where we can set

up project information when I've been

using backstage view I get back to my

project Again by using that back button

in the top left hand corner and that

takes me back to my project

so there we are that's all the basics of

the workspace for now in the next

section I want to take a quick look at

help so please join me for that

hello again and welcome back to Fair

course on Project 2019.

in this section I'm going to look at

help and for those of you who have used

project before help in Project 2019 is a

little bit different in terms of how it

works and in line with virtually all

other modern major software products

you're very much restricted on help if

you're not online

so I'm going to demonstrate help offline

in a little while but let's start with

online and let's start with how you

access help now as I pointed out earlier

on in the course if you see this little

question mark icon up here it's a help

link and you can either click on help or

you can use the F1 keyboard shortcuts in

fact in Project 2019 it's probably a

better idea to get used to using the F1

keyboard shortcut because quite often

you don't see the question mark icon

but let me click on the icon now anyway

and that takes me to a new browser and

to the help home page now the options

you have here may differ to mine

depending on what browser you're using

so for the record I'm using Chrome the

help home page has a list of what it

calls the top categories each item in

the list is expandable so get started

for instance if I click on that it gives

me a number of options so I've got basic

tasks in Project create a new project

schedule

Etc

you can choose one of those so let's say

basic tasks in a project and it will

take me to either the help page or in

this case through to another menu from

which I can select further options

having arrived at this page there may

well be links to other help pages and

the help is basically browser based so I

can use my browser buttons to go back

just by clicking the back arrow and if

we just go forward Again by clicking the

go forward button

I could use the Links at the top here to

navigate so if I want to get back to get

started I can click on the get started

link to take me back to that page

so that's back to the home page with the

top categories listed again and

whichever topic I'm on I have the option

to print the topic using the print

facility within the browser so let's

click the three dots in the top corner

there and I can print any of these Pages

using the print button

and very importantly within the help

system there is a search facility so

maybe you want to know how to for

example enable or disable the entry bar

so type in entry bar

and press enter

and you'll see a list of topics related

to the search term it's worth noting

that this search within office help will

search across all applications for the

search term not just Microsoft projects

so watch out for that one

incidentally in this particular case you

might like to just note this second

entry here so Under The Heading keyboard

shortcuts for project you'll see there

it says activate the entry bar to edit

text in a field and then it says F2 so

F2 is the toggle to turn off and on that

entry bar

so if you don't currently see it in your

version of project 2019 just hit the F2

key and that will bring that entry bar

up

now let's quickly go back to home so I'm

just going to click the back button on

my browser now I'm not going to go

through these help topics now but I

suggest that with get started you make a

point of going through some of these

basic topics obviously I'm going to

cover these topics during the course

and in most cases I'll be covering

things in much more detail than the help

does but it's always a good idea to get

a different view on these topics and of

course to get the official Microsoft

views so do try to find some time to go

through these help topics perhaps going

through them as we cover them on the

course

now when we finished using help all we

need to do is close the browser tab so I

could click the little cross in the top

corner of the tab or alternatively if I

just want to close the whole browser

down I can use the cross in the right

hand corner

now there are some situations where you

can access help in different ways

so far we've looked at accessing help by

clicking on the question mark button

which takes you to the external

Microsoft help website but you can also

access help from within the project

window also so let's create a new blank

project

and I'm going to press the F1 key

and what happens here is that a pane

opens up on the right hand side of the

screen and the options look fairly

similar to what we saw in the web

browser version of help

so from here we can browse the

categories so get started for example

and I have access to all of my help

information this way as well

we could also use the search facility at

the top so if I click in the search bar

and let's search for entry bar again

[Music]

and click the magnifying glass

and this time we get links to help that

are all related to Microsoft Project

only it doesn't search for the term

across all Microsoft applications so

essentially this is a much more targeted

search than the previous option and of

course if I click these three dots I get

some other further options including one

that will jump me back to home

now a couple of other things to tell you

about one of them is what happens if

you're not connected to the internet so

let me just show you that I'm going to

disconnect from the internet

so now I no longer have an internet

connection

I'm going to press the F1 key

and you'll see that I get a message that

says sorry something went wrong please

check your network connection and try

again in previous versions of project

there was something different there and

I think it provided you with a little

bit further help with regards to finding

items on the ribbon but at the time of

recording this if you're offline in 2019

you don't get any help at all

so the last thing I want to show you

about help is the new feature tell me

what you want to do and this was a

feature that was introduced in Project

2016 and it continues through to project

2019. this as I understand will improve

and become more comprehensive over time

we're very much dealing with a

reasonably early version of this feature

so let me just give you a quick

demonstration of it

so let's suppose there's something that

you want to do and you don't remember

where the command is that does it so

perhaps you're not quite sure how you

should go about doing it

let's suppose that you want to set a

baseline Now setting a baseline May mean

nothing to you at all at this moment but

let me just click in that box

and type set Baseline now as I do that

it recognizes all or part of what I'm

typing so it gives me some options set

Baseline show Baseline set reminder show

slippage so on and so forth as I do that

I may say to myself ah set Baseline

that's what I want to do and then

there's a little pop-out menu which says

set baseline or clear Baseline now if

that's exactly what I want to do if I

click on that option it brings up the

relevant dialog box

and if I know how to use that dialogue I

can actually go ahead and do it and set

my Baseline and of course there is a

help link there as well at the bottom of

that dialog box

note that with some of these help links

they have a button with the word help in

rather than just a question mark so just

be aware of that as well and in this

case though if I click on this help

button

it's contextual so some of them are and

some of them aren't most of them aren't

unfortunately

let's close that browser and go back to

where we were before

so that's the new tell me what you want

to do feature or tell me features it's

sometimes known that was introduced in

Project 2016 and continues through to

project 2019.

as it evolves I think it could become a

really useful feature I think we're

still kind of at the fairly early stages

of it with project 2019 but please give

it a try that's it on help I will see

you in the next section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019

in this section we're going to look at

the ribbon and toolbars if you've used

other Microsoft software that uses the

ribbon and toolbars it's probably the

case that you can skip this section if

you want to I'll talk about one or two

things that are quite specific to

Microsoft project but I think that if

you're an experienced user of the ribbon

you'll be able to pick these up easily

enough as we go along anyway now for

those of you who aren't so familiar with

the ribbon let me just explain the

ribbon system was introduced about 10

years ago now and it's fairly consistent

and has been implemented across all of

the Microsoft applications

as I pointed out already it's this

rectangle with a number of tabs and you

select a tab so for instance at the

moment I have the report tab selected

you select a tab by clicking on the name

so this is the task tab

we have the resource tab

report tab

project tabs so on and so forth and

you'll see these tabs whenever you're

using project

now this can be changed by local

settings but talking in general terms

here however there are some tabs that

only appear in certain situations and

these are what we call contextual tabs

we have a contextual tab here at the

moment and it's the format tab and the

format tab in this case is part of

What's called the Gantt chart tools and

this is contextual in that because we

have a Gantt chart shown here so that's

this area on the right remember

we have a Gantt chart tools tab that

enables us to do things like change the

format of the Gantt charts and other

tasks

if I change the view so instead of

showing the Gantt charts I'm going to

show for example a let's go for Network

diagram

I now have Network diagram View and I

get a contextual tab for that and you

can see there we have again a format tab

which is part of the network diagram

tools

we'll see some other contextual tabs as

we go through the course but let me for

the moment go back into Gantt chart View

on each of the tabs there are a number

of controls and the controls can be all

sorts of things they can be command

buttons they can be drop down lists they

can be sets of radio buttons Etc

and they're arranged into groups so for

instance on The View tab here the group

on the left is the task views group and

there are five controls here gancha task

usage and these are the three each of

these controls can be a single control

or for instance as in here it can give

us access to a whole menu of items now I

should point out something here that I

did point out earlier on and that is

that depending on the size of your

screen depending on the resolution of

your screen and depending on whether

you're in Mouse mode or touch mode

determines exactly what you'll see on

each tab so yours may vary depending on

what settings you have implemented

you may see more or less controls in

each group than I do on my screen and

I'm recording this course on a PC with

quite a high resolution if you have a

smaller resolution PC perhaps running it

on a laptop with much less space on the

screen again you may well see less than

me

but you should pretty much see the same

groups even if exactly what you can see

in each group is a little bit different

from what I see so let's now try to

execute a command or two I'm going to go

to the task Tab and one thing you'll

notice is that some of the commands are

grayed out so for instance in the

clipboard group on the task tab you have

a cut command a copy command and

something called a format painter that

are not grayed out so you could do all

of those things at this moment whereas

you can't use the paste command it's

grayed out because we don't have

anything copied to the clipboard and as

with Windows applications in general of

course graying out indicates that a

particular command is not available at

the current time

let me type a name of a task into this

task name box for the first task in this

little project

I could use the tick next to the task

entry bar or I could just press the

enter key so I'm going to use the tick

like so now if I select that particular

task name as I have here you can see

that the box has a border around it so I

know that it's selected if I wanted to

make that bold I could use the Bold

command in the font group in the task

tab

I could make it italic and I could

change the font from calibri

to say bedoni empty black

I can also toggle these options off so

if I click italic again

it will take me back to just bold

I could also make this font a larger

size if I wanted to by clicking the font

size drop down and selecting a larger

size

so that's basically how you can use the

commands on the ribbon now we're not

just restricted to styling text if you

take that particular task you could do

all sorts of things to it for instance

you could record progress on that task

using the commands on the ribbon but

more of that later now slightly at the

danger of getting ahead of ourselves

here one thing you'll notice

particularly as your project gets bigger

is that the ribbon does take up quite a

lot of space and in particular if you're

using a small screen it takes up a

disproportionately large amount of space

now you can hide the ribbon and there's

a little arrow up here over on the right

hand end and if you hover over it it

says collapse the ribbon and you can see

the keyboard shortcut for that is

control F1

if we click collapse the ribbon the

ribbon is hidden

now you may well say well that certainly

gives me a little bit more space but how

do I use the commands the answer to that

is that provided you've got reasonable

idea of where the command is so for

instance if I wanted to change the size

of that Task 1 font back to 10 or 11

points if I know the commands on the

task tab all I have to do is go back to

the task tab click on the name

and the ribbon reappears so if I say

okay then it's currently 18 and I want

to put it back to 11. I can very easily

do that

once I finish making my changes if I

click back on the project

you'll see that the ribbon is hidden

again now when I describe that to you I

said that if you know where a particular

command is on the task tab if you don't

know where it is you can still click on

any one of the tabs and you can pretty

much click around to find the task that

you want

click off again on the main project

window and you'll see that those ribbons

disappear again

if you get to a point though which you

think well actually I need the ribbon

available all the time again I don't

just want it collapsed anymore if I just

click on a tab to bring the ribbon back

and right click my mouse over on the

right hand side but still in that ribbon

area you'll notice that collapse the

ribbon is currently ticked so just click

to untick

and the ribbon will be there all of the

time and now you can see the contents of

each of the ribbons

one thing I'd like to point out here is

that you can customize the ribbon and in

particular you can create your own

ribbon tabs now I'm not going to cover

customization of the ribbon here but I

am going to briefly look at customizing

the quick access toolbar a little bit

later on in this section and that should

give you a pretty clear idea of how to

set about customizing the ribbon

so now let's turn our attention to that

quick access toolbar that we looked at

earlier on in the course

and as you can see here mine has about

four commands already shown one of them

that we talked about was the touch mouse

mode command then we have undo and redo

and also save

but as I explained earlier on if you

want to change what's shown on the quick

access toolbar there is a standard pool

of commands so if I wanted the Quick

Print command shown I'd select Quick

Print from the menu here so if I click

it you'll see that the Quick Print

button now shows in my quick access

toolbar

now apart from switching on and off

those standard commands you can

customize the quick access toolbar

further and if I click on more commands

it takes me to a page of the project

options now project options we're going

to look at in two or three sections from

now but what we have open here is the

quick access toolbar page which we can

use to customize that quick access

toolbar and let's suppose that I want to

add a button to the toolbar which will

enable me with one click to make

something bold

what I need to do is to find the Bold

command in the list on the left and then

add it to the toolbar now the list on

the left is controlled by this drop down

menu

and first of all we have the popular

commands there in alphabetical order now

I can't see bold there so if instead of

popular commands I say all commands

and again these are listed in

alphabetical order

and now I have access to the literally

hundreds of commands that are available

in Microsoft Project and I want to find

bold so let's scroll down and go to the

B section

and there it is so now I'm going to

click the add button

and what that will do is move the Bold

command from the list on the left hand

side across to the list on the right

hand side and what this list on the

right hand side shows are all of the

commands that are currently on my quick

access toolbar

if I want to put it in a different

position I can select it and use the up

and down arrows at the side here to

reorder my commands

so I'm happy with it just there if I

click on the OK button

you'll see that my bold command has now

been added to my quick access toolbar

now let's just jump back into those

project options again

because there's one other important

point to mention here if at some stage

you make a mistake and you want to go

back to the default or the settings that

were originally used there is a reset

button at the bottom there I'm actually

happy with how I have it so I'm going to

click on OK again and now I have my bold

button which I can use and I can choose

to toggle that off and on

it may well be that after you've been

using project 2019 for a while you'll

find it very useful to customize that

quick access toolbar

also some people customize it to do a

particular job so for example if a

project manager is doing a weekly update

of status he may put various commands

associated with task status on the quick

access toolbar or indeed create a custom

tab for the ribbon for that particular

purpose one other thing about the quick

access toolbar that some people find

useful

it's right up in the top left hand

corner there and you have to sort of go

across the ribbon to get to it you can

actually position it below the ribbon

it's very simple just click the drop

down

and you have the option show below the

ribbon

and you can see it's moved down to

underneath the ribbon

and that makes it quite a bit easier to

get to when you're doing perhaps a long

or repetitive task within the body of a

project

and of course if you wanted to put it

back up to the very top left hand corner

you could essentially do the opposite by

clicking the drop down and selecting

show above the ribbon now there's one

other type of toolbar that I want to

point out to you now and it's one that

pops up all over the place we're going

to be using this type of toolbar in many

places in this course if you take task

one here for example and select it

if I right click I get what's called a

contextual menu and it's contextual in

that the commands that are available

there although they're also available

from various places on the ribbon these

are deemed to be the ones that you're

most likely to want to use in the

situation that you're in

and above the contextual menu there is a

mini toolbar and again this is deemed to

be contextual to contain the commands

that are appropriate to where you are in

project and what you're doing so these

work pretty much on the principle that

I'm sure you'd expect them to you click

on things and they either execute

commands or bring up other menus or

bring up dialogues so we have these

contextual menus like this one and then

we have the mini toolbar as well

and as I say we'll be using these at

various points during the course

that's the end of this section I will

see you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to my

course on Project 2019. in this section

I'd like to take a quick look at the

status bar now I'm going to deal with it

in two parts the left part and the right

parts but importantly if you right click

anywhere on the status bar you'll see a

list of potential contents and

whatever's ticked is currently shown

note the header there customize status

bar now you might be surprised to see so

many ticks but actually not very much

information on the status bar at all and

the reason for this is that apart from

the bottom two entries few shortcuts and

zoom slider which are the things that

are shown at the right hand end of the

status bar the things on the left

correspond to optional pieces of

information you can show but which very

often don't show anything at all

so for example if you look at the item

fourth down in the list there filter

it's ticked and what that means is that

if a filter is being applied to the

current view show the name of the filter

there

now in this case no filter is being

applied and therefore you don't see

anything

so with quite a few of these items even

though they're ticked most of the time

you won't see anything unless you're

using that particular feature now there

are a couple of things shown at the left

hand end one of them is ready which is

the Cell mode

if I click sell mode

so that it's not shown you'll see the

effect it no longer says ready because

I'm not showing the Cell mode the other

thing that's shown is whether new tasks

are manually scheduled or Auto scheduled

if I click new tasks it will no longer

show that currently they're manually

scheduled by default now the other items

although they're ticked there's nothing

to see one of them that isn't ticked is

this one which is the macro recording

indicator we're currently not recording

a macro and a macro is a sequence of

steps that we can replay automatically

if I check that

you'll see the little icon that

indicates that we're not recording

if I started recording a macro and left

this checked then you would see a

different icon whilst we're recording

and in fact that icon would give your

way of stopping the recording also

we're not going to be covering macro

recording anytime soon so let's check

that back off let's now concentrate on

the right hand end of the status bar now

we're going to look at the bottom two

options there and the first one is view

shortcuts

this corresponds to this set of buttons

that I can use to enable different views

of my project

so let me just click away there I

currently have Gantt chart view if I go

to this one that's task usage View

the next one is team planner View

we have resource sheet view

and finally report View

I'll be covering all of these later on

in the course

and the fact that the second to bottom

option is ticked means that those

buttons are there to enable me to easily

switch between those views as an

alternative to those I can select the

view I want from The View tab on the

ribbon and in fact there are many more

options on The View tab on the ribbon

the very bottom option is zoom slider

and this gives me access to the control

that I can use to zoom in and out of the

current View

which is this slider over here so let me

click out again and go to the slider

it's by time so as I zoom out

I get a broader view of time

so now you can see that I'm looking at

quarters

if I zoom in by clicking the plus button

there I'm down to months

then weeks

then eventually I get down to individual

days

it is quite a course control but I can

use that if I want to or on The View tab

in the ribbon there is a zoom group and

that lets me be much more accurate and

much more flexible about how much I'm

zoomed in on the current View

so that's it that's the status bar

please join me in the next section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019. in this section

we're going to look at keyboard

shortcuts and key tips now if you don't

use keyboard shortcuts and you're not

interested in finding out how to use

them then you certainly can skip this

section I do know that many people like

to use keyboard shortcuts myself

included they can be particularly useful

if you have repetitive jobs to do and

you don't like moving the mouse around

all day you'd much rather just go

straight to what you need using the

keyboard and for some people the use of

the keyboard is a necessity either

because of an injury or some kind of

impairment and the use of the keyboard

is much more preferable to trying to use

a mouse or some other approach in

Project 2019 keyboard shortcuts are very

well supported and in this section I'm

going to take you through the main

options for using them now of course the

main problem with keyboard shortcuts for

most people is knowing what they are and

I must confess that I probably only use

about 10 or so because I struggle to

remember any of the others aside from

those core 10 that I use frequently

so for example the ones that I use quite

a lot would be things like Cuts copy

paste save print those kinds of keyboard

shortcuts if I go to a tab on the ribbon

so let's go to the task tab

if you wanted to know the keyboard

shortcut for cuts and you couldn't

remember if you hover over the cut

button it tells you that it's cut and it

gives you the keyboard shortcut in

Brackets afterwards Control Plus X

similarly for copy

you can see there that the keyboard

shortcuts shown in Brackets is control

plus c

format painter now unfortunately for

format painter there isn't one and

that's the problem with many of the

commands that there isn't an equivalent

keyboard shortcut

so if you know a keyboard shortcut

already that's fine and it's supported

in project if not if you hover over the

ribbon and that particular command

you're interested in you'll soon find

out whether there's a keyboard shortcut

for it or not

so the next option is there a list of

keyboard shortcuts well yes there is

if I press the keyboard shortcut F1 to

bring up online help

and I use the search facility to search

for keyboard shortcuts

[Music]

you'll see I get a link there for

keyboard shortcuts in projects so let's

click it

and there's some information at the top

but if we scroll down

we get to the different keyboard

shortcuts that we can use within project

now of course you could print this out

if you wanted to and I know some people

print this out and stick it on their

walls so it's easy for them to reference

quickly the keyboard shortcuts are

basically arranged into categories so

you can see here we've got display and

use Windows then if we scroll down we

have move around in text or cells move

around and work in tables so on and so

forth so it makes it a bit easier for

you to find what you're looking for

so you have all of the standard

shortcuts but then you also have a group

that relates specifically to Microsoft

Project shortcuts so you've got keyboard

shortcuts for using a network diagram

navigating views and windows and so on

so there's a list at the bottom there

and if you're pretty good at remembering

those things or as I say if you want to

stick that on the wall that's a very

good source for finding keyboard

shortcuts

so that's a couple of ways of finding

out what keyboard shortcuts are there is

another way and that's the use of key

tips and I'm going to demonstrate that

to you now I've got the task name Task 1

selected in that single task in my

current schedule

and I want to underline the name but I

can't remember the keyboard shortcut to

do the underlining so let me demonstrate

key tips first of all if I just tap the

ALT key

it brings up some one and two character

codes for accessing the commands on the

quick access toolbar and the tabs on the

ribbon

now if I can't remember which ribbon tab

it is I could step through these one at

a time but I do know that what I want is

on the task tab so if I press the H key

that's the access key for the task Tab

and now you'll see that the commands on

the task tab on the ribbon are each

presented to me with their various other

letter or number codes

now number three would give me access to

the underlying command but let me be

just a little bit more flexible than

that I want to bring up the dialogue

which gives me all of those formatting

font formatting commands

so I'm going to do F and N

so f

and then n

that brings up the font dialog

now to go through the commands on the

font dialog I successively press the Tab

Key until I get to the one that says

underline

[Music]

foreign

is selected I press the spacebar to

enable underline

and if you look at the top right hand

corner of the dialog you'll see that the

OK button is selected so if I press the

enter key

that will be underlined

now you can bring up those key tips at

any time by pressing the ALT key and you

can switch them off again by pressing

the ALT key again

that's the end of this section I will

see you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019

in this section we're going to take a

look at project options and to a large

extent project options represent your

own personalization of your installation

of project and in the way that you use

project on your projects

some of these options you need to have

set correctly before you start to create

and work on any kind of substantial

project

and in fact as we're going to get

started on our exercise project in the

next section it's very important that

you go through this one carefully even

if you've used Microsoft project before

I suggest that you follow this section

through because I'm going to make sure

that we cover all of the essential

options so that when you start working

on the exercise you won't finish up

having to sort of go back and redo

things later on so to Access Project

options the normal way is to go into the

backstage view so we'll click file

and right at the bottom we have options

and that brings up the project options

dialog now you've seen this already

because there are various points where

you get taken to this dialogue often to

a specific page on this dialog and

you're given the opportunity there to

change something or set something so you

may well recall that when we were

looking at the quick access toolbar for

example we went to this quick access

toolbar page and use the controls on

this page to add a button to the quick

access toolbar that bold button

in fact I think I'm going to while I'm

here remove that bold button now so I'll

select it and click on the remove button

in the middle

and I'm also going to remove the Quick

Print Button as well

now what we're going to do in this

section is go systematically through

these pages and look at the options that

we need to get set straight away now in

order to demonstrate the way that many

of the options work I'm going to do a

quick demo in relation to what's called

screen tip style the very top entry on

the first page the general page

underneath user interface options we

have screen tips style and it currently

says show feature descriptions in screen

tips if I click the drop down here there

are three options show feature

description in screen tips

don't show feature descriptions in

screen tips and don't show screen tips

now at the moment with the first option

selected if I just click on OK

if I hover over one of the buttons on

the ribbon so let's say if I hover over

move you'll see that I get that screen

tip there for move task

and you can see that it's telling me

that it moves the selected tasks forward

or back in the project schedule

now let me go back into options

foreign

and let me change that to don't show

feature descriptions in screen tips

click on OK

and let me hover over move again

and now all I get is move task so that's

the name of the command but not a

description of what it does

let's go back into options once more

and obviously if I choose the third

option here don't show screen tips and

click on OK

and once again hover over move

you'll see that I don't get anything

now I personally like to have the

description there so I'm going to put

that back to what it was originally from

options

and we'll just set that back to show

feature descriptions in screen tips

now let's look at some of the other key

ones on this General page the default

view for me is Gantt with timeline I

pointed that out to you a couple of

times that's the default view when I

open up project in particular when I

start working on a new project that's

what I see and I can also choose here my

default date format which is the short

form of the day of the week and then the

month day and year and if you prefer

there are various other date formats

that you can choose from that drop down

list my username is also here with my

initials now you may think well what

difference does that make well if you're

collaborating with other people on

projects and if you're sharing projects

and so on you may do many things for

example comment on projects you may make

certain other changes to projects which

are identified as being by you and

having your username and initials set

correctly here enables other people to

track that it was you that made that

change or made that comment now if you

remember right back to near the

beginning of the course I talked about

the fact that one of the new features in

Project 2019 was the availability of

some alternative office themes and down

here is where you can choose them so if

we click the drop down in office theme

you can see we have colorful dark gray

black and white now I've currently got

colorful selected which is my personal

preference but if I selected for example

say a dark gray and clicked on OK you

can immediately see the effect there and

I think if I was to select this one it

might make it a bit harder for you to

see these videos so I'm just going to go

back and I'm going to change that back

to colorful

and something else that I mentioned

earlier on in the course is that you can

suppress the showing of the start screen

just with that check box at the bottom

if I uncheck that

click on OK to save the change next time

I start project I won't see the start

screen again that's something for you to

try out to see if you're happier with

that arrangement

just incidentally while we're talking

about these changes that we're making

it's worth pointing out that most

changes you make in Project options are

activated when you click ok to close

that project options dialog there are a

small number of changes where you do

need to restart project for them to take

effect but when it is necessary to

restart project it does actually tell

you that you need to restart project for

the change to take effect the next page

I want to look at is the display page

and there are two important options here

that I want to highlight

first of all for each project that you

work on you can set the currency options

at the moment we only have project one

here and the drop down lets me choose

from any available projects so there's

only project one currently and I can set

a symbol the decimal digits the currency

and so on and the second option on this

page again going back to something that

I mentioned earlier on if I don't see

the entry bar it's probably because this

option down here for entry bar is

unchecked so make sure that's checked

and you'll see the entry bar between the

ribbon and the timeline now the next

page is the schedule page and there are

a couple of very important settings here

which I'm afraid I'm going to have to

ask you to set based on trusting what

I'm telling you at the moment I'm going

to explain these settings to you a

little bit later on in the course but at

the outset I'd like you to have them set

in a particular way now there are some

very straight forward settings on this

page so for instance the week starts on

a Sunday and the fiscal year starts in

January now you may be tempted to do

things like change the default start

time and end time for working days where

you work hours per day hours per week

Etc by all means set those if you want

to I will be talking about those and

calendars in general in a bit of detail

later on at this stage it's not really

that important that you get them quite

right at the moment two settings I do

want you to set in a particular way

though are these first of all new tasks

created manually scheduled now I've

mentioned that before I've currently got

new tasks created manually scheduled I

want you to set that to the other option

Auto scheduled and it's very likely that

for most of you this will be the way to

leave this setting set in the longer

term and what this basically means is

that when you create a task in a project

it becomes Auto schedule which means

that as you schedule the project or in

many cases as project 2019 schedules the

project this one is automatically

scheduled according to all of the

constraints dependencies resource

availability and all the other factors

that come into Force this task to be

scheduled accordingly if you leave this

setup manually scheduled for new tasks

then each task that's created is

manually scheduled and each task that

you create either has to be individually

changed to Auto schedule or you have to

manually schedule each task there may be

situations in which manually scheduled

tasks is what you want and I'll talk

about that later on but for the moment I

want you to make sure that's set at Auto

scheduled

the other setting that I want you to

make sure is set in the particular way

is down here where it says calculation

so we have calculate project after each

edit on or off

now I'd like you to make sure that this

is set to on which means that each time

we make a change to the schedule project

2019 will automatically calculate the

effects of that change without you

having to take a separate calculation

stop now I'll explain more of the

significance of that setting later on in

the course as well

but basically for the moment just bear

in mind that project 2019 has to do a

lot particularly in a large project to

work out how to schedule things and each

time you make a change you really need

to see the effects that change has had

potentially on whole parts of the

project and if you don't have that set

on you have to separately and as a

manual exercise tell project 2019 to

calculate the project or IE to

reschedule it

so for the moment I'd like you to set

that to on as well and as I say with

both of those settings we'll look at

those in more detail later the next page

is the proofing page and that relates to

spell checking and auto correction as

you're typing

I'm not going to go through that at this

stage but if you've used the proofing

facilities in other components of

Microsoft Office such as Microsoft Word

I'm sure you'll be able to go through

there and make the appropriate settings

correct for you now we come to the save

page and there are a couple of very

important settings here

one of them is the default file location

and this is the location where any

project files that you save will be

saved by default it's set when you

install project 2019 to one of the

folders within your personal Windows

directory

you may want to leave it set there or

you may want to save your project files

by default somewhere else that is

entirely your decision so mine is

currently set to save in the default

location the next option is the auto

save option and again if you've used

other components of Microsoft Office you

might be tempted to switch auto save on

and that will cause project 2019 to save

your work at regular intervals according

to the number of minutes selected in

this box just here now you may well be

tempted to switch that on but I don't

and there is a good reason for that

unlike other components of Microsoft

Office if you have Auto saved switched

on each time auto save occurs it clears

your undo history so once an auto save

happens you cannot then undo now for

some people they're quite happy to work

on that principle perhaps they don't use

undo very much sure perhaps they're very

careful you can in fact use this option

for a prompt to warn you when an auto

save is about to happen

but in my case I prefer to leave auto

save switched off but again ultimately

this is your choice the next page also

has some very important settings and

this page determines the language that

you're using to work in Microsoft

Project now you can have more than one

language installed and you can select

different ones for different situations

so you can see here I have English

United States and English United Kingdom

as the two languages that I use they are

sufficiently different to Warrant being

described as two different languages and

my default is set to English United

States

if you need to add an additional

language it is very straightforward

there is a drop down just here which

gives you access to many many many more

languages and in particular with a

particular project most people find

their default language is the one they

use most of the time but if you do work

in more than one language even if the

two languages are two versions of

English you do need to be aware of this

language setting and when you're working

on a project make sure that you have the

appropriate language selected now let me

quickly run through the remaining pages

of project options there are no settings

on the advanced page that you need to

worry about now we will be looking at

one or two settings from here later on

customized ribbon is the equivalent of

the customization page for the quick

access toolbar and it does look quite

similar

the main difference is that rather than

say selecting commands from the list on

the left and then adding them to what

was the quick access toolbar in the

right what you would normally do is

create your own Tab and then copy

commands from the left hand list to your

groups on your new tab and then what you

could do is build up your own custom

tabs on the ribbon now I'm not going to

cover that now but by all means have a

look at the help give it a try and see

how you get along with it don't forget

you can always click the reset button at

the bottom there to put things back to

how they were if everything goes

horribly wrong the quick access toolbar

page you've already seen and you've also

seen me use it add-ins are out of scope

for this course and the trust Center is

also out of scope for this course there

is one thing I would like to say about

the trust Center though in Project 2019

mainly the trust Center is concerned

with the fact that one way that people

can get malicious content onto your

computer is to get you to run macros and

macros can be included within a

Microsoft Project file so one thing you

want to do is make sure that you have

the macro setting disabled for all

macros with notifications so if we go

into trust Center settings and we just

want to check that we have our settings

set to disable all macros with

notification and then if you open a

project file from somebody else and it

says I want to run a macro if you know

who the person is that you've got the

project file from and you absolutely

trust the source you can let the macro

run

but if not you can say nope I'm not

going to let that macro run

so that's it that's the basics the

overview of project options and we're

going to be looking at quite a few

others as we go along please make sure

that you've got set the ones that I said

you should have set that's it for this

section I will see you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019. in this section

I'm going to start work on the project

plan for a wedding now of course

different people would have very

different opinions on what might be part

of the arrangements for a wedding so

what I'm going to try and do is come up

with a project plan for a wedding that

has enough detail in it to be reasonably

realistic but which will also reflect

the different styles of wedding that you

may get in different parts of the world

in different cultures and so on

having said that the style of wedding

that I'm planning here is not one that's

associated with any particular religion

now what you're going to be doing very

soon is planning the refit of a bathroom

in a domestic house

so what I'm going to try and show you

while I'm doing this wedding plan is

some of the ideas that I want you to

incorporate into building up the plan

for the bathroom refits you may well

find when you're looking at either of

these projects that they don't really

reflect how you would set about doing

them but really that's not the point

you're learning the tools in Microsoft

project to do these things you're not

actually learning how to either plan a

wedding or refit a bathroom another

important point to make here is that

we're building these things up in layers

I'm not going to go deep into the

details straight away we will certainly

get into the detail but what we will do

is one layer at a time and I'll explain

the tools and techniques associated with

project 2019 as we go so first of all

I've made a list of the main aspects of

this wedding plan so let's take a look

at that first

now I'm sure this isn't going to be

quite right but I've made this list it's

actually in the course file folder if

you want a copy of this list

and it's planning a tire and by a tire I

mean basically the clothes that people

are going to wear but it's probably a

little bit broader than that guests

venue catering flowers memories details

wedding day and honeymoon so they're

going to be my main headings and the

first thing I'm going to do is to start

adding each of those into my project

plan so let's take this first one

planning and set that one up first

so I've created a new blank project and

in the task name I'm going to enter

planning

now a couple of things to point out here

I'm using Gantt chart View and I did

show you briefly earlier on in the

course a couple of ways of switching to

Gantt chart view if you've got no Gantt

chart view on already one way is to use

the buttons down towards the right hand

end of the status bar but you can also

go into the view Tab and select again

chart view there another thing to bear

in mind is that you should have new

tasks set to Auto scheduled or what I'm

going to do next won't work for you

so having entered planning as the task

name I press the Tab Key

and a number of fields are filled in for

my first task and one of them is

duration and by default a task has a

duration of one day with a question mark

normally

now what the question mark means is that

this is an estimated duration and what

one normally does is to leave the

duration as an estimate until you have

actually got a reasonably reliable

duration for that task

now at this stage I'm not going to worry

about duration at all I'm just going to

get all of those tasks in the list but

bear in mind those question marks are a

good way of reminding myself that that's

just an estimate of the duration and

believe me when planning a wedding it's

a lot longer than a one day task

Let's ignore ignore the work column for

a moment and let's take a look at start

and you can just about see the start

date is Tuesday March the 5th 2019.

now one thing that may or may not be

annoying you already is being able to

see the contents of all of these fields

so let's deal with that first

if you need to make these columns wider

or narrower if you hover over the edge

and you'll see the cursor change to a

double-headed Arrow if you click the

mouse at that point and drag one way or

the other you can make the columns wider

or narrower depending on your personal

preference

we're going to do a little bit more work

on how to format Gantt charts how to lay

them out more neatly later on but for

the moment that's probably one of the

most important things you need to be

able to do just resizing those columns

and also there is a bar of vertical

dividing line between the table on the

left and the charts on the right and if

you hover over that vertical bar in any

way

you get a slightly different

double-headed arrow and you can change

the divider so that you can see more or

less of the table

or more or less of the charts so again

that's entirely up to you and how you

like to work

now let's go back to this start date

Tuesday March the 5th 2019 Now by

default new tasks are either created on

the project start date or on the current

date now in this case

both the start and finish date are the

same they're today's date

and you can check which it's set to by

looking at project options on the

schedule page I do suggest you have a

quick look at that now

so what is the project start date

by default the project start date is the

date I created the project

and I created this project today so

that's why we have a start date of today

if you click on the project tab on the

ribbon and in the Properties Group

normally the first button there is

project information so let's click on

that

and one of the basic pieces of

information we have in there is the

start date for the project which is

showing here currently highlighted

it will also tell you in this case what

the Finish date is as well

now of course I haven't really got much

work scheduled on this project at the

moment so it means that I can start

planning this wedding today and I can

actually have the wedding today as well

because I will be ready I'm just going

to go back to what I was saying now

about project options you can see here

that we're scheduling from Project start

date some projects might be scheduled

from the project finish date

now it's very conventional to start a

project and say to yourself when will I

be ready but also what often happens is

that you know when you've got to be

finished by and what you really need to

know is when you should start the

project you can do both of those types

of scheduling in Project 2019 but it's

very important to know at any time

whether you're scheduling from the start

date or to the Finish date

the approach we're taking now with

planning this wedding is that we're

starting at a start date and when we've

done all the planning and got all the

other activities in we'll know when we

can be ready by so we haven't got a date

for the wedding yet

we need to do a lot of work to do a lot

of planning first but we will find out

when we would be ready to have the

Wedding by

so let me cancel this dialogue for now

and I'm going to put in a couple more of

the tasks into my project

okay so I've got those three tasks in

there now you might be slightly

surprised by how my plan looks but there

are very good reasons for it at the

moment I've not told project 2019 much

about these tasks at all I haven't for

instance said that a tire must happen

after planning or that guests must

happen after a tire so it has no reason

to put these tasks in any kind of

sequence

a very important Point as well here is

that you don't actually have to enter

the tasks of a project in chronological

sequence I could put all of these in any

order that I wanted to but the

convention is that the tasks you expect

to at least start first go first in the

list

now in the left hand column here you

have something called a task ID and as

you'll see later on in the course task

IDs fulfill a very important purpose but

one way of looking at this is that

generally speaking the convention is

that the task with the lower IDs

correspond to the tasks that are

performed earliest in the project

having said that as you'll see later on

with this wedding plan the individual

elements that make up each of these

tasks and bear in mind we're going to

break each of these tasks down as we go

through we'll overlap some of the things

that we thought were going to be earlier

on or would be later on and so on and in

any case as the project progresses

things will tend to change so having the

earliest tasks as the ones with the

lowest ID numbers is more of a sort of

General guideline than any sort of

specific rule the next thing I'm going

to do is put in the rest of those tasks

and there we are I have all those

headings in all of them have an

estimated duration of one day which is

clearly not the case but we have a

starting point for our plan and having

done that work the next most important

thing to do is save that plan and that's

what we're going to do first in the next

section so I will see you then

hello there and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019.

now in this section I'm going to take a

look at opening and closing projects and

before I do that the very first thing

I'm going to do is save the first

version of The Wedding plan I'm going to

talk more about saving in a couple of

sections time but for the moment I'm

going to save this to the course files

folder with a very straightforward file

name and then we're going to concentrate

on a bit of opening and closing

so in order to save this project I go to

the backstage views into file and then

click on save as

and what this brings up is the save as

page and exactly what you see here will

really depend on what save as locations

are available to you so you can see here

that I have a few different ones I could

choose to save this file to OneDrive and

you can see I have a OneDrive business

account there and also a OneDrive

personal account I could choose to save

it into SharePoint which is what you can

see just here or I could choose to save

it to this PC so if I want to save it to

a folder on my hard drive that would be

my option as well now I'm going to save

this file to my PC so I could click on

this PC or I could click on browse at

the bottom so I'm going to click on

browse and that will let me choose the

location where I want to save this file

so I'm just going to go through and

select a folder

the folder I'm going to choose here is

Project 2019 course files now at the

moment the course files folder is empty

as far as the save as type that I'm

using which you can see down here is dot

MPP which is the default file extension

for project files

so all I need to do is go down to file

name and give my project a name

so I'm going to call this SSI

wedding

wedding zero one

and click on Save

now when I've saved that the file name

appears in the header of the Microsoft

Project 2019 window so you can see there

it says right at the top SSI wedding

zero one dot MPP

and if I now like to save this or any

other project using the approach I've

just taken I can do that so if I go back

to file and save as

and this time let's click on this PC

you'll see that I have now listed at the

top the last save location so it's

showing me that the last file I saved

was into the project 2019 course files

folder so it makes it very easy for me

to access the folder that I've recently

saved into now there's a couple of

important things to note about these

sort of lists and locations of lists and

files and that is the more you work with

project 2019 obviously these lists are

going to get longer and longer and

you'll find that save locations and

items will start to drop off the bottom

of the list

now something to anticipate that if you

have locations that you save into on a

frequent basis and things you want to be

able to access quickly you do have a

very useful utility in Project 2019 and

that is the ability to be able to pin

folders to the top of the list

and you'll see as I hover over the

project 2019 course files if you cast

your eyes to the right hand side you'll

see I have a little drawing pin icon

if I click on that drawing pin

that's going to now pin that folder to

the top of the list so no matter how

many other save locations I start to see

build up in here this one is always

going to be at the top and you can pin

more than one you can pin

um up to about 30 I think it is into the

top of this list so that's also a really

useful utility for being able to quickly

access folders that you use most often

so in a moment I'm going to look at some

of the options for opening that wedding

project again but before I do let's go

into project options

and straight to the advanced page and I

did mention earlier on that we would be

looking at some of these Advanced

options as we go through the course

there won't be time to go through each

and every single one of them you can see

there are quite a few in here and some

of them I will leave for you to go

through in your own time but I would

like to point out a few of them as we go

and I do suggest that from time to time

you take a browse through these options

it's always good to know what your

settings are and if you need to adjust

those settings to enable you to work

more efficiently with whatever it is

that you're doing for example on the

advanced page in the display group which

is just down here you'll see this first

option show the number of recent

projects and it's currently set to 50.

so here you can very easily control how

many projects appear in your recent list

and below that option is show the number

of unpinned recent folders and then

below that option you also have an

option to quickly access this number of

recent projects so again you could

select however many projects you want to

be able to access quickly from there and

then underneath that we have show this

number of unpinned recent folders so you

have a number of options just here that

you can experiment with to get them to

the optimum level for you and the way

that you work so I would definitely

check out those options I'm fairly happy

with how they're set at the moment so

I'm not going to make any changes there

now I'm going to click cancel and what

I'm going to do is I'm going to exit

project altogether and kind of pretend

it's the next day and then when I come

back and see what happens when I start

up project so let's close down project

and then I'm going to reopen it well

when I start up project again I can of

course see the wedding project in my

recent projects list now I'm not going

to open that the moment what I'm going

to do is start a new blank project

and it might be that as I'm working on

my new blank project I decide that I

need to take a look at the wedding

project maybe as a quick reference point

now I don't actually need to close down

this project that I currently have open

I can have more than one project open at

once so I'm going to go to the file

ribbon and I'm going to select open and

of course there in my recent files is my

wedding project now again I might choose

to pin this again if this is something

which I reference frequently it might

serve me well to pin this to the top of

that list as well so let's just do that

so now I have my file pinned and if I

click on folders I also have my project

2019 course files folder pinned so you

have the option as well not just with

folders but also with Standalone files

so let's open the wedding project I'm

going to double click on it

so now I have my two projects open and I

can see that if I go down to my taskbar

and just hover over the project icon I

can very easily see the two different

project files that I've got open project

one and SSI wedding zero one and I can

choose to flick between them if I want

to so it makes it very quick and simple

to move between any of your project

files just by hovering over the project

icon in the status bar now that's one

way of cycling through all the projects

that you have open another way would be

to use your alt and tab key you may be

familiar with that that allows you to

cycle through everything that you've got

open not just your project files so you

could use alt and tab and a third and

final way that you might want to utilize

is actually within project itself if I

go to the view ribbon at the top

you'll see right in the group at the end

the window group we have a switch

Windows option and when I click that

you'll see that I then have access to

all of the files the project files I

should say that I currently have open so

again project one and SSI wedding zero

one and you can see the wedding plan has

a little tick against it because that's

the one that I'm currently viewing so

again this is a nice way of being able

to switch quickly between your projects

so any of those three methods are really

good utilities to use

so by now you should have enough tools

and techniques to create a project save

it close it and open it again and also

you should understand how you can work

on multiple projects at the same time

and very easily switch back and forth

between them so now it's time for you to

do the first course exercise that's what

I'm going to set you in the next section

so please join me for that

for the next section you'll want to

download the project 2019 course

exercise files click the link below in

the video details to get these you can

also scroll through the video details to

find time stamps for each section of

this course finally if you're enjoying

this training please leave us a thumbs

up and some comments

hello again and welcome back to my

course on Project 2019.

in this section I'm going to be setting

you exercise one and the information

that you need to complete exercise one

is in the exercises folder and what

you're going to need is the text file

exercise zero one major tasks Dot txt

and you can see I've got that file open

here in notepad and that lists the major

tasks the major headings for the

bathroom refit that you are going to

plan which is very exciting

so I would like you to use this list and

produce a Microsoft Project 2019 project

like this one behind now note the name

that I've given my sample answer at the

top here so we've got Simon says it

project 2019

exercise01 dot MPP all of the sample

answers that I provide will be in that

same exercise folder so make sure that

you finish up with something pretty

close to what I have here and I do

appreciate that these start dates may

not be relevant for you at this current

time so make sure you finish up with

something that is pretty close to what I

have here I do appreciate that the start

date and the Finish date May Vary in the

examples that you're using depending on

when you're doing this course so so see

how you go with exercise one that's it

from me for this section please join me

in the next one

for the next section you'll want to

download the course exercise files click

the link below in the video description

to get these you can also scroll through

the details to find timestamps for each

section in this course

if you're enjoying this training please

leave us a comment

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019.

in this section we're going to look at

some other basic properties of tasks and

I'm just going to go back to that first

version of The Wedding plan that we were

looking at so the top one here remember

I've got it pinned to the top of the

list makes it super easy to access and

I'm just going to open that by double

clicking

now if I look at that first task the one

with the name planning and if I click in

the duration field

the duration as I explained earlier has

a default value of one day which you can

see here with a little question mark

next to it which indicated that this is

an estimated duration

I can of course use these little scroll

bars at the side these little scroll

arrows to increase the duration or

alternatively decrease the duration and

you'll see as soon as I do that the

question mark is removed so it's no

longer an estimated duration because I'm

inputting something into that duration

cell

now I don't have to use these little

scroll arrows just here for instance if

I went into the attire field for example

I can literally click in this field and

I can type something in there if I

wanted to so I could type three days for

example

and you'll see that as I type that if

you look up into the little bar at the

top here it also inputs three days and

if I'm happy with that I can click on

the tick to accept it like so

and as you can see as I adapt and adjust

the duration of these tasks the bar in

the Gantt charts on the right extends

accordingly so we now have these two

bars showing us three days and the rest

of my plans showing as one day

now we haven't actually looked at the

definition of working days and working

weeks and working hours as yet but you

can probably see from that that when I'm

talking about for example an eight day

task I'm talking about eight working

days and that doesn't include days at

the weekend with the current calendar

that I'm using on this project

now look very carefully at the bar

charts on the right because for the

tasks that still have a one day

estimated duration you'll see that at

the right hand end of each of those

you've got a vertical line this one just

here now it's pretty much coincidence

that it's at the right hand end of those

bars that vertical line indicates the

current date so that is essentially what

I like to call the today line so at any

point you can see where you are today in

relation to the project or if you like

where the project is in relation to

today

and we've talked about the Project's

start date supposing I was entering this

project and in fact the various aspects

of it had started a couple of weeks ago

I'm a bit late setting this project up

in Project 2019.

so some of these things may have already

happened

what I could do is change the project

start date

so look for example at that first

planning task which says it starts on

March the 14th

so that's the date that I entered it

yesterday and that is currently the

start date for this project

so let's go into project information

which you'll find up here on the project

ribbon and down into project information

so let's go in and change this start

date to a date two weeks ago you see I

have my little calendar here so I'm

going to select

Friday the 1st of March

and then click on OK

now none of the durations have changed

but each of the tasks has an updated

start date

now of course I could change the

individual task start dates so for

instance if I wanted to change the date

that the entire task is starting and if

I decide that a tire is something we

maybe need to think about a little bit

and I know that people need to sort out

their clothes but I think I'm going to

leave that until after the Easter break

so I might want to change this attire

start date

to after Easter so I'm going to put it a

month in advance so let's say

April the let's do 15th

so that's when the task is going to

start

now in doing that one of the problems I

have is that this task is now shut off

to the right in my chart if you look I

can no longer see it that may or may not

be a problem but you know how to resolve

that already because you know about the

zoom slider so right in the bottom

corner we have our little Zoom slider

with our plus and our minus buttons to

control it and the only reason I can't

see it is because we're not on that

correct part of the Gantt chart so if

you look at the dates running across the

top they don't go as far enough into the

future currently for me to be able to

see the start date of this task so I'm

going to zoom out very slightly by

clicking on the minus

and there we go you can see my little

task pop into view as I zoom out a

couple of times

and of course if I wanted to I could not

only set the duration of each of these

tasks but I could start to actually set

them out in time

so for instance I could decide on a

wedding day and assuming that I'm

confident we'd be ready for that I could

plot that at some time next year as well

and similarly for each of those other

tasks I could set up a duration

I could decide on the start date and I

could start to put my project plan

together with a lot more care and

attention and hopefully with a lot more

resemblance to what is actually going to

happen

and that is indeed what we're going to

be doing over the next few sections

however this project if it's just

comprised of those roughly 10 tasks it

wouldn't really be a very realistic

project so what we're going to need to

do is put in a lot more detail to make

this into a realistic planning exercise

now in order to do that you need to know

quite a lot more about tasks and you

need to know about things like

dependencies and resources and one of

the things I'm going to tell you about

and in fact we're going to start on this

straight away in the next section is

that you need to have an understanding

of summary tasks and outlining but for

the balance of this section I just want

to look at information about tasks now

we've seen task name duration start and

finish date

I mentioned work once or twice now

before I do this if I look across my

column headings where I have task name

duration start finish so on and so forth

and if I drag this across very slightly

you can see that I don't have a column

currently labeled work and I want to

have a column called work

so if you do need to make adjustments to

what columns you see here if you look

right at the end we have something that

says add new columns so I'm going to

click the drop down and there is a whole

host of different columns that you can

select and they are in alphabetical

order making it slightly easier for you

to find the one you want

and I'm going to scroll all the way down

to the bottom

and I'm going to look for the one that

says work and there it is so let's

select it and you see I now have a work

column so I'm just going to grab it

and drag all the way across and I'm

going to drop it next to task name

and now you see I have my new column in

between task name and duration let's get

back to just talking about information

about tasks

for any task in Project 2019 there is an

awful lot of information about that task

available and you may need to be able to

manipulate that in some way

now I've got the attire task selected

and what I'm going to do is right click

on that row

to bring up the contextual menu

and one of the options about fourth from

the bottom there is information and I'm

going to click information

and it brings up the task information

dialog

now this is a dialogue with half a dozen

or so tabs running across the top and

each tab has information about the

selected task

much of the information won't mean much

at the moment but by the end of the

course most of it will hopefully

and some things I think the descriptions

that you can see here pretty much

explain what that particular piece of

task information is about so for

instance you know about the name

but what about percentage complete or

the amount of work that we've done

well currently we haven't done any of it

so that's why it's showing a zero

percent complete

it's an auto scheduled task we've

briefly mentioned that previously

and you can see the start date and the

Finish date there it's not an estimated

duration so that's why this checkbox

isn't ticked

and it's a three-day task and it has a

priority of 500. now the other

properties on this particular tab are

ones that we're going to be looking at

later on but let's look at the other

tabs so let's jump across and take a

look at predecessors

what are this tasks predecessors which

tasks must happen before this one

or which tasks in some way depend on

this one which resources does it use and

there is also an advanced tab with

information like deadlines constraints

specific calendars

to use and so on

virtually all of these we're going to be

looking at during this course

we can also do things like record notes

about the task and we can even set up

custom Fields with custom information

about the task

so that's the task information for that

particular attire task

let me cancel out of this and just point

out something I've mentioned a couple of

times before task information is a good

example of something which you can get

at in a variety of different ways so

with the same entire tasks selected if I

go to the task tab at the top

and on the ribbon there is a button in

the Properties Group

called information

and that brings up the exact same dialog

box

let's cancel out of there

another way I can bring that up is to

just double click on the entire task

and you see I get exactly the same

dialog box so a few different ways for

you to bring up that task information

box

and that is something important for you

to remember because being able to access

this task information box quickly is

something that's going to be pretty

important to you as you run through this

course

and if you want to do a little bit of

extra reading about task information

remember that you'd always have that

help button down in the bottom left hand

corner of the task information box

so that's it for this section I will see

you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019.

in this section we're going to look at

summary tasks and outlining and I'm

going to use the wedding project and

demonstrate how we can build up the

level of detail and the structure of

this project now I mentioned a couple of

times already that the tasks that I

currently have in the project so

planning attire guest venue Etc are

actually high level tasks they really

represent groups of tasks and what we're

going to start to do now is to flesh

this plan out a little bit and break up

each of those high level tasks what

we're going to call summary tasks down

into individual tasks or subtasks and by

the end of this section we'll have a

much more detailed project plan

but to get us started I want to look at

one particular summary task

and just before we get into it I want to

point out two things

first of all if you were doing a

breakdown of the tasks involved in a

wedding project particularly if you're

doing it from scratch you would almost

certainly come up with a different

breakdown to me so so the tasks that I'm

going to add you might not necessarily

add into your project plan but just

remember that this is a guide as we go

through and you can add whichever kinds

of tasks you like but it is important

that all of the necessary tasks in the

project are represented ultimately in

the project plan and the second thing to

point out is although you're going to

add quite a bit of detail to this

wedding project plan you could add a lot

more so again don't use what I'm doing

as a casting iron guide you add in the

tasks that are relevant to whatever it

is that you're planning now we're

probably going to end up with something

in the order of between 50 and 100 tasks

in total but if you were doing this for

real and it was a particularly thorough

plan you might have 100 hundreds and

hundreds of tasks so please just bear

that in mind as we go through so the

task I'm going to break down first is

this one here the guests task so if I

click on venue and then right click my

mouse I can go to insert task

and what that will do is it'll insert

this new task item surrounded by

Chevrons underneath guests

and this means this is going to be one

of my guests subtasks it gets a default

name of new task and then default values

for duration work start and finish date

as well now I'm going to rename this

task to make it a little bit more

meaningful

and all I need to do is click in the

entry bar at the top and type in the

name so I'm going to call this one make

guest list

[Music]

and hit enter

so that's my first guest related task

now the important thing here is that

this is actually a subtask of my guest's

task and in order to indicate that it's

a subtask I'm going to demote it in my

task hierarchy and there is a button in

the schedule group on the task tab for

that so if you go to the schedule group

you'll see you have promote and demote

buttons and you'll see if I hover over

this one it says indent task and gives

me the keyboard shortcut for that

and if I hover over the other one it

says out Dent task

so if I click on indent the task

automatically demotes within its

hierarchy so now not only does make

guest list get indented and it clearly

indicates that this is a subtask of

guess because of a number of other

things that are going on here as well

one of them is that the word guests has

now become bold indicating that this is

a summary task

and also it gets this tiny little wedge

or triangle next to the word guests

and we can use that wedge to collapse or

expand any of the subtasks related to

that task so if I click it my subtask

disappears if I click it again it

reappears so this is really useful and a

really sort of uh great space-saving

trick when you have lots and lots of

tasks which we will do as we build this

up if you're not particularly interested

in a particular group of tasks at that

moment in time you can just collapse up

the group and it just enables you to see

a lot more of maybe the tasks that you

are more interested in so it's a really

great way of being able to control that

now what I'm going to do is I'm going to

put in a second subtask so I'm going to

click on venue again

I'm going to right click and select

insert task

now this new task has clearly gone above

venue again but it also inherits the

indentation level what we call the

outline level of the task above it so it

automatically becomes a subtask of guess

because it gets the same indentation

level

so let me again type in a name for my

new task up to the entry bar and we're

going to say for this one uh send

out invitations very important thing to

remember

and click on the tick or press enter now

my column is wide enough to accommodate

send out invitations but if I did have

my columns slightly less wide slightly

narrower I should say you'll see that

the text automatically wraps around in

the cell

I'm just going to take that back

by double clicking to expand to the

length of the longest piece of text in

this column

now if when I enter this send out

invitations wasn't actually meant to be

a sub-task of guests all I need to do is

make sure that I've got the tasks

selected and then one of the other

buttons in the schedule group is the

other one that we use so outdent task so

if I click that you can see it moves it

ever so slightly and it's no longer a

subtask of guests and we can test that

even further if I was to collapse that

guest task

you can see that I can still see send

out invitations it hasn't been hidden

with the rest of this group essentially

so very easy to indent an outdent tasks

to either make them tasks or subtasks

now in this instance I do actually want

to send out invitations to be part of

this guest group so I'm just going to

highlight it again and use my indent

task button to make that a subtask of

guests once again

so what I'm going to do now is go

through and add in a third and a fourth

subtask for the task guests

so having entered the fourth subtask let

me just point out something else here

let me right click on book guest

accommodation note that the indent and

the out Dent buttons are both available

here as well on the mini toolbar so if

you wanted to you could use those as

well

and as usual as you're working in

Project 2019 project itself offers you

the most likely commands on either the

contextual menu or the mini toolbar so

keep your eyes open for those because

they often give you a very quick way of

working on a task like this

now at this point you may feel inclined

to work out how long each of the tasks

is going to take and when each of them

needs to happen and so on I don't want

you to worry about any of those things

at the moment we're going to come back

to the durations

and the time scales and dependencies and

so on as we go through the next sections

of the course

all I want to do at the moment is to put

in the structure of the project and then

we'll start to add the detail a little

bit later on

having said that there's one more thing

I need to show you here about summary

tasks so let me go to make guest list

and I'm going to increase the duration

to eight days

now if you look over at the Gantt chart

itself you'll see that the make guest

list task is indeed now eight days long

but you'll also see that the summary

task no longer has the same type of bar

representing it as a standard subtask

the summary task has a different format

bar on the right there now we're going

to talk about Gantt chart formatting

much later on and you can in fact change

most aspects of formatting of These Bars

anyway but there's two important things

one of them is that the summary task

does have a different format of bar

which helps it stand out on the right

there

but also the summary tasks by default

does not have a duration of its own the

duration of the summary task is actually

the duration from when its first subtask

starts right through to when its latest

subtask ends

so the duration of the summary task is

an effect dictated by the scheduling of

these sub tasks so if we look at hours

here our guest task is showing in this

format and it's showing eight days and

that's because the longest task or the

longest subtask I should say that we

have currently is make guest list which

is also eight days long and the other

subtasks are only one day so hence why

this bar is showing as currently being

eight days long because it will show the

duration of the longest subtask in the

list what I'm going to do now is to

insert the rest of the subtasks for this

particular project now if you'd actually

like to do this yourself rather than use

the sample file the demo file that I'll

tell you about towards the end of this

section there is a text file in the

course file folder and this text file

lists each of the subtasks under its

relevant summary task

so if you want a bit of practice you

could go through and set all of these up

this is what you'll see in that text

file and again just a reminder it's

called SSI project 2019 wedding task

breakdown dot txt so please feel free to

use that as a practice

so here is the revised wedding plan

this will be the version that I'll save

as wedding zero two so if you want to

take a look and perhaps somehow compare

it with the version you've made yourself

that's fine and there is one other area

now that we need to look at and in order

to look at that area what I'm going to

do is add even more detail to this

temporarily

now I'm going to take the task select

and Order wedding dress and I'm going to

break that down into three further

subtasks so I'm going to right click

select insert task

and the first one is going to be

select wedding dress

[Music]

and click the tick

and I'm going to then indent that to

make it a subtask of Select an order

wedding dress and you'll see as

immediately when I do that the task

above select an order wedding dress

becomes bold and I get my little

triangle at the side that expandable and

collapsible triangle

let's do another one same process right

click insert task and we'll call this

one

order dress

[Music]

and the final one

might be measurements

and fittings

and you'll see that all of them have

taken on the same indentation of the

subtask that we added

and then we might for example break down

measurements and fittings into

measurements and then first fitting

second fitting third fitting something

like that so as you can see even though

we're in the very early stages of

planning this project we're already

getting pretty deep into building out

that structure for our plan

now when you're looking at a plan like

this and bearing in mind that we've

still only got roundabouts oh let's have

a look right to the bottom under 50

under 45 tasks I should say the highest

ID number there if we scroll down is 43.

if we really went in and putting all of

the detail actually making your way

around this plan would start to get

quite complicated because it will look

more and more complicated we haven't

even started yet on durations and

assigning resources and putting in

dependencies and time constraints and so

on so there'll be much more detail to

add

and it's usually the case when you start

to increase the size of a project that

you only want to look at certain parts

at certain times or even that you only

want to look at the project at a certain

level now there is a straightforward way

of determining the level of detail that

you see in a plan such as this one

so I'm scrolled back up the top of my

plan and I'm going to select a tire the

entire summary task

and that's the task with the ID of four

if I click on The View tab

and I'm going to go to the data group

and there is an outline button just here

and if you look at the description you

can see this the screen tip has come up

it says specify which outline level

should be used in the view for a large

project you may want to collapse

everything to outline level one or two

and then expand only the sections that

interest you

so if I have a tire selected

and I click on the bottom of this

outline button let's see what happens if

I say select for example hide subtasks

now you'll only see a tire and all the

subtasks and all levels below it are

hidden

let's go back to the outline button

again and if I want to show those

subtasks I just click on show subtasks

and there we go

now in fact I can apply the same

principle to the whole project

so if I click on the bottom of the

outline button again

and say click on level one

it's going to show me outline level one

and look what's happened here all I see

is everything just at level one

if I click on level two

I get to see everything at level two but

note with task ID 5 select an order

wedding dress under a tire level 2 means

that I don't see its subtasks I only see

the level 2 subtask select and Order

wedding dress so as you can see the

summary tasks like planning an attire

and guests are all at what we call level

one and the level below that is level

two and so on there is in Project 2019

and level zero and level zero is

actually pretty important so let me show

you what level zero is

if you go into the Gantt chart tools and

the format tab towards the right hand

end in the show hide group there is a

check box for project summary task and

the project summary task has some very

important uses some of which we're going

to look at during the duration of this

course

now I already have this switched on but

if I was to take the tick out of that

box just look in the task name field

what happens when I untick project

summary task

can you see it removes that main heading

let me click it again

and you can see SSI wedding zero two

comes back and there is a duration

for the project summary task which in

effect is the duration of the entire

project currently and as we'll see there

are many aspects of the project that we

need to use the project summary task in

order to deal with but more on those

things later so I'm going to select the

project summary task I'm going to go

back into outline and I'm going to click

hide subtasks so bearing in mind

anything you select in this outline

group applies to the tasks that you're

currently clicked on which is why I

clicked on the project summary task and

now you can see it's hidden pretty much

every task in my project

so let me put those back again

show subtasks and my project comes back

and then finally since I've put in the

subtasks of Task 5 here select an order

wedding dress I think I'll leave these

for now they may be a little bit useful

later on

so that's it on summary tasks and

outlining please join me for exercise

two in the next section

for the next section you'll want to

download the project 2019 course

exercise files click the link below in

the video details to get these

you can also scroll through the video

details to find timestamps for each

section of this course finally if you're

enjoying this training please leave us a

thumbs up and some comments

hello again and welcome back to project

2019 in this section I'd like you to

take the information in the file in the

exercise folder project 2019 exercise 2

task breakdown dot text which is this

text file that I have open on the screen

and I want you to use that to create the

Fuller version of the bathroom refit

project with structure so for example in

the planning summary task there are six

subtasks scoping select style decide

about project manager check permissions

required fix dates and temporary

accommodation and what you should

produce will hopefully be similar to my

sample answer for exercise 2.

now notice I've still only got one day

estimated as the duration of each task

but my project now has structure and in

particular note the project task summary

right at the top there it has an ID of

zero

so that's it for exercise two my sample

answer is in the usual place and I will

see you in the next section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019

in this section we're going to look at

dependencies and as we're doing that

we're going to add quite a bit more

detail into this wedding plan

now you might be wondering what a

dependency is well a dependency reflects

the fact that something's happening

depend on other things happening the way

in which they depend can be quite

complex but in a very simplest type of

dependency we would say that one task

cannot start until another task finishes

but we can have much more complex

dependencies than that and in particular

one task may depend on many other tasks

now let's start looking at this let's

take a pretty straightforward dependency

to begin with so let's take a look at

task six and seven

select wedding dress and Order dress

now clearly you're not going to order

the dress until you've selected it but

as soon as you have selected it you

might then want to order it if I want to

record in my schedule that one task is

dependent on another the very simplest

way of doing it and let me select this

first task here task six

I'm going to hold down my control key

and select task seven so I have both of

those tasks selected currently I'm then

going to go up to the task tab

and in the schedule group there is a

button just here it looks like a chain

link button and it says link the

selected tasks and you can see there

that there is a shortcut Key Of Control

Plus F2 so let's click that and you can

link tasks so one can't start until the

other one has finished and this

establishes the very simplest kind of

dependency

now if you look over on the Gantt chart

you can see that we now have an arrow

indicating the dependency whereby task 6

must finish and you can see the little

arrow there so it comes out of task six

at the Finish Line essentially and

points towards the start of task seven

and if I pull this divider here

you'll see that that reveals the

predecessors column and you can see that

now for task 7 in the predecessors

column it now has the number six in

there which states that task seven is

dependent on task 6 completing now let's

look at the durations of these tasks so

let's go back to select wedding dress

this is obviously very difficult to be

absolute about but let's suppose that

the bride has decided that in order to

select a wedding dress it's actually

quite a long and complex process so

she's probably going to need maybe a

month or two in order to be able to do

that so let's say that in terms of

working days weekday working days let's

call it eight weeks or 40 days in this

case so if I click on the wedding dress

task and go to duration and I'm just

going to change this

to 40 days

and you can see immediately that the

Gantt chart updates to reflect that now

that's all fine but in terms of ordering

the dress that's a reasonably quick task

once you've made the selection you're

probably going to order that dress

fairly quickly so that could be a matter

of going into the store and filling in a

form committing to spend a certain

amount of money maybe paying the deposit

on the dress and we'll talk about things

like costs later on

and we're really going to say that the

order is going to be placed in a day so

let's change this order address and

currently we have um an estimate in here

of one day remember that's what the

question mark represents it's just an

estimate currently so I'm going to go in

and change this from an estimate to a

fixed duration now I can do that in a

couple of ways I could go in and edit

the cell or I could double click on the

task to bring up the task information

and just take that tick out of estimated

and click on OK

now once the dress has been ordered the

measurements and fittings can start

there'll be a sequence of these until

the dress is finalized and once again

let's assume that it's going to take a

total period of 40 Days for all that to

happen so we can select task seven and

we can select task 8 control key and we

could create dependency in exactly the

same way we did before

however if I right click on the

selection

if you look at the mini toolbar down

here you'll see that it has a link

button so I can do the link that way and

I can do the link before I establish the

second duration

so let me double click on task 8.

and change its duration to not estimated

and

40 days

and there we are

and at the end of task 8 we should have

a wedding dress that fits

now let's move on to task nine select

and Order bridesmaid dresses

now this is not a task which is

completely independent of the wedding

dress because as I understand it in

general the wedding dress would be

selected first with a thought to what

the bridesmaids dresses will be like

but you certainly wouldn't start

selecting the bridesmaid dresses until

you were certain about the wedding dress

so let's in this case say that the

dependency is Will select the wedding

dress before we select and order the

bridesmaids dresses now in reality with

a select and Order bridesmaid's dresses

that's probably going to be broken down

into more subtasks underneath that but

for the moment we'll stick with what we

have

so let's establish a link between select

wedding dress

and select an order bridesmaids dresses

so up to the task ribbon and in the

schedule group we're going to click that

link the selected task button again

and let's change this duration so I'm

going to double click on the task

and we're going to take the tick out of

estimated and we're going to say the

duration is 60 days

and you can see by looking at our

schedule now this takes us towards the

middle of July

and you can also see on our schedule

that select wedding dress now has a

number of tasks dependent on it and of

course any task cannot only have several

tasks depending on it but it can depend

on several tasks as well now let's start

to look at these dependencies in a

little bit more detail there is a

dependency from task 6 to task nine we

just set that up if I hover over the

arrow that represents that dependency

there is a screen tip that comes up that

gives me a summary of the dependency

it's an FS a finish to start dependency

that means that the first task in the

dependency that is Select wedding dress

must finish or F

before select an order bridesmaid

dresses can start and that is what the S

is and in fact if I double click on that

line

I get a task dependency dialog where I

could if I wanted to change that

dependency

so it says from select wedding dress to

select an ordered bridesmaids dresses

there is a finish to start dependency

with a lag of zero days

now if I decided in this particular case

that after the wedding dress was

selected and at that point we were going

to order it we could certainly start

looking at selecting and ordering

bridesmaids dresses but we needed to

leave a gap of say five days for some

reason and that would represent a lag of

five days

so let's do that let's change the lag to

five days just using those scroll

buttons

and click on OK so now you'll see that

there is a five day Gap

in between the finish of Select wedding

dress

and the start of Select and Order

bridesmaids dresses

so that is what we call a lag and I

could also have said that there is a lag

of minus five days so let's take a look

at that I'm going to double click

and I could take that back five days or

to minus five days

like so now that is what we call a

negative lag and we often refer to it as

a lead we still have a finish to start

relationship but what the relationship

now says is that the second task can

start five days before the first task

finishes so we can actually get started

on selecting and ordering the bridesmaid

dresses five days before we finish

selecting the wedding dress and again

you can see that represented here on the

Gantt chart there is an overlap between

selecting the wedding dress and

selecting and ordering the bridesmaids

dresses

now I'm going to restore that to being a

lag of zero days in a moment but first

of all I'd like you to look at the

predecessors column

if you look at task 7 or address

its predecessor was six look at task

eight its predecessor was seven when all

you see in the predecessor column is a

number that indicates a default finish

to start relationship with zero lag

if there's more complexity to the

dependency then you'll see something

such as you can see for task nine the

dependency is on task six so it begins

with a six

the fs basically says that it is a

finish to start dependency which is the

default but the reason it says that is

because it then says minus five days so

that code tells you that task nine has a

finish to start relationship with task

six which means that six must finish

before 9 starts but there is a five day

lead

so in effect task 9 can start five days

before task 6 finishes

and whenever there is anything other

than a standard default finish to start

relationship so if it's any other type

of relationship or if there is lag or

lead you'll see that coded into this

predecessor's column

so let me once again open up that

dialogue so I'm going to double click

and I'm going to change that lag back to

zero days

but just before I click on OK let's take

a look at the other types of dependency

now there are four types in total finish

to start which is the default as I

mentioned there is also start to start

which means that the second task can

start when the first one does

of course you can apply lag or lead to

any of these

the next one is finish to finish which

means that the second task can only

finish when the first task finishes

and then there is start to finish which

means that the second task can't finish

until the first task Starts Now by far

the most common dependency is the Finish

to start but you are very likely to come

across the others at some point and in

the next section or two I'm going to

show you one or two examples of these

other types of dependency

the next task I want to look at is the

task of making the guest list now making

the guest list can be quite a long and

controversial subject I'm going to

assume for a moment that it's going to

take maybe three to four weeks to try

and make sure that everybody that should

be invited is invited

so let's change this from 8 to 15 days

and again you can either click in the

cell and change it up here or double

click on the task so I'm just going to

put 15

and click the tick

but let's also say that once we've got

some guests on the guest list who are

definitely going to be invited we might

start sending out the invitations pretty

much straight away so for task 13 send

out invitations this would be a task

that would pretty much run throughout

the period of making the guest list we

may even wait to see what responses we

get to some of the invitations so let's

extend send out invitations to be a

20-day task so this time I'm going to

double click

and I'm going to change that to

20 d

and okay

and let's say that this is going to

start five days after making the guest

list starts

so once we've been working on the guest

list for a week we're going to start

sending out the first batch of

invitations and see what sort of

responses we get

so let's link these two

up to the task ribbon and click our link

button

and I'm going to double click

and set my task dependency so this is

going to be

start to start and we're going to put a

five day

lag in there

now we need to allow time for people to

respond to invitations as usual quite a

controversial subject how long you would

like to give people to respond to an

invitation but probably a figure of

something like two or three weeks so

you're going to start sending out

invitations on a particular date and

then over a period of time you'll send

out some more and you'll start to get

replies back

but in reality you can't really finalize

the guest list until you've received all

of the responses to the invitations

so what I'm going to do is to create a

link between send out invitations

and finalize guest list

so I've created a link between those two

and I'm going to put a lag of 15 days in

and then instead of saying it's a finish

to start link I'm going to say that it's

a finish to finish link

and I'm also going to say that finalized

guest list is a five-day task

and what you can see there is a

situation where at some point before our

deadline we're going to start to

finalize the guest list but we're not

actually going to be able to finish it

until 15 days after we've sent out the

last invitation

now of course the way that I've done it

that was partly just to demonstrate

these types of dependency but you'll see

from that also that when you're setting

up dependencies there are often a number

of options to consider and coming up

with the right sort of dependency can

sometimes involve quite a bit of thought

and discussion

so we've put quite a bit more detail

into our plan now for the wedding in the

next section we're going to look at

constraints and deadlines and we're

going to do a little bit more on

dependencies as well so please join me

in the next section for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019. since we last

looked at the wedding plan I've added

quite a bit more detail to it in terms

of the durations of many of the tasks

and also some of the dependencies so for

example if you look down at ID 20 where

we have catering within there there are

two pairs of tasks there's the first

pair and there is the second pair and

I've allowed 15 days for making a short

list of Caterers talking to them

making a decision about which one to

book and then finalizing the menu with

them

I've allowed 15 days for each of those

tasks

and then I've done the same for the

baker so make Baker shortlist 15 days

select Baker and Order cake also 15 days

now it may look from the current plan

that we could get this wedding done very

very quickly but as you can see one of

the main issues is that we're doing

everything all at once right at the

start of the project and in reality

that's not really what would happen

there just wouldn't be enough time in

this short period of time in the case of

a few weeks to do all of those things at

the same time and as we'll see later on

in the course there are various factors

or various reasons that will force us to

spread these activities out over time

but for the moment I just want to leave

the plan like this except for adding a

few dependencies that are really

important

now one situation that arises very often

when you're working on projects is that

there are one or two key decisions to

make and there are certain things that

you must do before you make those key

decisions and there are certain other

things that you can't do until after

you've made those key decisions and what

I want to look at in this first section

is the very key decision of The Wedding

Date itself so you can see here task 3

set wedding date now you can't do

everything before you decide on The

Wedding Date

so for example we talked in the previous

section about making out the guest list

and sending out the invitations you

can't send out the invitations until

you've set a wedding date

but you can't set the wedding date until

you know what the venue you're going to

use

um is and if it's available

you may also want to make sure that the

venue you're going to use for what we

call in the UK the reception is

available as well but you are going to

have to take some things on trust

so for example you may well have to say

well I'm going to fix the wedding date

and then see which photographers are

available and book one of those

photographers

so what I'm going to assume here in this

wedding plan is that there are two or

three key things that must happen before

we can set the wedding dates and from

that point onwards various other things

will be dependent on knowing that

wedding date

so appreciating once again that there is

quite a lot of detail missing from this

plan I've been through the plan and I've

decided that the two key things that I

need to do are number 18 book the

reception venue

and also number 38 book The Wedding

Venue

so I'm going to go up to

set wedding date and rather than using

the linking mechanism that I've used

before I'm going to type in those IDs

straight into the predecessors field on

the end here so I'm going to put in 18

comma 38.

and that gives me a date on which I'm

going to set the wedding date

I should point out that this is not

final yet because we have a few more

hurdles to overcome a little bit later

on and then from the setting of The

Wedding Date for example I can say well

if I select set wedding date then

certainly sending out the invitations

will be dependent on that

so I'm going to put a link in between

those two

up to task and click on link

and now we have a more realistic

representation of when we're going to be

in a position to send out the

invitations

now particularly in the early stages of

creating a project plan it's important

to review the plan from time to time to

make sure that things haven't been

missed I've left a couple of items here

which clearly have dependencies that

aren't currently represented in the plan

so for instance task 19

plan and finalize seating arrangements

and that will clearly need to have the

guest list finalized before that can

happen so really a predecessor of plan

and finalized seating arrangements

should be task 14.

now there is still one or two key

dependencies that I haven't put into the

plan yet but I want to turn my attention

now to constraints and deadlines

now let me insert a completely new task

into this schedule so right click insert

task

and you see that it's inserted it at the

project start date

we change the option much earlier on in

the course if you remember

and if I open up that task

and go to its Advanced tab I'll see that

the constraint on that task is that it

should start as soon as possible

and when scheduling from a start date

and when you have the project start date

as the default date for new tasks

that is the constraint that new tasks

get

generally speaking they should start as

soon as possible now there are a number

of different constraints that you can

set on tasks as late as possible as soon

as possible finish no earlier than so on

and so forth and it's worth pointing out

that as late as possible will be the

default when you're scheduling to an end

date

but you also have this multitude of

other options in the constraint type

drop down that you can select now it's

quite often external factors that mean

you need to put constraints other than

straightforward ones such as as soon as

possible onto a task in many cases when

you're scheduling from a start date as

we are here as soon as possible is the

best bet because you're basically trying

to get all of the tasks done as soon as

possible without restricting project to

do certain things on certain dates

but let's take an example of a possible

constraint

let's suppose that we already know that

one of the Bridesmaids who is the

bride's sister is actually out of the

country so she's working abroad at the

moment and she's not going to be

available for the select and Order

bridesmaids dresses until the beginning

of May 2019 so whatever else happens she

won't be available until then

now if I double click on this task and

go to the advanced tab I can say

constraint

start no earlier than and then I can

choose a date at the beginning of May

so whatever else happens she won't be

available until then

and when project 2019 schedules the

wedding it will take into account that

constraint that we can't start earlier

than that now you may want to at this

point also put a note in here to remind

yourself why the constraint is there

so across to the notes Tab and I'm going

to add a quick note

[Music]

[Music]

and as you can see project 2019 has

successfully rescheduled this task to

make sure that it doesn't actually begin

until the beginning of May

now with the plan as it is at the moment

and considering that particular task the

constraint that we've just added really

has had quite an impact on the duration

of the whole plan so you've seen there

an example of a constraint let's now

look at deadlines

deadlines in many ways are quite similar

to constraints but there are two or

three really important differences

one difference is that a deadline is

very easily visible in the Gantt chart

it's actually a physical marker in the

Gantt chart which you'll see in a moment

and you get not only a marker in the

Gantt chart but you can also get warning

indicators in the indicator column to

the left of the table

another major difference is that

although constraints are used in

scheduling as you saw just now with the

limitation on the availability of one of

the Bridesmaids deadlines are not

actually used in scheduling they are

used in some calculations associated

with scheduling but they don't actually

affect the schedule itself

so let's suppose that we decided

obviously we want the wedding to be a

huge success but if possible we'd like

to schedule it in a better time of year

so maybe it's always been our Dream to

have an Autumn or fall wedding so I want

to change the actual date of the wedding

to the beginning of September so what

I'm going to do is go down to the

wedding date task itself which is down

here task 41. open that up

and I'm going to go to the advanced Tab

and I'm going to put a deadline on it

and the deadline I'm going to put on it

is September the 1st

now you can't actually see September at

the moment in the Gantt charts on the

right there so let me just zoom out a

little

and now you can see that the deadline

marker the Green Arrow just there

and if I hover over it you see deadline

task wedding day deadlines Sunday

September the 1st 2019. now that's a

purely visual marker it won't put in a

physical limitation but clearly as we

work further on the plan we need to try

to make sure that the wedding day never

moves to the right of that date we've

got quite a lot more to do on it yet so

we don't need to worry about that too

much at the moment and as I say if we do

start to get a problem we will see an

indicator in the column at the left of

the table

so I have two other things to do in this

section both fairly quick things to show

you first of all I'm going to go into

options so file

down to options

and on the schedule tab

one of the options

is auto schedule tasks scheduled on and

we changed it to project start date

which is the setting that I usually use

but let me just change that

to current date and click on OK

and then I'm going to go and insert a

new task

now if I double click and take a look at

the constraints on that new task it

doesn't have an as soon as possible

constraint it has a start no earlier

than constraints of today

which means as the constraint implies

that the tasks cannot be scheduled by

project 2019 to start earlier than that

date

so that's an important distinction

I'm now going to cancel that

and delete both of those new tasks

so highlight them both right click

delete task

and I'm just going to go back in and

change that setting

so back to schedule

and I'm going to change this back to

project start date because that is my

preference

the second thing I want to do here is to

make quite a big change

right near the beginning of the plan so

id2 agree budget and approach in terms

of project management itself quite often

projects have phases and probably the

most likely phase with a wedding

planning project would be that we'd

start off by saying well how much money

are we going to need to spend on this

what sort of level of spending are we

looking at and what will our approach be

so for example are we talking about a

relatively small family wedding with

maybe just immediate family and a dozen

or so people or are we talking about a

much grander affair with two to three

hundred guests and maybe even more than

that attending the reception and

entertainment in the evening

now really that particular task is a

precursor to virtually everything else

within the schedule and sometimes when

you've been looking at a plan for a

while like this one you may decide

actually I'm not 100 sure about the

planning task at the beginning there

because setting The Wedding Date and

agreeing the bud budget and approach are

really two completely separate tasks

so what I'm going to do here is I'm

going to promote set wedding dates and

again you can do that from the mini

toolbar

and also promote agree budget and

approach

and I'm going to remove that planning

task

by right-clicking and delete task

and then I'm going to make task one a

predecessor of each of the summary tasks

so let me just drag this out slightly so

task 3 attire its predecessor is going

to be one

so what I've done is go through and put

task one as a predecessor of each of

those other summary tasks and this

reflects the fact that as you get more

and more detail and accuracy in a plan

you may well want to restructure it you

may want to take everything from a tire

onwards and put that inside a sort of

super summary task which would make it

much easier to represent the fact that

everything in that task follows after

the task with ID 1.

something else you can do which often

makes it easier to read a plan to

understand the structure of it if I

select task three

and on the task tab in the insert group

click the lower half of the task button

one of the options is blank row and you

can insert a blank row quite neatly into

a project plan and very often that

emphasizes the structure of the plan

note Also let's take this task here with

id1 if I insert a blank row again

look at what happens to all of the

predecessors in the predecessor column

the task is now task two and of course

all of the other task IDs are updated

accordingly so that's the end of this

section I will see you in the next one

hello there and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019.

in this section we're going to look at

milestones and Milestones are used to

denote significant points or events in a

project usually Milestones have a zero

duration but project 2019 does allow

Milestones with non-zero durations as

well

now Milestones are used for a number of

different reasons and amongst the most

important ones are as a way of providing

a management snapshot of progress on a

project so there is for example a

particular report called a milestone

report where you can just view the key

milestones in the project and get a

summary of where you are in terms of

those Milestones which in turn gives you

a good idea of General progress on the

project

they can also be used to show you what's

coming up next what's happening say over

the next week or so and very often

Milestones are associated with a payment

schedule of some sort so for example

when a particular point is reached in a

project there may be a payment to make

now what I'm going to do with the

wedding project is to take some of the

existing tasks and turn them into

milestones and I may well introduce one

or two new Milestones along the way

before I start note what I've done with

the project at this stage because it

looks a little bit different than when

we last saw it in the previous section

now this is version three of the project

and I've collapsed up all of those

summary tasks as you can see down here

from task 6 to 43 they're now all

collapsed and we cannot see the subtasks

so for instance there is a dependency

between a task in wedding day and the

setting of The Wedding Date but because

wedding day is collapsed

you can't see that link if I expand

wedding day again it's now visible

so just really to emphasize the point

that when you're looking at a project

with some summary tasks collapsed you

need to be careful at what you're

interpreting because some elements of

the project may have become invisible

even though they're actually quite

significant now one of the very

important aspects of Milestones is that

generally speaking although I should say

there are exceptions but generally

speaking because a milestone is a task

of zero duration it is assumed that

there is little or no work associated

with the Milestone itself so if I take

task 4 here for example set wedding date

if that doesn't actually involve any

significant amount of work I could make

it into a milestone but what I'm

actually going to do on this occasion is

to insert specifically a milestone which

indicates when the task has been

completed

so I'm going to select the task below it

which is basically a blank row and then

on the task tab in the insert group I'm

going to say insert task

now that task I'm going to rename to

wedding

date set

and click the tick

so that's basically a statement that

something has happened it isn't

something to do itself and then in the

duration I'm going to change it to zero

days which will make it into a milestone

and the default notation if you look at

the Gantt chart you'll see you get a

little Diamond icon and we also have a

date in there

so now I'm going to select set wedding

date

and I'm going to link these tasks in the

same way

so now I have my first milestone in my

project

now I'm going to set Milestones that

indicate when the venues have been

booked the venue for the wedding and the

venue for the reception so let's start

with the reception venue so I want

something to indicate that task 21 has

been completed so I can do the same that

I did just now insert task but there's

also an option within the insert group

on the task tab of insert Milestone so

let's try that one instead I'm going to

just highlight task 22 because we want

the new task to go in above I'm going to

go to the insert group and select

Milestone this time and you can see

automatically it's given me a task with

the duration of zero days let's change

the name so we'll say reception

venue

booked

let's just link these two tasks together

we should be getting used to doing this

by now

and I'm going to do exactly the same

down here for wedding venue so let's go

in

highlight the one below

put in a milestone

and we'll call this wedding venue booked

and we will link these two tasks

together

and then I've got just a very few other

Milestones to add I'm going to add one

to indicate that all of the attire has

been ordered one to indicate that the

guest list has been finalized and

finally that the wedding is registered

and licensed so I've added a few other

milestones in so I've added another one

to check that make to make sure that all

a tire has been ordered one to indicate

that the guest list has been finalized

and finally one to indicate that the

wedding has been registered and licensed

and then I have just one more thing to

do and that is that I'm going to turn

The Wedding Date itself into a milestone

so I'm going to select wedding day

double click

now I don't want to reduce its duration

to zero days because there will be other

things to do on the wedding day itself

so I'm going to jump onto the advanced

Tab and I'm going to check this little

checkbox down in the corner Mark task as

Milestone and click on OK

so that task is now marked as a

milestone but as you can see its

duration is still one day so there we

are we have some milestones in our

project I'm going to take a look at

those in just a moment before we do I

don't actually need this timeline that's

showing at the top here and as this

project is beginning to take up more and

more space let's save a little bit of

space by hiding the timeline now can you

remember back on how to do that we go to

the view Tab and you can just switch off

timeline at the top there if you only

want to see the Milestones you can use

one of the features of the view tab

which is to use a filter and in the data

group of the view tab there is a filter

control just here with a drop down and

one of the options in that drop down is

Milestone so if I select that you're

only going to see those project

Milestones so that gives you an idea of

how useful Milestones can be in terms of

setting out the key points in the

project over the course of its duration

now one other point that's clear here is

that we still have a lot of work to do

on this project because for instance we

still haven't worked out when the

wedding day is going to be it's still

right near the beginning of the project

now you might be a little frustrated by

this and thinking well why don't we sort

out that wedding date well the reason

that we don't is that we still have some

very key factors to take into account

before we can work out what the Wedding

Date can be and we're going to be moving

on to those factors after we've done

Exercise three once we've done those

we'll be in a much better position to

actually pin down a wedding day and then

we'll see how useful these Milestones

can be in terms of giving us a realistic

summary of the key points in the project

now if you applied the filter as I have

here I can unapply it by clicking on the

drop down

and selecting no filter

so that's the end of this section

exercise three is in the next one so

please join me for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019.

in this section I'm going to set you

exercise three and as exercises go this

one is actually quite a long exercise

and it will take you a little while to

work your way through this one and it

has a few constituent parts

what we're going to do is to take the

bathroom refit project and not only are

we going to add the durations of the

various component tasks but we're going

to put in dependencies and we're also

going to change the overall structure of

the project for reasons that I'll

explain in a moment now sometimes when

you go through a project and you have

your first try at listing out all of

those tasks as we've done here you might

be successful in some ways and you might

make it through that list but you won't

necessarily structure it in a way that

lends itself either to easy scheduling

and planning or to easy understanding

and you can finish up in a situation and

this is what is happening in the wedding

project that you finish up with many

many complicated dependencies

so for instance I have a task here

preparation it's task 16.

and one of its subtasks is prepare for

painting now we know that further down

in the plan we also have a paint task

and clearly one predecessor of the paint

task is going to have to be prepare for

painting but there will also be various

tasks following on from painting that

depend on it such as actually fitting

the equipment

now whilst the number of dependencies

are obviously going to be the

Cornerstone of scheduling the project

you can greatly simplify the structure

of the project once you've got your

basic lists of tasks by dividing the

project into separate phases and making

each phase as self-contained as possible

now what we're going to do with the

bathroom refit project is to make four

separate phases and from the point of

view of dependencies each of the four

phases is going to be self-dependence

now looking at what's involved in this

bathroom refit the four phases that I

think we should divide the project into

are basically a planning phase that

would be a phase of activities that

happen before we start doing the work so

planning certainly would be in the

preparation phase or the planning phase

but also things like arranging the

finances finding the contractors so on

and so forth this

phase is going to be a purchasing phase

and there's quite a lot of selecting to

do so I need to select paint equipment

tile so on and so forth and I need to

order it and also get it delivered

and I'm going to need to get all of that

done before the work actually starts the

third phase will be the work itself so

the implementation itself and the Final

Phase will be where any snags are dealt

with the sort of cleaning up phase

making sure that everything is ready to

be used now in order to give you the

information you need to do this division

into four phases let's take a look at my

answer to exercise three so you see

there the four phases as collapsed

summary tasks task two is the planning

phase summary task and its total

duration is 12 days and you can see the

different Columns of information clearly

the values in the duration columns for

the summary tasks will be derived from

the duration of its subtasks but the

predecessors column

shows you the predecessors of summary

tasks and the successes column shows you

the successes of the summary task so if

you take for example task ID 21 the

purchasing phase its predecessor the one

it depends on

is Task two which as you can see is the

planning phase and it's successor the

one that comes after it is Task 40 which

is the implementation phase

so you can see there the very simple

structure of the overall project in

those four phases now if I open up one

of the phases I'll give you an overview

now of the dependencies and how they

work within the phase now within the

planning phase there are three summary

tasks planning contractors and finance

and basically with these three summary

tasks the individual durations are there

and lots of individual dependencies

within the planning phase are also there

so for instance if we look at scoping

which is Task 4 you can see it has five

successors task five six seven eight and

nine and these include selecting the

style deciding whether we're going to

have a project manager or not checking

what permissions are required if any to

do the work and fixing the dates for the

works and arranging temporary

accommodations to use whilst the

bathroom is out of action and then we

have the summary task contractors

this is where we get some contractor

recommendations we make a short list we

get some quotations then we appoint the

contractors

note that the get contractor

recommendations task runs in parallel

with some early phases of planning but

we won't be getting any contractor

quotations until the planning summary

task so task 3 is complete because we

want to be clear about exactly what

we're expecting the contractor to do we

then have the finance summary task

once we've got all our contractor

quotations we can set about arranging

the finance now in order to help you get

all of these numbers right to get the

durations in and get the dependencies

right and so on I've prepared a text

file for each of the four phases which

is in the exercise folder and it lists

the durations and the dependencies also

the predecessors and successors in terms

of the task IDs in my answer to exercise

three

some reason your IDs are differently

numbered to mine then clearly that will

affect all of the predecessors and

successor values but hopefully your ID

numbers are the same as mine so you

should be able to use this to help you

not only enter the appropriate durations

but also to set up all of the correct

dependencies so I've got up on the

screen now the text file for the

planning phase and as I said there is a

text file for each phase in the exercise

folder so let's look at the purchasing

phase now you might be wondering

throughout why you can't see start and

finish dates here in my answer to

exercise three well whenever you're

working your way through exercise three

it won't be on the same dates that I'm

recording this so to a large extent the

dates if I gave you my dates they

wouldn't really help you it's the

durations that are important the

dependencies are important but I'm

assuming throughout that your dates are

going to be different from mine now the

purchasing phase is pretty

straightforward it includes the delivery

of each of the materials the tiles and

so on so at the end of this I've

introduced a milestone there which is

Task number 38 which is all materials on

site

that's a very significant milestone in

the project next we have the

implementation phase and let me explain

the main points here now we set up a

skip a receptacle for the waste products

which arise from gutting the existing

bathroom and from the building work that

we're going to do fitting the new

bathroom

then we have a lot of preparation to do

we need to prepare for the tiling

prepare for the flooring and also

prepare for the painting so those three

items might include things like joist

work there might be Plastering to do and

a whole host of other items and then we

do the first fix electrics and the first

fix plumbing then we do the painting and

the flooring and the tiling and the

other wall work that's needed all of the

General Building work which you can see

there in tasks 55 57 and 59.

then we start the second fix electrics

and this is things like putting the

sockets up on the walls we then do the

second fix plumbing which might be

things like uh pipes from the pipe work

behind the wall maybe installing things

like Taps it's also worth bearing in

mind it's often the case nowadays that

there's some kind of electrical

certification needed once the electrical

work is finished so I've put that in as

task 50 just here and then once the

second fix is underway fitting the

equipment begins which is task 61.

and then when fitting of the equipment

is finished we have a milestone which is

Task 62. the Final Phase the completion

phase again is fairly straightforward we

have a task to resolve any snags or

outstanding issues which is Task 65 here

and then we basically clean up and we

hail the project as being complete and

just one small reminder before I leave

you to exercise three do remember to

move your project to change those dates

to your start date as you're not going

to be using the same dates that I'm

using today when I'm recording this so

that's exercise three for you and that's

the end of this section I will see you

in the next one

Simon Says subscribe and click on the

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hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019. in this section

we're going to start to look at

resources resources include the people

involved in a project they include

equipment and materials used and various

other types of resource notably cost

associated with a project

when you look at the Gantt charts such

as this one you're primarily looking at

tasks the table on the left gives

information about the tasks and the

charts on the right gives a graphical

representation of the scheduling of the

tasks their durations dependencies and

so on

now tasks and resources are basically

the two building blocks of a project in

Microsoft Project 2019.

and we link the two together using what

are called assignments or resource

assignments in this section we're going

to look at resources and in the next

section we're going to look at resource

assignments one thing you may have

noticed when we're using the view tab

before is that the first two groups on

the left are task views and resource

views and largely speaking when we're

looking at a project we tend to be

looking at tasks or wrap resources but

there are many views that enable us to

look at both at the same time and in

particular look at the relationship

between them so far when we've been

looking at tasks we've used the Gantt

chart view which you can see highlighted

there in the task views group and for

most people that's the view that they

use most of the time of the resource

views a very popular view is resource

sheet view and that's the one that we're

going to look at first

so if I click resource sheets

this spreadsheet gives us information

about all of the resources in our

project and at the moment as you can see

we have no resources in our project now

we're going to start to add some

resources in just a moment but before we

do just look down at the right hand end

of the status bar you'll see we have

some icons

the one on the left is Gantt chart View

and the three on the right the one that

looks most like a spreadsheet takes us

back to the resource sheet so you'll

probably get used to switching between

resource sheet and Gantt charts the

other two views the ones in between are

also used fairly frequently task usage

which basically lists tasks and shows

which resources are used in a task and

at the moment we have no resources so

there's nothing being used and the next

one is team planner view which can

enable us to look at how the work on a

project is distributed between a team

now at the moment we have no team

because we have no resources to put into

a team

so let's go back to the resource sheet

view

the two main projects that I'm using on

this course differ in many ways and

perhaps the biggest difference is in the

resources that they use and the way that

they use those resources in the case of

a wedding some of the people resources

involved which would be for example the

bride and groom won't be charging for

their time and also the wedding won't

involve using lots of consumable

materials not in any case in the way

that a building project or a bathroom

refit project would if you think about

our bathroom refit project we have to

use materials such as paint and floor

tiles and that kind of thing

the difference is going to be even

bigger when we start looking at costs

because when it comes to cost for

example the bride and groom wouldn't

expect to charge their time on this

project to people whereas the people

working on the bathroom refit will be

charging their time to whoever is paying

for the bathroom refit so there are many

differences between these two projects

in relation to how they handle resources

and the associated costs

but I hope that by dealing with two such

different projects that we're going to

in turn deal with many of the situations

that you're likely to come across in

future when using project 2019

now as we add resources to the resource

sheet each row on the sheet represents a

resource and each column represents a

property of that resource

so the First Resource that I'm going to

add to this project is the bride

and first of all I need to say what type

of resource is the bride

there are basically three choices work

material and cost and as we're going to

see this is not always a particularly

easy choice to make generally speaking

people are entered onto the resource

sheet as work resources because they do

work and whether or not they charge for

that work is a separate matter but we

expect them to perform tasks and

complete work rather than as in the case

of say materials be consumed by a job

used up in doing a particular task or a

cost where we basically say with a task

that it has a certain cost but isn't

necessarily performed by an individual

or involve the consumption of some kind

of material now we're going to see an

example of each of these three resource

types but we're going to work for the

moment on the principle that when we add

people we're adding work resources

generally now when I choose a type for a

resource I will get different accessible

selection of properties here

so for instance when I declare that a

particular resource is a work resource I

can specify their standard rate and at

the moment that's zero dollars per hour

and I can specify their overtime rate

now as I mentioned just now the bride is

not going to be charging for her time on

this project so we don't need to assign

a standard rate or overtime rate for the

bride

we do however need to declare how many

brides we have and we only have one and

she's represented by that a hundred

percent just here

if I were dealing with say bricklayers

and I was building a house I might say

I've got three Brick Layers so that's

300 and I could say that the standard

rate that it costs me to employ those

Brick Layers and then I can also enter

an overtime rate I also have a cost per

use so for example if I'm dealing with

something where there is a setup fee

perhaps a delivery fee or a contract fee

I can specify that here and I normally

also specify an accrual method now for

the moment I want you to ignore accrual

and I also want you to ignore the next

column which is the calendar that this

particular resource uses which by

default is our standard base calendar

now we're not looking at calendars at

the moment so just ignore both of those

columns now when it comes to using any

resource on a project it's always a good

idea to give that resource initials

whereby we can identify that resource

for example on the Gantt charts so for

bride I'm literally just going to put

Bride for the initials

so that's my first resource set up

now it would only seem right to add the

groom as my second resource so let's add

him in here as well

and we'll stick with the same initials

and just call him groom

so now my project has two resources the

next resource I'm going to set up is a

little bit controversial I'm not really

sure you do it in this way but you

certainly could do it this way

I'm going to add a resource of wedding

ring and I'm going to say that this is a

material resource so let's jump back

onto the resource sheet and add wedding

ring

and I'm going to select material and I'm

going to give it the initials of ring

and note that when I chose materials

some of the other fields some of the

other properties also changed

so for instance Max was cleared out it

no longer said a hundred percent which

is the default for a work resource

because we're not talking about having a

maximum number of rings

we can basically buy as many rings as we

want subject to available funds of

course

and similarly the standard rate change

from being dollars per hour to just

dollars because we're not talking about

a rate of pay for somebody for a work

resource we're talking about the cost of

a material

when you're dealing with costs for

materials you also declare what units

the cost refers to

If instead of wedding rings I was

dealing with building bricks and what I

might put here in the material column

might well be one thousand for a

thousand bricks now for the price of a

ring it will be price per ring and let's

suppose the price I'm working on here is

500.

[Music]

and that is all the information I need

to set up that material resource so

whatever point I decide to buy one or

more wedding rings in my project the

cost will be recorded in the project as

500 per ring now for an example of a

cost resource sometimes a person working

on a project is not really working on it

as though they were say a builder or in

this case the bride or groom what they

are doing is more of if you like a

service so I might choose to make the

photographer or videographer for this

project a service or a cost to the

project we're not talking about paying

this person by the hour we're talking

about their standard charge for

photography or video at a wedding so in

this case I'm going to add the resource

photographer

and I'm not going to deal with the

photographer as though he or she is a

person working on the project but deal

with them as a service to the project a

cost to the project so on this occasion

I'm going to make the type cost the

initials I'm going to apply

are photo

now you notice that there is no

highlighted cost rate filled with

dollars as we had before for work or

material resources and in fact the best

way to record the cost of a cost

resource in a particular situation is to

assign that cost when you assign the

resource to the task I'm going to show

you how to do that a little bit later on

at the moment the important thing is

that we have listed our cost resource

here photographer and of course with

this project there will be many other

cost resources it is true to say in this

particular case that many of the

resources so things like the wedding

dress and even wedding ring might

reasonably be considered to be costs

rather than materials but as I said

earlier on in this section sometimes

it's actually quite a difficult decision

to make and you'll certainly find that

you have your own approach to

determining which is the best way of

dealing with resources on your own

projects having been set up a few

resources there we're going to do a

little bit of resource assignment in the

next section but there's one more thing

to show you in this section if I select

one of the resources and note that we do

have a resource tab one of the options

on the resource tab is information

and that brings up the resource

information dialog box as with the task

information dialog you have a number of

tabs running across the top and it's

already got in it the information that

we've entered so far but of course

there's other information that you can

add some of which we'll be looking at a

little later on in the course now there

are other ways of getting to this

resource information you can right click

and you have an information option in

the menu and of course you can just

double click on the resource to bring up

the same dialogue as well

so that's it for resources for the

moment I will see you in the next

section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019.

in this section we're going to look at

the basics of assigning resources to

tasks in the previous section we set up

a few resources for the wedding project

now clearly there are going to be many

more

but let's switch back to Gantt chart

View using the buttons towards the right

hand end of the status bar

and I'm going to choose one of the tasks

and assign resources to it

so I'm going to select the agree budget

and approach task I'm going to right

click and select assign resources

and this brings up the assign resources

dialog box and you can see a list of the

available resources so I'm going to

assign the bride and the groom to this

task I'm going to work on the principle

that the bride and groom are arranging

this wedding themselves so to assign a

resource all I need to do is Select that

resource and then click assign and

you'll see I get a little tick next to

the name now when I assign a resource to

a task list like that it doesn't

automatically close the assign resources

dialog you note that there is a separate

close button in the dialog box but what

you can see is first of all the number

of units well a hundred percent

represents one bride so there's one

bride attached to this task which is

just as well really and the cost of the

Bride working on that task is zero

don't forget that the rate for the bride

chargeable to this project is zero

dollars per hour so she's working on

that task for 10 days then she's still

not going to charge us any money for

doing it now one very important point

I'd like you to bear in mind here and

this is going to become increasingly

important later on in the course

is that a hundred percent means that the

bride is working on the task full time

now in reality it may well be that she's

not working full-time and that she's

actually doing her day job most of the

time and she's just spending a certain

amount of time working on in this case

the budget and approach to her wedding

but for the purposes of this particular

project and this will not be the case

for the bathroom refit but for the

purposes of this project all I'm going

to do is treat that as a hundred percent

as being all the time that she has

available that doesn't mean to say it's

a 40-hour week or an eight-hour day or

anything else it just means that all of

the time she's got available she's going

to spend on that task while the task is

in progress now fortunately while that

task is in progress she doesn't actually

have any other tasks on the wedding so

she can spend all of her time on that if

I want to assign a second resource and

the most obvious second resource to

assign is the groom I'm going to select

the groom and do the same thing click

assign and then I'm going to click on

close and the bride and groom are now

assigned to that task and you can see in

the Gantt chart we have our initials

bride and groom now one of the

consequences of assigning the bride and

groom to that task is to do with the

amount of work involved in that task I

pointed out to you much earlier on in

the course that when you look at work

particularly for a new project in the

work column there was a zero hours of

work because we had no resources

assigned to that task

as far as project 2019 is concerned

we've now taken a 10-day task and it

defaults to an eight-hour working day

so 10 days for eight hours a day is 80

hours and when I assigned two people to

it full time that is 160 hours of work

so as far as project 2019 is concerned

these two resources are going to do 160

hours of work on this particular task

now when you do this you effectively

increase the amount of work from zero

hours to 160 hours and project 2019

offers the alternative ways of dealing

with the change that you've made and

this little exclamation mark over in

that First Column gives you a little

drop down

and offers you alternative ways of

dealing with a situation where you've

increased the amount of work in a task

as far as the wedding project is

concerned this is of little Interest

really because we're not really going to

charge for the bride and groom's time

so the costings and in fact the

scheduling of this is not going to be

changed by the fact that we've assigned

two resources to that task we're not

going to say that because the bride and

groom are working on it it's only going

to take half the time we decided it was

a 10-day task and that was it we don't

make it a five-day task because two

people are working on it that set of

arguments about work and duration and

the amount of work in a task and so on

is what we're going to look at in the

next section and I hope that that

section will explain to you why we get

these options here and in fact which of

these options is the right one to choose

but on this occasion we're going to go

for the default option which is increase

the amount of work but keep the same

duration

when we do that project 2019 is quite

happy the warning has gone away we've

got our 160 hours of work and we've

still got a 10-day task and the bride

and groom are still assigned to that

task now my main concern over the next

few sections is going to be the

scheduling of this wedding and the

scheduling of projects in general and in

fact it's the assignment of work

resources that will be a key factor

so for the rest of this section I'm just

quickly going to show you a couple of

other ways of assigning resources and

we're going to assign those other two

resources that we set up one cost

resource and one material resource just

to go through the basics of dealing with

those

we'll be coming back to custom material

resources later though as I really do

want to concentrate on work resources

and scheduling now so let's jump down to

the photography section

and suppose I want to assign the

photographer to the select and book

photographer task

so essentially I'm going to assign the

cost of the photographer to this task so

let's jump up to that resource Tab and

select assign resources and that brings

up the assign resources dialog box and

from here it's very easy for me to just

select the photographer and click on

assign

now don't forget that when I assign the

photographer we don't have a cost

assigned because it's a cost resource

and we haven't specified what that cost

is until we actually assign it to the

task

now we're going to allow for the fact

that the photographer we're going to use

is going to charge right about 1500.

so let's add 1500 as the cost

and you can see just behind the dialog

box we now now have 1500 added next to

the photographer resource having done

that I'm going to click on close and we

can see how that cost appears on the

Gantt charts it is worth pointing out

this point that what you see on the

scant chart the words to the right of

the blocks in this case this is all

customizable and we will be looking at

customizing the Gantt chart later on in

this course

now the last assignment I'd like to make

here is the assignment of the Rings so

I'm going to go to select and buy rings

and I'm going to right click and I'm

going to use this third approach to get

to my assign resources dialog box and on

this occasion I'm going to choose

wedding ring and I'm going to actually

assign the number of rings because we're

actually going to buy

two rings

and you can see that as I do that if you

look behind on the Gantt charts it now

has two rings in Brackets

project 2019 is also recognized that

each wedding ring costs 500 and has put

a cost in of one thousand dollars for

the two rings the other important thing

to bear in mind here is that I could at

the same time assign the bride and groom

to this task as well

so if I select bride and hold down the

control key and select groom

and click on assign

I've now assigned them to this task as

well and I can now click on close

so I've now got three resources assigned

to that task I've got the bride and

groom which are work resources I've got

the bride and groom and I also have two

wedding rings so that's the basics of

assignments in the next section we're

going to turn our attention back to work

and we're going to look at work with

particular reference to different types

of tasks that's it for this section I

will see you then

hello again and welcome back to our

calls on Project 2019

now that you know how to assign

resources to tasks the next thing we

need to move on to is producing a

workable schedule given the resources

that are available

in order to do that there are a couple

of fundamental things that you need to

understand and perhaps the most

important thing to understand with

project 2019 is the different task types

that can be evolved in projects

now in order to illustrate this I'm

using sort of a dummy project and this

is a very simple project with three

tasks in it task a task B and task C

and currently their duration is two days

and there's one resource assigned to

each task and that resource is Jane and

Jane is also working for eight hours a

day so on task a Jane is doing 16 hours

work task B 16 hours and task C 16 hours

of work and remember the reason why task

a is a longer bar it's spread over a

greater number of days is because we're

not counting the weekend as working days

so effectively she's still working two

days the Friday and the Monday now let's

suppose that I provide Jane with a

little bit of help so I say to Jane hey

Jane John is going to help you with

these tasks now if I assign John to task

a what do you think would happen now

what may happen is you may look at it

and say well obviously Jane is going to

be able to get the job done in half the

time so instead of being a two-day task

it's going to be a one day task and

obviously that is one option but there

are a couple of other options as well

one other option is that if John works

on that task as well it will still take

two days but they will do 32 hours work

during that time so with twice as much

resource twice as much work gets done

but in the same time another possibility

is that we still want to get our 16

hours of work done and we still want to

do it in two days but the fact that

we've got both Jane and John working on

it means they only need to devote half

their time to it so we effectively have

three different options and those three

options correspond to the three options

you saw in the previous section when

project 2019 said you've changed

information about resourcing on a task

so let me just show you that again I'm

going to right click on task a and I'm

going to click assign resources

I'm going to choose John and I'm going

to click assign now notice the little

warning sign on the left there project

has assumed that in assigning John I

still want to spend two days on this

task but having that second person we're

getting twice as much work done so let's

go over to the warning sign and click

the default option there the middle one

increase the amount of work but keep the

same duration

the first one was reduced duration but

keep the same amount of work

so in that case we would have said well

we're still going to do 16 hours work

but because we've got two people on it

we can do it in a day

the third option reduce the hours

resources worked per day but keep the

same duration and work

so we say it's still a two-day task it's

still only going to be 16 hours work but

Jane and John only need to work half the

time each now I'm going to stick with

the default option here and what I want

to do now is to show you why that was

the default option let me open up task a

now the reason that was the default

option was because the task type was

declared as a fixed duration and very

importantly the box to the right of that

effort driven was not checked

so what this says is that this task is a

fixed duration task it's a two-day task

and putting more effort in on it will

not automatically reduce its duration

so my default is to keep the duration

fixed and therefore if I add a resource

to it I'll just get more work done now

let me look at task B now let me look at

task B now the way that task B is set up

is As a fixed work task

so the amount of work is fixed and all

fixed work tasks are effort driven so

note that the effort-driven box is

checked but it's grayed out so I can't

change it now what do you think will

happen if I add an additional resource

to this task it's fixed work it's effort

driven so I'm going to assign John to it

so right click

assign resources

John assign

and look what happens I still get 16

hours of work done but of course now

with the additional resource it can be

done in one day

if I go over to the warning on the left

and click on the drop down the default

now reduce the duration but keep the

same amount of work

well that's the default for a fixed work

task which is always effort driven but I

could say increase the amount of work

but keep the same duration so I could

say well okay it's declared to be a

fixed work task but on this occasion I

want to actually increase the amount of

work having put the additional resource

in and then I have the option of

reducing the hours resources work per

day so I could say okay I'll put a

second person on it it's fixed work but

because I'm not changing the amount of

work each of the resources only needs to

work part-time on it to achieve that

amount of work now on this occasion I'm

going to stick with the default and the

duration of that task has been reduced

by one day now let's look at task C now

task C is a fixed unit task and

currently it's not effort driven now the

significance of the effort-driven part

is whether in fact what we're trying to

do do is to do a certain amount of work

to put in a certain amount of effort and

in doing that we're flexing we're

varying the number of people working on

it or the duration in order to get that

amount done

if a task is not effort driven then

we're not trying to achieve that certain

amount of work or put in that certain

amount of efforts and if I put more

resources onto a task then all that will

happen is that more work gets done and

as a task that's currently not effort

driven if I assign additional resources

and let's really go to town this time

let's go back into assign resources so

let's go to town this time and add all

of them so I'm going to highlight them

all and click assign and close

and now you can see that we're going to

get a lot more work done with four

resources assigned to this task 64 hours

of work now as usual I've got the yellow

warning sign on the left there and you

could choose a different option but

basically we're getting the default

which is increase the amount of work but

keep the same duration now let me undo

that particular change

and let's go back in now and make it

effort driven

now that means we're trying to achieve a

certain amount of work putting in a

certain amount of effort

now what happens if I assign those three

extra resources

given that it's a fixed unit what do you

think is going to happen well let's see

let's assign our resources

and we're going to assign everybody

again

and what's happened is that the duration

is reduced so in half a day four people

can do that amount of work

once again of course I get the warning

sign and I can change that if I want to

but basically as it's not fixed duration

putting on that extra number of people

means that I can get the work done much

more quickly as I mentioned towards the

beginning of this section we're going to

be doing quite a lot of scheduling from

now on and scheduling in Project 2019

can be quite complex at times and

requires a bit of understanding of

what's going on there is a very useful

help article how project schedules tasks

behind the scenes and it's well worth

going through this help article it's

very useful very well set out and it

gives lots of very helpful information

of course I will be covering virtually

all of this on the course and quite

often in a little more detail than

you've got here but there is a section

in here and I think it's the fourth one

in the list how do you task types affect

the schedule fixed units fixed work and

fixed duration and what will happen if

you revise units if you revise duration

if you revise work and then gives one or

two really good examples

of what happens in different situations

so I do suggest that you take some time

to go through this and it will really

help you if you can increase the level

of your knowledge on scheduling in

Project 2019 and another important Point

here and I briefly mentioned this again

right near the beginning of the course

in Project options on the schedule page

there are a couple of very important

settings one of them is default task

type mine is set to fixed units I find

that this isn't something that I leave

set the same way all the time I often

vary this depending on the type of

project that I'm planning sometimes

setting it to fixed duration or fixed

work throughout the time that I'm

working on a new project in particular

can actually save me time but I've got

it here set to fixed units and another

default here is new tasks are effort

driven in my case that's not checked you

may find that you prefer your new task

to be effort driven or again you might

vary it from job to job so that's it

we've covered the basics of task types

in the next section we're going to start

to look at scheduling itself so please

join me for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019. in this section

we're going to start to look at

scheduling and as part of this we have a

couple of fundamental things to do to

our plan in Readiness for actually

coming up with a realistic schedule for

the wedding now the first thing I want

to talk about is the difference between

manual scheduling and automatic

scheduling and as part of doing that I

just want to explain something about

scheduling in Project 2019 if you want

to take a plan such as this one that we

have here and schedule it manually there

will be nothing to stop you now what I

mean by scheduling it manually is that

you choose exactly which task starts on

which date and you check that you've got

the time to do it that the resources are

available that your constraints and

deadlines are met and so on so you can

pretty much hand craft the whole

schedule

now in some situations you may have

projects where that's exactly what you

decide to do

but with a large project with a lot of

resources and many constraints

dependencies Etc that would be a very

very large job it would probably take

you quite a lot of time to maintain that

schedule particularly if there's a lot

of change involved and particularly if

as the project starts things start to

shall we say not go according to plan

largely speaking one of the main reasons

that people use project 2019 is to

automate the scheduling now of course

there are many other reasons to use

project 2019 but the automatic side of

scheduling is one of the most

significant ones and it's the one that

we're going to be concentrating on quite

a bit over the coming sections

so my fundamental assumption about the

wedding plan and indeed about the

bathroom refit is that we're going to

Auto schedule them having said that and

as we're going to see with the wedding

schedule within an auto scheduled

project you may well decide to manually

schedule some of the tasks

so for instance in the wedding plan we

may well actually manually schedule the

actual wedding date and fix it in time

and not allow project 2019 to change it

but the rest of the schedule we may be

quite happy for project 2019 to Auto

schedule

now one of the things that I haven't

done yet and which I need to do now is

to resolve the question of when the

wedding day will actually be

and at the moment of course because

wedding day or task 48 has no

predecessors it's almost the first task

in the project which clearly is not

correct I really need to show that the

wedding day is going to happen when

everything else is done

I know there will still be a honeymoon

after the wedding date but the honeymoon

itself isn't actually in the schedule at

the moment we've only got the making the

short list and selecting the destination

and booking the honeymoon we don't have

the honeymoon itself

so in effect the wedding day is going to

be the last task now one way of doing

this would be to have other summary

tasks such as catering flowers memories

as predecessors of the wedding day

but often when you're starting to get

into the scheduling of a project you

decide that one or more tasks or groups

of tasks can be separated out into

significant phases

and what I'm going to do here is to

separate out the wedding day and I think

the rehearsal as well and I think these

are going to be considered the last

phase of this project and then what I

can do is to say that this last phase

has its predecessor the preparation

phase the phase when all the work on

deciding on the venue booking flowers

Etc is all done

so what I'm going to do is take tasks 47

and 48 that I have highlighted here and

separate them out from the rest of the

schedule and make them a separate phase

now one of the things you need to be

careful of here because I am going to do

a cut and a paste which is something I

haven't talked about much so far

and that is where you have tasks such as

these two which are subtasks of in this

case The Wedding Day summary task in

order to cut them and put them elsewhere

I need to stop them from being subtasks

of a summary task

so having selected them I'm going to out

Dent them using the schedule group on

the task tab

and I'm going to click the outdent

button

now I get a warning and you're going to

see this quite a few times these

planning wizard warnings

and this one tells me that if I out Dent

these two they will no longer be

scheduled as part of the Wedding Day

summary task

and in fact they'll be rescheduled to

start before the Project's start date

now that sounds a little bit dangerous

but in fact it's something that's going

to happen from time to time this sort of

planning wizard warning

and what you can say with confidence in

this case is that because I'm going to

immediately reschedule those with a

different set of rules this particular

planning wizard warning is not one to

worry about because although they will

be given a very strange date it will be

only for a very short period of time

until I change them again

so I'm going to click on OK

and my tasks have now been out dented

now note that the scheduled tasks are

now right back to actually before the

beginning of the project which is

clearly not when the wedding day is

going to be but we're going to change

that in a moment

so now I'm going to cut those so now I'm

going to select cut

I'm going to place my cursor in a row

just below the end of the schedule and

I'm going to click paste now once

they've been pasted into place they pick

up the indentation of course of the task

above them task 49 in this case now I

don't want them as part of the honeymoon

so I'm going to select both tasks and

I'm going to out Dent them I get that

same warning again about their

scheduling and again I'm going to click

ok to continue and they're back to being

scheduled far too early now let me go

back up to the attire task

select it and then do an insert task

above that

and that is going to be my task my

summary task for the preparation phase

so let me change the task name

and we're going to say

preparation phase

and then what I'm going to do is to

select a tire which is now task eight

write down to task 50.

foreign

those to make them part of the phase

and then for the wedding day task which

we have down here in task 53 it's

predecessor will be the whole of the

preparation phase so I'm going to put a

7

in the predecessor column

and I now have a wedding day

on August the 20th 2019 now I know

that's not right but at least I've got a

wedding day now which is at the end of

the wedding project generally speaking

if you're going to use phases in a

project it's a good idea to do that

before you start scheduling partly for

the reason that I've just shown you

where it often makes it much easier to

set up dependencies

now I've got one or two other very small

changes here I'm going to change the

name of task 44. it's currently called

wedding day and I'm going to change this

to wedding venue

and one particularly useful thing to

note is that wedding day is an

individual task

and it has its predecessor as a whole

phase so you can really mix and match

these dependencies the next thing we

need to do is check the add task types

are correct very often when you're

setting up a project you will have

thought carefully about task types

you'll have your default set

appropriately and you'll also want to

make sure that any exceptions from the

default are set up as well while we've

been setting up the wedding day project

my default has been set to fixed units

as you know but let me just demonstrate

to you now and bearing in mind what we

looked at in the preceding section that

in this particular project fixed units

is not a good choice

so let's go to the select and buy Rings

task

and let's suppose that the bride and

groom look at that task and it's a

four-week task and they say well it's

not going to be a full-time job for us

to select and buy the wedding rings over

that time let's say it's only going to

take half of our available time

so let's go into assign resources

and we get the assign resources dialog

box again

obviously

these two are assigned to that task but

they're assigned 100

and watch what happens when I reduce the

bride's assignment to 50 percent

as you can see the task becomes a 40-day

task

the amount of work continues to be set

at 320 hours

now of course in this project the bride

and groom's time isn't chargeable and

we're working more on a notional idea of

what proportion of their available time

is being used on each task

so when we say the bride is 50 allocated

that's just half of the time that she's

got available to work on the plans for

the wedding

now clearly the idea is not here to

extend that task but just to reflect the

fact that the bride's time on it is only

going to be half of her available time

so what I'm going to do is close this

and I'm going to undo that last change

and what I really need to do here is to

set the task type for this and

effectively every other task in the

project to be a fixed duration task

now if I want to change a fundamental

property of a task you've already seen I

can use the task information dialog box

and I can also change a whole set of

tasks by selecting multiple tasks just

by holding down my control key and using

the same approach so what I'm going to

do is Select everything from a tire I'm

going to go all the way down

to task 15. hold down my shift key and

click and that will select everything

between those two tasks

and then with the control key held down

I'm going to make other individual

selections

so rehearsal wedding day and if I scroll

back up to the top hold down control and

select those three as well

and I'm going to change each of those to

be fixed duration so if I click on

information on the task Tab and go to

the advanced Tab and make sure that I

have fixed duration in the task type

and not effort driven note that when you

see just a black blob or a black Square

in a box it means that you have a mixed

type in there so some are and some

aren't

now you need to be very careful when you

transfer what you're looking at here to

the bathroom refit project because the

bathroom refit project has a situation

with task types that are a little bit

different from what we have here in the

wedding project

so let's click on OK and that's all fine

now let me go back to that wedding rings

task and once again I'm going to right

click and go to assign resources

and once again I'm going to change it to

50 percent

and watch what happens this time look at

the duration and also look at the work

now what happens is the amount of work

is reduced the duration has not changed

the bride is shown at 50 percent

now if I reduce the groom to 50 as well

you'll see we're not changing the

duration but we are showing that each of

the resources is only needed for 50 of

their time over that period

so now we've got what looks like a

better project and you may think that

we're coming up to being close to having

a workable schedule but in fact the

schedule we've got is going to present

some major problems and as you can see

here for example if you look at the

second half of April that the major

problem is going to be that we have far

too many things going on at once and

given that the bride and groom are going

to be doing a lot of this work

themselves we're going to find that

they're going to be over allocated on

some parts during certain periods of

this project

so what I'm going to do now is to

quickly go through and allocate the

bride and groom to all of the tasks in

the schedule that they're going to be

responsible for and you can start to see

how we have a scheduling issue so here I

have allocated the bride and groom

sometimes full time sometimes with the

proportion of their time and in the left

hand column you can see the little red

symbol that indicates that that

particular task has over-allocated

resources

now if I look at the resource sheet

I can see that the two resources that

have over allocation problems that means

they've got too much to do over a period

of time are the bride and the groom

which is no surprise and how we resolve

those is what we're going to look at in

the next section

now as I mentioned at the beginning of

this section it's in our interest to be

able to automate the resolution of

over-allocation of resources but in

order to do that it's also important to

understand the context within which

we're working

so for instance which things we can

delay and which things we can't and

which things we'd prefer not to delay if

it can be avoided and so on but they're

the issues that we're going to look at

in the next section when we're going to

look at leveling resources so please

join me for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019.

we're starting this section from wedding

five and we're going to look at resource

leveling

the way we left things in the preceding

section is that I had assigned the bride

and groom to tasks for which they had a

level of involvement and we can see that

both of them are significantly over

allocated particularly during one period

in the second half of May where they

have a lot of different things to be

doing all at once you can see the

specific tasks that are over allocated

with the indicator in the left hand

column and I pointed out to you in the

preceding section if we look over at the

resource sheets

the two resources that are marked in red

are the ones that are over allocated so

the bride and the groom

and of course in something like this

project we don't really have the option

of say having a couple of extra Brides

or a couple of extra Grooms to spread

the work over

in another project such as for example

the bathroom refit if the tiler or the

plasterer or the bathroom fitter had too

much work to do you could possibly get a

second person in to help but that isn't

really an option for us here now one of

the things that I mentioned in the

preceding section which of course is a

very important thing is to make sure

that you have your default task type set

correctly so let's just take a look at

that now

on the schedule page in Project options

in scheduling options for this project

note that I have this project selected

so wedding five

and the default task type I now have is

fixed duration

note also that I have the check box new

tasks are effort driven not checked now

if I go back to this drop down here for

all new projects My overall default is

still a default task type of fixed units

so in the absence of a specific change

for a specific project that is my

overall default fixed units and you'll

obviously need to set that up in the way

that suits you now it's very likely when

you're planning projects and as your

projects progress that you will

experience over allocation of resources

and there are a number of ways of

resolving these over-allocations and

we're going to be looking at quite a few

during the course

but before we do just one very important

point to make is this there isn't a

universal way of resolving over

allocations the resolution of

over-allocations almost always involves

understanding the underlying project or

the underlying business that your

project relates to now one of the key

things you normally need to decide is

whether to resolve over-allocations

manually or automatically both of them

have a place and it may well be that you

work on the principle that as far as

possible you resolve over allocations

automatically but that you'll revert to

manual methods where necessary it

actually wouldn't be that complicated

for us to go through and resolve all of

the overallocations in this particular

plan manually but it can be very time

consuming and automating this process as

much as possible is usually the best

approach if you can in fact automate it

successfully which is not always the

case

now the first thing I'm going to do is

to demonstrate a manual resolution of an

over allocation and I'm just going to

take the first over allocation here

select wedding dress and I'm going to

show you very quickly how you can

resolve this manually now the fact that

project 2019 has put that red marker

there that says that this task has

over-allocated resources

so it tells you that there's a problem

and it also says right click for options

and we're really interested in the top

three options now I'm going to start

with the second one here fix in task

inspector

we're going to look at the task

inspector later in the course so we'll

come back to that one

and the third one is ignore problems for

this task

in the same way that in the preceding

section once or twice I said Let's

ignore that warning from the planning

wizard there will be situations where

you have an apparent over allocation but

either you know it's not really a

problem for reasons I'll look at later

or you may know that you're going to fix

that problem later and don't need to

deal with it now so you do have the

option of ignoring a particular problem

related to over allocation now the first

option is the one that you'll very often

use when doing manual resolution and

it's rescheduled to an available date

and what you're basically saying to

project 2019 is I want you to find a

date when this task can happen and I

don't then have an over allocation

against it and that's what we're going

to do here now notice the task has been

rescheduled and also notice the little

red mark from the left column has gone

and also note that the date the end date

of our project has pushed right out

quite a long way actually so we've

pushed everything related to the wedding

dress out to the right because of course

that one task select wedding dress had a

number of successes including order

dress measurements and fittings and of

course that delays the entire summary

task which in turn delays the whole of

the preparation phase and if we look all

the way down here now we can see our

wedding date has moved to September the

6th now we could go through each of

those over

tasks and resolve it manually in that

way but as I say that would be time

consuming and generally speaking we'd

like to automate it so let's look at how

we might possibly do that now you might

be tempted in this situation to undo

what we just did and start again with an

automated version of the process but

before we do I want to demonstrate

something else I'm going to change the

view

and the view that we're going to use is

one specifically that we use when we're

working on leveling resources

so I'm going to click on other views

more views

and I'm going to choose leveling Gantt

now the leveling Gantt view effectively

shows you what project 2019 is doing in

terms of leveling the resources on a

project

now when you apply a new view like this

it's very often the case that the time

scale is all completely wrong

so let's go back up to the view tab

and in the zoom group click on entire

projects so that we see the project on

the right there

and you note in particular this little

colored bar here against select wedding

dress

that bar represents the leveling delay

the amount of delay that was added to

that when we did the manual leveling

just now

and in fact we have a set of tools to

handle leveling delays now before I use

one of those tools look at the table on

the left let me just make the name

column a little bit wider

and there's a column there leveling

delay and the current leveling delay on

that task is 42 e days and e-days are

elapsed days so when we did the manual

resource leveling just now what project

2019 had to do was to delay that task by

42 elapsed days

and that's the currently applied

leveling delay to that task

now also notice that its successes

which were also delayed were not delayed

because of leveling of themselves they

were delayed because we delayed the

select wedding dress task that had the

resource over allocation

so they're leveling e-days are set at

zero days they weren't delayed because

of a leveling problem they were delayed

because they are successes of a task

that had a leveling problem now if I

wanted to put this particular project

back to the way it was I could obviously

do the undo but I can also go to the

resource tab

and click the button just here clear

leveling in the leveling group and watch

what happens if I clear the leveling

I get an option of clearing it from the

whole project or the entire project or

just the selected tasks

and as I've only done one bit of

leveling here I might as well stick with

entire project and click on OK

and basically what happens is the task

goes back to where it was before

and now if I revert back to Gantt chart

View

it would look exactly how it looked

before

and of course I've got my over

allocation indicator on the left there

for task 10. now before we look at

automatically leveling let me just point

something else out we asked project 2019

to reschedule select wedding dress to a

date where the resource wouldn't be over

allocated

you can reschedule these things

completely manually yourself

so there will be nothing to stop me

going into any of these tasks and

changing the start and finish dates and

I could go through all of them and

change the start and finish dates

manually schedule them manually change

their task types from Auto scheduled to

manually scheduled if necessary and fix

any of these dates in time if I wanted

to

but what we want to look at now is the

opposite of doing that and that is

putting everything in Project 2019's

hands and seeing if it can resolve these

over-allocations automatically for us

so I'm back in the regular Gantt chart

View and I go to the resource tab

and in that level group that we just saw

now there are two buttons there there's

a level resource

and a level all level resource gives me

the ability to level one or more

selected resources so if all I wanted to

do was to level the bride and make sure

she's not over allocated I can select

one resource and then click on level now

and project 2019 will try to level the

bride over the project so that she's not

over allocated at any stage

now it's important to recognize it will

try because it may well be that the

constraints the deadlines the

dependencies that might mean that she

cannot be leveled there are going to be

situations where she's just got too much

to do over a period of time so you may

find in many of the projects that you

can't completely resolve over

allocations or should I say not in a way

that you're 100 happy with so that's

leveling an individual resource the

level all button basically levels all

resources and if I click on level all

I may possibly get one or more warnings

now I haven't at this stage which is

good news and there we are now as you

can see most of the red markers in the

First Column have gone and our wedding

day is now on January the 23rd 2020 so

the dates have got pushed out a long way

so overall our schedule is coming

together and we've got some very good

aspects of the schedule now because for

example we have the reception and venue

identified we have the wedding venue

identified and if they're both done

before we send out the invitations

that's pretty good

we also have the wedding itself

registered and organized and we also

have the wedding itself registered and

licensed early on

but when we look at things like caterer

florist Baker so on and so forth we're

making the short list and then there's a

long time before we book those people

and the booking is probably a little bit

too late in the day ideally we seem to

have left the bookings much too late in

the process whereas with other aspects

such as the wedding rings maybe they're

roughly in the right kind of place

but quite often when you look at a

schedule after leveling you'll find that

resulting schedule doesn't really tie in

with the ideal sequence of events and

there are a number of options you can

apply when leveling to help you to get

to the kind of sequence of events that

you want while still resolving any over

allocations and the use of those options

is what we're going to look at in the

next section so please join me for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019

in the preceding section we did a little

bit of manual resource leveling in order

to try to overcome over-allocations of

the bride and groom's time in our

wedding plan now what we're going to do

in this section is to look at automating

the leveling of resources in Project

2019

and primarily we're going to look at the

options that are available when you're

doing this

now before we start I should point out

that when we did the leveling before we

came up with a schedule that indicated a

potential wedding date of August the

20th now that's a good starting point I

think we may go for a date a little bit

later than that but first of all we need

to make sure that all of our issues are

overcome it may well be that it appears

to be a good date and the plan appears

to work but until you've actually looked

at any outstanding issues you can't

really be certain that the end date in

this case The Wedding Date is going to

be achievable

the other thing to bear in mind is that

with any project you are dependent on

making sure for example that you have

all of the tasks dependencies Etc in

place that your estimates your time

estimates your resource estimates are

good and that your resources are going

to be available

now we're going to take a look at some

of the things that might go wrong a

little bit later on in the course but

for the moment let's assume that our

resources are available and we're pretty

much scheduling this project on the

basis that given that a lot of it is

down to the bride and groom they're

going to be very committed to getting

the wedding running to schedule and that

therefore they'll be more than happy to

put in a bit of extra effort to deal

with any problems that arise now the

first thing I'm going to do is undo the

leveling that we did in the previous

section so if I go to the resource tab

in the level group there is an option

called clear leveling now look carefully

at the schedule particularly around the

area of Select and Order wedding dress

so now we're back to where we were

now what we're going to try and do is to

level automatically and before we do

that let's look at the leveling options

now the resource leveling dialog has

many options and we're going to look at

a few of them in this section one or two

we're going to save until later on in

the course now first of all do you want

leveling calculations to be automatic or

manual now I normally set this at manual

because whilst having project 2019

automatically deal with leveling can

work quite well when you're setting up a

project it can actually be a little bit

annoying because you get to a situation

where it's leveling resources and you're

thinking to yourself well hang on a

minute I've got loads more tasks and

resources to put in yet so you're doing

work that is really a waste of time

because until all of the project or the

bulk of the project is in there there's

not really any point in doing this so I

tend to go for manual level calculations

the next option look for over

allocations on a default day-by-day

basis you can also have minute by minute

hour by hour down to month by month now

this is a very important option and I'm

going to explain it to you with an

example

let's suppose you have somebody doing a

task for two hours a day over the course

of a week and maybe it's the only job

they've got to do on a project

but on Wednesday you need them to do a

full day task so they've got an

eight-hour job to do on Wednesday if you

have over allocations being looked for

on a day-to-day basis project 2019 will

look at Wednesday and say they're over

allocated because they've got two hours

on the first task and eight hours on the

second task that's 10 hours that's too

much work but if instead I said on a

week by week basis what project 2019

will do is to say let's add up that

first task a week five days two hours

that's 10 hours let's add the time for

the second task that's eight hours but

if instead I said on our week by week

basis what project 2019 will do is to

say okay let's add up that first task a

week five days two hours that's ten

hours let's add the time for the second

second task and that's eight hours so

that's a total of 18 hours and I've got

plenty of time in a week to do 18 hours

of work

so as far as project 2019 is concerned

in that case they're not over allocated

basically what project 2019 is doing is

leveling out or evening out the work now

in case of the wedding well we're not

really that concerned about exactly what

hours are being worked the bride and

groom have indicated the proportion of

the time they need on each task so I'm

going to be quite happy with week by

week leveling the next option is the

leveling range do I want to level the

entire project or do I want to just

level a certain date range what can

sometimes happen when you're working on

a long project is you may for example

have the project in phases and over the

next phase say the next few months it

may be important that you have the

resources leveled

but for phases of the project which are

much further off into the future

leveling resources might be a bit of a

waste of time because you don't really

have the detail in yet so leveling

resources over that period really is a

waste of time and will flag problems

that don't really yet exist so in that

situation you might want to choose to

say just the next few months to level on

this occasion though we're going to

leave it at level entire project the

next option we're going to look at is

the leveling order but in fact I'm going

to cover that last I want to look at the

check boxes below that first because I'm

going to briefly review those first of

all there's an option level only within

available slack now we're going to talk

about slack and the critical path later

on in the course but basically if I

check that box that says level only

within available slack that means that

leveling will be done in such a way that

the end date of the project is not

delayed now this may well constrain how

successful leveling can be but it does

mean that we can be certain that this

isn't going to cause a delay in the

project

at the moment this is unchecked so any

leveling we do May well delay the end of

the project the second option leveling

can adjust individual assignments on a

task rather than move a task and of

course the assignments associated with

it for all of the resources that are

assigned to the task it can adjust

individual assignments

so it could take one resource and adjust

that resources assignment on a task in

order to overcome an over allocation

issue that's currently checked so we're

going to allow that and the third option

there leveling can create splits in

remaining work

you may recall that when I did that

manual leveling exercise and it moves

some of the tasks associated with the

tire out to the right you may have

noticed that one of the tasks was

actually split into two with a sort of

dashed line between the two halves what

project can do is to split outstanding

tasks and say we're going to do part of

the job then we're going to take a break

from it then we're going to do the other

part of the job and this is on the basis

that in that Gap in the middle the

resource is working on the task are

needed to do something else

again we've got this ticked so it's

allowed the fourth option level

Resources with the proposed booking type

is one we're not really going to cover

on this course you can really have two

types of booking you can have a proposed

booking and a confirmed booking now as I

say the use of these booking types is

outside the scope of what we're covering

on this course but later on in your use

of project 2019 when you start looking

at proposed and confirmed booking types

that's an important option to be aware

of when you're leveling the fifth option

dictates whether leveling can be applied

to manually scheduled tasks now

generally speaking by default we don't

level manually scheduled tasks but if

you do want to include manually

scheduled tasks then check that box

so that's the group of five options one

or two of them will come up again later

on in the course and let's concentrate

now on the leveling order in Project

2019 there are three options for

leveling order and by default the

leveling order here is standard and with

standard what basically happens is

Project 2019 uses all of the information

you've given it about resources tasks

dependencies constraints Etc and does

the best job that it can to level all of

the resources on the project but you do

have two other options these two options

are very different but as I'm sure you

appreciate by now even using the same

terminology and looking at the same

types of problem on two different

projects you very often take a very

different approach to solving a problem

now the first other option we have is

called ID only and the way the ID only

leveling works is is that leveling is

done strictly in terms of the ID numbers

they're the numbers on the left that you

can see in the table in the Gantt chart

so task one task two task three and so

on the higher the number the more likely

it is to be leveled I mentioned very

early on in the course that there is

absolutely no reason for you to put the

tasks here in if you like chronological

order or any other order for that matter

but many people do put tasks in an order

whereby if leveling is to occur then the

ones that are if you like further down

the schedule the ones with the higher ID

numbers will tend to be leveled to be

delayed the most now that usually

corresponds with the general concept

that the tasks near the beginning of the

schedule are the ones that are done

first and the ones near the end are the

ones that are done last so with ID only

that's the rule that project 2019

follows the other option is priority and

then standard and what happens with this

is that you give projects some

guidelines on the basis of priority

so let's suppose that we have a

particular task that we definitely don't

want to be delayed we know it's involved

in an over-allocation issue but we don't

want it to be delayed what we would do

is to give that task a higher priority

than all of the other tasks similarly if

we have a particular task wherever it

was in the schedule it wouldn't matter

whether it was near the beginning or the

end wherever it was we would give that

task a lower priority and that would

tend to reduce its chance of being

delayed as part of the leveling process

so first of all what I'm going to do is

to try just to use standard leveling and

see what sort of results we get so I

select standard and I click on level all

and project 2019 comes up with a new

schedule now you're going to see some

problems with the schedule straight away

the number of read over allocation

indicators is greatly reduced so that's

good um you won't necessarily always see

them all disappear but there is

certainly a lot less than there were

before we did the leveling but let's

look at our end date

if I scroll down and take a look at the

end date well our end date is now

December the 9th 2019. So currently the

way the schedule is planned with all the

tasks that we have in we're not going to

be finished until December the 9th 2019

but let's have a look at some of the

issues because there are some issues in

here for instance if we scroll up to

catering and make cater a short list you

can see that there's a huge gap between

make cater a short list and then book

caterer and finalize menu so there's

clearly some work needed there on the

scheduling because we don't want that

huge long Gap but perhaps even more

importantly if we scroll up and take a

look at the order of the dress

we can see that the ordering of the

dress and the measurements and fittings

and the attire generally is being left

right until the very last minute if you

look at those dates up there if you

imagine that the wedding is uh in the

middle of December we're not doing any

of these things related to a tire until

right up to that date so obviously we're

going to need to do something about that

because that's way too late in the day

to be making decisions about the attire

so standard leveling hasn't really done

the job for us on this occasion

so let's undo that and let's try setting

one or two priorities now one of the

things that takes a little bit of

getting used to when you're doing

leveling is that there are quite a few

options and although I'm going to

demonstrate priorities now you may

alternatively choose to add things like

uh constraints that they must start on a

certain date or even make them manually

scheduled tasks but let's suppose the

first thing that I'm going to try is to

say well the most important thing to get

started with is to sort out the guest

list and the invitations and of course

as part of that we're going to need to

book the venue so that we can send out

the invitations

and we're going to need to have decided

on the actual date and so on most of

that is covered by the dependencies that

we've already set up if I just make that

a little bit wider

but let's go into make guest list and

change its priority so on the general

tab we have a priority set to 500 so

let's change that to 600 and click ok so

we're making that the highest priority

task and then we're going to do the same

for sending out invitations let's make

that 600 as well and then let's go into

leveling options and choose priority

standard and click level all and let's

see what happens so now if we scroll

down to wedding day so we can see that

date is now slightly earlier it's

December the 6th 2019 so we've actually

come up with a slightly better solution

so having sorted out that particular

issue we might turn our attention now to

the attire and give that a higher

priority than it currently has and maybe

also look at some of the other tasks

perhaps ones which could do with a lower

priority so think things like the

florist we may decide that the florist

is one of the last things we would need

to do

but in that way with Selective use of

priorities we should be able to come up

with a pretty good schedule so what I

want you to do next is to give you a

chance to try a little bit of resource

leveling and scheduling now on the

bathroom refit project so we're going to

do that in exercise four and that's

going to be covered in the next section

so I'll see you then

hello there and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019

in this section I'm going to set you

exercise four now this is a reasonably

straightforward exercise but it takes a

little bit of explaining

now I'm starting you with a version of

the bathroom refit project version zero

four a and I've set up some resources

but I'm only really concerned here with

the resources and the second part of the

project

so for the first two phases the parts

that I'm effectively going to do myself

where I'm not going to do things like

look into the color scheme and the tiles

and all those things I'm not really too

worried about resourcing those in fact

with those I've generally set up a task

type to fixed duration

but later on in the project for the

implementation phase and also the

completion phase I've allocated some

resources these are people I'm going to

employ to do the work on the refit for

me

as you can see we have some resource

over allocation issues but if I just

look now at the resource sheet

you'll see that I've set up an

electrician

a plumber and a contractor the

contractor is basically a general

Builder so somebody who's able to do

most of the jobs that I'm going to need

to get done during this bathroom refits

and as you can see it's the contractor

who is over allocated now the first

thing I'd like you to do is to move the

start date of the project to tomorrow

that is your tomorrow not my tomorrow

when I'm recording this course but

you're tomorrow as though you are

actually going to start doing all of

this work from tomorrow now when I move

my start date to tomorrow I finish up

with an end date of May the 1st now

clearly it's very unlikely you'll finish

up with the same end date as me but make

a mental note of that end date because

the next step is to level the resources

and in order to do that I want you to

use the standard leveling and I want you

to do it in such a way that you're quite

happy for the refit complete date to

move out to be later on

and I want you to do it on a week by

week basis

so that's the first exercise now when I

do that my refit complete date goes back

about 10 days or so and you should find

that yours goes out by about 10 days as

well so given this one contractor and

given the electrician and the plumber

and the plan that I've got here I can

stick with those resources and it will

delay the end date by about 10 days so

that's the first part of the exercise if

you do get a slightly different date to

that bear in mind it could just be the

way that your weekends are falling then

what I want you to do is I want you to

clear the leveling again now what I want

you to do is to level those resources on

a day by day basis without changing the

end date so the end date is still going

to be whatever you started whatever your

end date is if you like the end date you

got straight after you moved the start

date of the project now the obvious

question is how am I going to to do that

how am I going to keep the same end date

and clear all of the over allocations

the answer to that is you're going to

use more contractors the question for

you is how many more do you need to use

my answer to that is in 4B good luck

with that and I'll see you in the next

section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019

in this section in the next section or

two we're going to take a look at views

in Project 2019

you've already seen a few different

views such as Gantt chart view already

we're going to look at quite a few

others in the next couple of sections

but I'm also going to introduce you to

some general aspects of views that will

help you as your knowledge and use of

project 2019 develops now in a little

bit of a break from tradition we're

going to look at the exercise the

bathroom refit exercise version 0 4 B

and this is my answer to exercise 4

during this section

and one of the reasons for doing that is

I want to explain a couple of things

about my solution to exercise four

hopefully your solution to exercise four

will have been pretty similar to mine

but I'm going to show you one or two

tools that probably would have helped

you to do the exercise a little more

easily but first of all a little

reminder about some basic features of

views now we're currently showing Gantt

chart view if you look on The View tab

the leftmost button Gantt chart is

highlighted that's the one that's

currently in use don't forget you've got

those specific buttons down at the

bottom right hand end of the status bar

that let you switch between some of the

more commonly used views and you've also

got a zoom control down there as well

now up on the ribbon up on The View tab

in the first two groups one of them says

task views and one of them says resource

views

now typically you'll use the views in

those two groups for those specific

purposes

so clearly the views that you're most

likely to use for tasks are in task View

and those for resources are in resource

View

however if you click on other views

you'll see a complete list of views from

the more views list just here

you'll find that as you use project 2019

it will update some of the views that

are on the drop down menus based on your

use of them

now at the moment I'm looking at more

views in the resource views group

you can see that one of the views there

is Gantt chart

so as you can see I can access these

views from various different places now

the other thing to remember is that many

views involve a split of the screen in

fact some of them evolve not only a

vertical split like this one but you can

have a horizontal split which we're

going to look at in the next section now

it's pretty straightforward to move that

split line to change how much

information you can see on the table on

the left here or in the right of the

chart so you can just drag and drag it

back in again depending on how much of

each one you want to see so that's

entirely up to you but very easy to

change the way that you're viewing the

Gantt charts and the task list you you

can also change the width of any of the

columns so for example if you decided

that the predecessors column here was

maybe too wide if you put the cursor to

the right of the dividing line in its

header and click with the mouse when you

get that double-headed Arrow you can

just click and drag in

or you can drag out depending on how

wide or narrow you want that column

and if I wanted for example to make the

start date a little bit wider I could

again get that double-headed Arrow

click and drag out to the right and I've

made the start date wider so that's how

you can adjust what's on the left hand

half of The View

but now let's take a look at a

completely different view related to

task

let's go into task usage View

in task usage view what you have is a

list of the tasks and for all the tasks

where resources are assigned it shows

how much resource is used now if you

remember with the bathroom refit project

the first couple of phases don't have

any resources in use but as we get down

into the implementation phase we can see

each task so let's say for example here

task 43 got existing bathroom that has a

contractor assigned to it

now I'm going to make the task name

column slightly wider but what you can

see here is the amount of resource

that's used on a particular task

so let's take for example the gut

existing bathroom again

now the resource used is a contractor

and the amount of work is eight hours

and we can see in The View on the right

that where eight hours occurs it's on

Friday March the 29th 2019. so here we

can see where our resource is being used

but not only can we see where the

resource is being used and how much of

it is being used we can also see various

subtotals so for instance we have

preparation which is task 41.

and the totals for Preparation are shown

here by each day so on Friday we have

eight hours Monday eight hours Tuesday

24 hours so on and so forth now the 24

hours on the Tuesday is made up of eight

there

eight there and eight there so that's

how we get to our 24. so you can see how

the work that's being done is broken

down by task and by resource

now sometimes when you're looking at a

task usage view the amount of

information can actually seem quite

overwhelming the bathroom refit is not a

huge project but already as we scroll

through time and through the tasks you

can see just how much is going on and

how much work is being done

this is a situation where using the

outlining that I showed you earlier on

in the course can be very useful so

let's go up to the data group still

staying on The View Tab and click on

outline

and let's say that we only want to see

level two

now with level two we only see the level

two tasks

however if we look at where the work is

all happening you'll see the totals for

each of those tasks and of course if you

want to we could go back to outlining

and select level one and now if we go

back up to the top here you'll see the

implementation phase

and how much work is being done on the

overall phase on each day and also note

right at the top you can see how much

work is being done overall on the

project so you can see how we can

control the level of detail that we can

see in task usage View and if we turn

our attention now to what we call the

time phase data on the right we can do

quite a lot there to customize the view

to our specific requirements at any time

if you look up on The View Tab and in

the zoom group

you can see we have a control called

time scale and currently days are

selected now there's quite a few other

options in that drop down so let's take

a look at weeks for example and there we

can see on a week by week basis how much

work is being done

so we can see our totals for each week

now when you make a selection like that

what you finish up with quite often is

pretty much a whole project squashed

into a very thin amount of space and you

may want to widen things out or see a

little bit more and there are quite a

few other options with zoom that I want

to take a look at next

one of the most useful ones of all is

this one just here entire project

note the screen tip description update

the views so the entire project is

visible on the screen now that will work

in any view where you've got time phase

data so it starts at the beginning of

the project in this particular project

the first two phases we don't have any

resources assigned so we've got no work

being done but we do have as we scroll

across

the recorded work in the latter part now

you also have a zoom control just here

so you can do things like zoom in or you

can zoom out often when you do that you

might well lose sight of exactly where

you are in terms of the project you

might have to use the scroll bars on the

writer at the bottom in order to bring

everything back into view

the other thing to notice here and this

can be a little bit unnerving at first

is that sometimes when you do a

particular view like entire project what

project 2019 does is to adjust the time

scale to what is sometimes a strange

setting so for instance in doing what

I've done there the time scale is now

five days so it's doing it in chunks of

five days which is a rather strange unit

of time although of course it copes with

it perfectly well these totals of work

will still be completely accurate

now sometimes that sort of thing can be

a little bit annoying there is

ultimately though a way that you can

adjust time scale where you can pretty

much achieve whatever effect you want to

achieve so let me show you how to do the

ultimate adjustment of the view of time

on the right there if I right click over

the heading one of the options there is

time scale and that brings up the time

scale dialog box and you can have up to

three tiers of time so you can see there

top tier middle tier and bottom tier and

currently in time scale options I have

show two tiers so let me just change

that to three tiers

and then I'm going to set each of those

three tiers by selecting the appropriate

tab in the dialog and then saying what I

want to show in that particular tab

at the moment don't worry too much about

non-working time we'll just concentrate

on the first three tabs

so in the top tier for my units

I'm going to put quarters

so I can then choose how I want those

quarters labeled and the default there

is quarter one 2009 let's suppose

instead that I want uh q109 q209 so on

and so forth

and how many of them do I want at a time

well I'm just going to do them one at a

time and remember what I said just now

about three days well if you wanted it

marked in three days or three quarters

you'd say three of them in here you can

also say how you want those markers in

the header there aligned and I'm going

to stick with left aligned and very

importantly you can also scale The View

and I'm going to show you that in a

moment

so let's go to the middle tier

and for Middle tier we're going to keep

it on months and we're going to say

January 09 is our label

and I'm happy for it to be left aligned

and I'm going to say I want a count of

two

and let's go to the bottom tier and here

we're going to have uh weeks

I'm going to change the label to this

format

and we're going to have a count of one

and I'm going to align these ones to the

center

now there's a preview down at the bottom

here which gives you an idea of what the

whole setup is going to look like so

let's give that a go

so you can see it's made quite a

substantial change now that's probably

overdoing it a little bit but hopefully

you get the idea from that that you can

modify the way that you're viewing

things in that window

so just to recap I have my time scale

ordered by quarter at the top then by

month and then by weeks

and not only can I adjust that in a very

flexible way but I can also scale it so

let's go in and scale this now

let's suppose that I think well actually

that's a little too wide I need to cover

a longer period

so let's right click again and bring up

time scale

and I'm going to select the top tier and

currently it's at 107 so let's go for

75 percent

and click on OK

now as you can see that I've made that

adjustment and that looks a little bit

better I can see a little bit more

information on the screen

now you can use that approach to

presenting time phase data on the right

there labeling scaling Etc up to three

time scales on any view that has time

phase data on the right so we've done

all of this in task usage view clearly

you could also do exactly the same thing

in Gantt chart view as well so in the

next section we're going to take a look

at resource usage I'm going to talk a

little more about the answer to exercise

four and then I'm going to show you how

to split the view horizontally and how

it helps you when you use project 2019

but that's it for this section I will

see you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019. in this section

we're going to continue looking at views

and we're going to start by looking at

resource views

now I'm still looking at exercise zero

four B and I'm going to go back into the

view tab

and in the resource views group let's

first of all look at the resource sheet

now this is often The View we use to set

up our resources and of course it's got

a lot of the information about each

resource on it and we'll also often

contain helpful indicators such as over

allocation indicators so that one's

pretty straightforward and something

that we've looked at before

so let's jump to the view above it

resource usage

and resource usage view is sort of a

complement of task usage View

and what resource usage view gives us is

a list of resources and then for each

resource a list of the tasks that that

resource is working on now as usual

there's a certain amount of Readjustment

needed here in order to make the columns

and the split of the view a little bit

more helpful so I'm going to quickly do

that

and you see that the First Resource

listed is unassigned so the unassigned

tasks and those are the ones that don't

have any resources assigned to them

that's really quite a long list on this

particular project as you know the first

two phases I haven't yet allocated any

resources to but if I go down now to the

main body of what's in phases three and

four I have three resources electrician

plumber and contractor and for each one

I can see a list of tasks that have that

resource working on them now this can be

a very useful facility for getting a

list of the tasks that each resource is

working on

and of course you've got the work hours

shown on the right there

in fact the top of this section the

unassigned section is often very useful

because it will basically tell you which

tasks you haven't got any resources

assigned to us yet and very often you'll

want to go through that and make sure

that you haven't missed anything

the right hand half of this particular

view is a conventional time scale so it

shows the time phase data on the work

for these resources and of course you

can customize that in the way that I

showed you in the preceding section now

you probably would have found this a

very useful view to use to help you with

exercise four but there's another

resource view which can be very helpful

when you're looking for over allocations

and how to resolve them and that's the

resource graph so I'm going to click on

other views

and one of the items listed there is

resource graph

now this really is quite a different way

of looking at resources on a project

the left hand of the display shows a

little panel for a resource in this case

contractor and you step through the

resources using the scroll bar at the

bottom so you can see as I move this

scroll bar it changes to plumber move it

again electrician back to plumber back

to contractor

now if I use the scroll bar on the right

it takes me through the time scale of

the project and what you'll see is the

workload for the contractor resource in

graphical form now let me just jump back

to the resource sheet and of course we

solved our over allocation issue by

having three contractors that 300

percent there denotes three contractors

so let's go back to the situation where

we only had one contractor so we need to

take this back to 100 percent and you

can see my over allocation now pops up

so let's go back to the resource graph

now you can see how this resource graph

here would immediately have shown you

where your over allocation problem was

I'm just going to zoom out very slightly

and you can see that the contractor is

over allocated and you can see exactly

where the contractor is over allocated

as well so this is a very good view for

identifying where over allocations occur

so I've introduced you there to a couple

of other important views there are many

more in Project 2019 if I click on other

views and then on more views I get this

more views dialogue where you can access

the many different available views we're

going to be looking at some more of

those during the course but I strongly

suggest that you work your way through

those and have a little experiments and

you can create your own views you can

copy a view as a starting point for a

custom View

and you can edit the definition of a

view

so as your use of project 2019 develops

it's a good idea to find out about

customizing views because it can really

save you a lot of time and effort now

what I want to look at next is splitting

the view so I'm going to go back to

Gantt chart View and I'm going to go to

these split views group on The View Tab

and I'm going to click on the details

check box and what that does is to split

my view into two horizontal parts

the top part is still the Gantt chart

and the bottom part is now the task form

now the important thing about this is

that the task form will show the task

information for the selected task in the

Gantt chart so you can see there I've

selected uh task five select style and I

can see all of the information related

to that task including things like any

predecessors now let me go further down

the project and select prepare for

flooring and what I actually see in the

task form is I see the resource names

here so the contractor is the resource

for this particular task I'll also see

the predecessors just here now what you

see in this task form is something that

you can choose so you can decide which

particular information to show in this

task form and I'll come to that in just

a moment but if I use these next and

previous buttons they'll take me through

the tasks in the project

so I've currently got prepare for

flooring which is Task id45 let's look

at next

and you'll see that I now get the task

information for task ID 46 prepare for

painting so I can control how I move

through using the next and previous

buttons now as I mentioned just now you

can actually choose what you want to

show in the bottom for the selected task

and if you right click on the task form

it gives you options so we have

predecessors and successors resources

and predecessors schedule work cost so

on and so forth and if we were select

something like schedule

it will even show in there

the amount of work required for that

particular task so in this case 16 hours

and I can also see the scheduled start

date and the scheduled finish date

and I can also see the leveling delay

that's currently applied

so there's really a good selection of

things that you can show in task form

View and we can add more to this which

we're going to go into later on

so if I go back into the split view

group and the drop down next to details

you can even choose what is shown in the

lower part of the split view

So currently we have task form there

I could show resource form

now you might think that's a little bit

strange isn't it showing the resource

form when you've got a task shown in the

top but in fact what it means is that if

I'm looking at prepare for painting task

the person who's working on that is a

contractor and what I'm seeing at the

bottom here is the work that the

contractor is currently scheduled to do

so I can actually look at what one of

the resources working on that selected

task is doing

if I choose as my selected task second

fix electrics I see that an electrician

is currently assigned to these two tasks

now when you're finished using a split

view there is a couple of ways of

switching it off

one of them is to Simply uncheck the

details box up here so the other way is

just to hover over the split bar there

till you get the double arrow for the

cursor and then just drag it off the

bottom of the screen so let's do the

horizontal one

like so

so there are a couple of other things

I'd like to show you about views you've

already seen how to use the zoom to

entire project but sometimes when you're

working on just part of a particular

project you may want to get some kind of

automatic Zoom so that you can see the

most detail of that part of the project

so let's suppose I was interested in the

preparation phase of the bathroom refit

if I just select those tasks in the

preparation phase

go to the zoom group

the zoom button and in the zoom dialog

if I select

selected tasks what project 2019 will do

is it just zooms to those tasks

and in that way I can get the maximum

amount of detail in a view and finally

one other very useful view I'd like to

show you let me go back to the top of

this project

and just make sure I haven't got a

particular task selected and let's look

at the calendar view

Now calendar view is a very interesting

one where you can see the tasks of the

project set out in a calendar

and note how the Milestones are colored

differently so they're showing here on

mine in a gray color whereas everything

else is in blue and you've got selected

tabs at the top there for month week and

custom View

and you could use that for showing a

custom number of weeks in a date range

that you specify

so that's calendar view which can be

very useful when looking at what's

coming up on a project

that's basically all I've got for you on

views in this section in the next

section we're going to take a look at

timelines so please join me for that

hello there and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019

in this section we're going to take a

look at timelines and primarily

timelines are used as a communication

and presentation tool a timeline can be

a pretty good way of getting a summary

of aspects possibly even all aspects of

a project and presenting them to an

audience perhaps who aren't as

interested in the detail of your

projects as you are or certainly an

audience where the people don't have or

use Microsoft Project

so you want to show them just the right

amount of detail of a project maybe

highlight certain points without going

into the sort of complex diagram that we

have here for the wedding so first of

all let's switch on the timeline for the

wedding and see what it looks like at

the moment

so I'm going to go up to view and in the

split view group I'm going to select

timeline now along the top of the

timeline you have dates and the left

hand End by default is the start date

and the right hand End by default is the

Finish date of the project

now at the moment there are no tasks

shown on the timeline and the only other

thing shown is a marker indicating today

if I wanted to show some tasks on the

timeline and let's suppose I wanted to

show the selecting and ordering of the

bridesmaids dresses I can right click

and select add to timeline

and it now appears in the timeline and

you can see its duration in particular

relative in duration to the overall

project as well so let's add another one

I'm going to go to make guest list

right click and select add to timeline

and there you can see that one pop up on

the timeline as well so it's a really

nice way of getting an idea of where

tasks are in the timeline in relation to

each other and in relation to the

overall project

having added a couple of tasks to the

timeline it's very easy to take them off

again so if I right click on make guest

list whilst I don't have a remove from

timeline option you will see that the

add to timeline little icon is

highlighted so it's essentially a toggle

so if I want to remove that from the

timeline I just click add to timeline

again and that will be removed it's

important to recognize that you don't

use the timeline in some automated way

you select what to add and you'll

usually select it on the basis of the

purpose of the timeline which as I

mentioned earlier will quite often be

some kind of presentation or summary of

progress on all or parts of a project

now one of the very important aspects of

a timeline is that you might want to

format it and if I go and select my

timeline if you look up we have a

timeline tools contextual ribbon with a

format sub ribbon and that contains lots

of facilities for instance to change the

color of the bars or to change the text

Styles and so on so I could jump in here

and change the color very easily I could

increase the font size if I wanted to

and that's a bit too large so I'm going

to take that one back but I'm going to

leave it on Orange

so I'll pretty much leave you to

experiment with those and get that set

up however you would like now there's

nothing to stop you working on the

timeline in the way I have it set up

here it's a very convenient way for

adding and removing tasks but you can

actually work on the timeline on its own

and sometimes the rest of the display

can be quite distracting so let's adopt

timeline view

and you can do this in a couple of ways

if you right click on the gray bar to

the left there on Gantt chart

one of the optional views that comes up

is timeline

but what you could also do if I just

undo that

is you could do the same thing by simply

just dragging that divider all the way

down to the bottom

and you'll see now that timeline view

occupies the whole of the view and one

of the advantages of this is that you

can build up a quite complex content for

the timeline without the distraction of

as we had just now a Gantt chart and you

may think to yourself yeah but that's

not really very helpful is it because I

can't see the task to add anymore but

there are a couple of ways of doing that

with the timeline selected on the

timeline tools format tab in the insert

group there is an existing tasks button

if you click on that it brings up a

hierarchical list of existing tasks and

if you want to put two or three more

tasks onto the timeline you can select

them and then click on OK

so for example if we scroll down to

let's go to details and we'll add these

three

and there we go

so not only have they added to the

timeline but if necessary the height of

the timeline is adjusted to accommodate

tasks that are actually happening at the

same time you could also add completely

new tasks you could add a task which

isn't even in the schedule yet

so again up to that format ribbon and

from the insert group select task

so I can now go through and fill in the

task information dialog as normal and

when I click on OK it would appear on

the timeline and in my project schedule

as well

now of course for it to appear in the

right place in the project I may have to

select dependencies I may have to set a

start date and so on but I can certainly

enter the details of the task and have

it added to both the schedule and the

timeline in this way

I can also add a milestone in that way

and I can also add something called a

call out task now this is basically

going to do the same as adding the task

but the task will in this case appear on

the timeline as a call out now what

happens with a call out is it appears

outside the timeline as almost a sort of

note

so let's just cancel that

and let's take this task here register

wedding and get license

if I right click I can display as call

out

and there you go it sort of appears as a

call out outside of the timeline as an

additional note

now earlier on I mentioned that one of

the main reasons that people use

timelines is for communication and

presentation purposes and if you have a

timeline like this then in order to

present it or include it in say a

PowerPoint presentation or send it to

somebody in an email you have a number

of options

so again up to that format tab in the

copy group there's one option and that

is copy timeline and that button has

three options copy for email for

presentation and copy full size copy

will basically copy it to the clipboard

and then you can paste it in an

appropriate format and the final thing I

want to show you here is the main new

feature in Project 2019 in relation to

timelines and that's the ability to have

more than one timeline

so let's suppose we want to just

highlight a particular perhaps shorter

period in the project and add some tasks

to that particular period so let's just

say I want to see what's going on

between June and July only

if I go back up to the format ribbon

in the insert group I have timeline bar

and when I click that you'll see that it

adds a secondary timeline and what I'm

going to do is go in and just change the

dates to June and July so right click on

the timeline and select date range

I'm going to set custom dates

and I'm going to select the beginning of

June and my finished date will be the

end of July and now then of course I

could add some tasks to that timeline I

could even take tasks that I already

have on a timeline and drag them down to

this one so if I say select and book

and you can see how that displays in

relation to the timeline let's do the

other one select and Order bridesmaids

dresses

and there we go and you can see again

the timeline adjusts vertically as I add

more tasks so that gives you the ability

to use multiple timelines now if I

revert back to Gantt chart View

and I'll switch timeline on again

I'll see both of those timelines and I

can add tasks to either remove tasks

from either drag them between timelines

and so on

hello and welcome to our course on

Project 2019 Advanced my name is Deborah

and I'm your instructor on this course

and I'm a Microsoft Office specialist

and tap certified it trainer with a

specialism in Microsoft products and

I've been using Microsoft project for a

long time along with the rest of the

wider Microsoft Office Suite and in fact

I'd say it's probably getting on for

about 20 years now that I've been using

this product and I've used many many

different versions of Microsoft Project

over that time

I've used Microsoft Project to manage

projects from large to small from a

value of a few thousand pounds or

dollars to Euros or multi-billion pound

projects and programs for both

government organizations and public

sector organizations so over time I

found out quite a bit about the use of

Microsoft Project and I'm hoping to

impart a lot of knowledge to you during

this course

in this introductory section I want to

cover some very important points before

we get started so please bear with me

for a few minutes while I talk about

first of all assumptions I'm making on

this course

now first of all I'm going to assume

that your basic knowledge of Microsoft

Project extends to cover just about

everything that's covered on our basic

Microsoft Project 2019 course

and if you do look at the course on the

Simon Says it.com site you'll see the

list of topics that's covered and I'm

going to assume that you pretty much

know all of that now if there are topics

on that list that you're not familiar

with I suggest you cover those first

I'll also assume that to some extent

you've got a reasonable amount of

experience in applying those topics or

applying the knowledge that you will

have gained and that it isn't all

theoretical because really you need to

have used a lot of those topics to have

a good grounding before you cover this

Advanced course now you may well have

used an earlier version of Microsoft

Project and maybe you're wondering

whether a good solid knowledge in that

earlier version is good enough now if

your knowledge is in Project 2016 or

2013 and even 2010 and particularly if

you've got a good sound practical

experience of applying that knowledge

you'll probably find that it's good

enough because in my fundamental topics

Microsoft Project 2010 2013 and 22 16

and 2019 are pretty equivalent really

now

some changes but they have been

gregarious and you can probably pick up

what you need in terms of those changes

as we go along

for example one of the largest areas of

change has been in reporting and I'm

going to spend quite a bit of time on

this Advanced course talking about

reporting so hopefully with a little bit

of help maybe from our basic course you

should be able to fill in any gaps in

your knowledge

the next question is that every time you

look at Microsoft project on

microsoft.com there seem to be more

project related pieces of software the

next thing I want to point out is that

throughout this course I'm going to be

using keyboard and mouse so Mouse mode

rather than touch mode now if you are

going through this course on a tablet

device and you want to turn on touch

mode that's absolutely fine personally I

find Microsoft Project a bit awkward to

maneuver around using touch mode so I

prefer to use the keyboard and mouse but

remember if you do want to turn on touch

mode you can click the drop down here

and you can select touch from that drop

down and when I click it what it will do

is you'll just see that these icons get

spaced a little further apart which will

allow for your finger when you're using

a touch device but as I said I'm going

to stick with keyboard and mouse

throughout the duration of this course

the final point I'd like to make is that

although I'm based in the UK throughout

this course my default Locale will be us

and my default currency will be the US

dollar also I will be providing some

course files and I'm also setting some

exercises and the majority of those will

be based on for example U.S currency so

if you want to stick with us that's fine

as well

so that's it in this section in the next

section I'm going to talk a little bit

about the structure of the course and

the material that is supplied with the

course and then after that we'll be able

to get started with project 2019

Advanced that's the end of this section

please join me in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced in this

section I'd like to talk to you briefly

about the structure of the course

I've arranged the course in a particular

sequence and the sequence comprises a

number of chapters and each chapter

comprises one or more sections and a

section basically contains one video

the sections are generally around 50

minutes or so in length some are more

some are slightly less and ideally you

cover the course in the sequence in

which I present it

having said that a number of the

sections are pretty much independent of

everything else so if for example the

first thing you want to do is find out

about customizing the ribbon which is

actually towards the end of the course

you could go straight to that now and

it's independent of everything else

however beware do not try and leap too

far ahead unless you have a good reason

to because quite often the material that

I cover will be dependent on the early

material in the course now there are a

couple of things to be aware of and one

of them is that project files are

included with the material on this

course and you should have a copy of the

project files downloaded

the list of files will look something

like this it won't necessarily be

exactly the same but you need to know

where these files are I also suggest you

keep a backup copy of them in case you

work on them and maybe break something

or accidentally delete something these

are most of the files that I will be

using during the course and you can see

that I've got them saved into a course

files folder and I would suggest that

you download them from the course and

also create your own project 2019

Advanced folder to save off these course

files there's also a folder containing

the exercise files on this course

during the course I'll be setting you

various exercises to do and you should

make sure again that you know where

these files are they contain my sample

answers generally speaking plus one or

two other things including starting

points in one or two cases

and again you may want to open my files

perhaps check what you've done maybe

even try changing what I've done but

make sure that you've always got a

backup copy so that you can refer back

to that if necessary now another point

I'd like to make here is one that I make

at various points during the course and

that is I have used a specific Locale

language currency and indeed specific

dates and when you're working through

the course you may want to change any of

these including the dates

so for instance you may want to shift a

project sometime into the future to

correspond with the time that you're

following this course

so for example I'm doing this course in

March April 2019 and when you come to

sit this course it might be a year later

it might be two years later so please

don't feel that you have to keep the

same start date for your project that I

do in my videos you can adjust it to

correspond with the current date if you

want to you don't have to do that if you

want to work along with me then that's

absolutely fine as well but please don't

feel that you're stuck with the start

date that's showing in the course also

remember that what you see might not

necessarily be the same because of your

installation of project 2019 you may

have a different working week you may

have different public holidays set up

and so on so it wouldn't really be

possible for me to say that specifically

any date or range of dates on your

system will be exactly the same as mine

or indeed that any dates will work out

exactly the same in terms of say an

elapsed amount of work from a starting

point so bear in mind that particularly

when you're working on an exercise

differences between your Locale between

your calendar between your working time

holiday days May mean that there are

differences in some of the answers to

the exercise when compared with mine

having said that I've tried to make sure

that both the course material that I

cover and the exercises that I set

suffer from this kind of issue as little

as possible now another very important

point when you open certain project

files that are provided with the course

you may see a Microsoft Project security

notice

any of the project files that have an

embedded macro will almost certainly

generate this notice although to some

extent whether it's generated does

depend on the options you have set on

your system as far as the project files

that you download from Simon says it in

relation to this course are concerned

then there's no danger on clicking on

the enable macros option so those are

just a few points to be aware of in

relation to the course structure that's

it for now I will see you in the next

section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced in this

and the next few sections we're going to

look at a couple of related topics in

Project 2019

and we're going to look at these two

topics together because you very often

need to use them perhaps for the first

time on one large program of work or one

very large project

now what quite often happens when you're

working on a large project is that the

project gets larger and larger and maybe

becomes a set of projects or perhaps

you're working on a program that needs

to be split up into a set of projects

and not only do you need to split the

work up but different people are going

to manage different parts of that body

of work and what often happens is that

the different projects although they

need to be managed separately they still

share resources

so what we're going to look at in the

next few sections are combining multiple

projects into one or if you like

splitting a large project into several

projects and sharing resources between

projects so it's essentially project

consolidation and resource sharing that

we're covering here now in order to

demonstrate these two techniques I'm

going to use an example of a charity

event

and the idea is that we're going to run

a charity event and it's going to

comprise actually three events within

one there'll be a Gala dinner there'll

be a fashion show and a buffet lunch and

there will be a sports day and a

barbecue

so the gala dinner will be a fundraising

dinner where we'll charge the

participants a pretty heavy admission

price but for that they'll get a good

dinner there'll probably be some kind of

prize draw some entertainment and so on

and then the fashion show in the buffet

lunch will invite local fashion houses

to put on a show

and as part of that we'll provide them

with a good buffet lunch

and again we'll charge a suitable

emission charge for all the people that

want to see the fashion show and enjoy

the buffet lunch

and we're also going to run a sports day

pretty much a family focused event and

that will include a barbecue so as far

as this stage in the course is concerned

we're going to assume that I've done

some of the early planning so I've put

in place a provisional schedule for the

major aspects of the event

and in the Gantt chart here let me just

expand that planning section

you can see that I've got maybe 20 tasks

in that planning section

and I'm assuming that at this point we

realize that this really is going to be

quite a big undertaking and we need to

split the charity event into separate

parts

and we've kind of now got to the point

that we realize we're going to need

people to manage each aspect of the

event

so we're going to have one person

managing the overall plan

we're going to have another person

managing the gala dinner

another person managing the fashion show

and buffet lunch and then finally a

sports day project manager now the key

Point here is that although the

individual projects are not really very

complicated at this stage maybe about a

dozen or so tasks in each we need each

of the project managers to be able to

manage their project independently and

separately so why do we need to be able

to do this well as you'll know from your

current knowledge of Microsoft Project

when you're dealing with editing a

single MPP file if our four project

managers each want to work on it at the

same time that becomes very very

complicated particularly if they all

want to work on it at home and they

don't have some kind of shared access to

the file so what the project managers

need to be able to do here is to manage

each of their projects separately now

that in itself is a pretty

straightforward thing to do but the

problem then is how do we share the

resources

some of the people for instance the

group of volunteers that we're going to

take on to do a lot of the work here or

people dealing with for example

publicity or people dealing with the

legal side getting licenses and so on

there are many people involved in an

event like this who will be shared

between the four projects

so how do we make sure that those people

are not over allocated

and the way that we do this is to set up

our four separate projects so that they

share resources

now the added complication here and

again this is quite typical is that the

four projects although we want to

separate them out they are not

independent these projects have various

links between them and we need to make

sure that these links are set up

correctly understood and respected by

all of the projects

now let me point out a couple of things

before we start first of all if you're

going to split a program of work into a

number of separate projects it's a good

idea to make that decision as early on

as possible because if you've already

set the program up as a single MPP file

there will be quite a bit of work to do

in splitting it up again

I'm going to show you one or two options

for splitting as we go through the next

few sections

and as you'll see there's very often

quite a bit of work to do usually a very

good proportion of that work relates to

the relationships between the tasks so

in this case the initial program before

we split it up and maintaining those

links when we split the program of work

up

at the moment with my Force summary

tasks I've only got the fourth one open

sports day and barbecue and although you

can see the links within that task

because the other three summary tasks

are currently collapsed you can't see

links to tasks within those from sports

day and barbecue but if for instance I

were to expand the planning summary

tasks look carefully at sports day and

barbecue tasks now

now you can see that there are in fact

several links to the planning summary

task when one of the summary tasks is

collapsed you don't see those links

they're still there but you can't see

them now before I get started on

splitting this program of working to

four separate projects what I'm going to

do is take a quick look at the resource

sheet now I've got here eight resources

at the moment although note the last one

volunteer we're counting on getting 10

or possibly even more volunteers to help

on this charity event I've left the

standard rates at zero and for the

purposes of this first few sections of

the course I'm really going to ignore

cost we're going to come to cost in

relation to other projects a little bit

later on

and what I'm going to do is first

separate sports day and barbecue to make

it a separate project

now I'm going to set up sports day and

barbecue in a separate project in a

particular way and this way is not

necessarily the best way of doing this

the best way will always depend on the

particular circumstances that you're in

but some of the tools and techniques

that you'll see here will be useful to

you

as we go through the next few sections

hopefully you'll see some improvements

that you can make to the way that you do

this but as I said earlier on in the

section one of the key things here is

that the earlier in the process you can

do this the better the more likely you

are to save yourself time and effort if

you split up a program as early as

possible

so let's get started let's first of all

create an empty blank project using the

keyboard shortcut Ctrl n now let me

switch back to my original project

and what I'm going to do is expand out

sports day and barbecue

and I'm going to select all of those

tasks

I'm going to copy them to the clipboard

and then I'm going to switch back to my

empty project

and I'm going to paste those tasks into

that project now having pasted those in

note that within what was a summary task

in the original project the dependencies

still exist now what I'm going to do is

to save this particular project as a

separate MPP file so I've saved in the

project course files folder and I've

called it charity event sportsday.mpp

now there are a couple of important

points to make here one of them is that

when I copied the block of tasks I

copied the summary tasks sports day and

barbecue itself as well and I want to

return to that point a little bit later

on but in addition if I look at the

resource sheet for my newly created

project you may be surprised to see that

there are only two resources on it we

have volunteer and note that the max

number is one and we have sports day PM

so our new project has a sort of

resource sheet created for it but it

doesn't get the same resource sheet as

the total project that we started with

and what happens when you do what we've

done is that project 2019 creates a

resource sheet based on the resources

that are already specified in the copied

and pasted tasks

and so you can see for example here one

consequence of that is that the

volunteer resource already seems to be

over allocated because when it creates

the resource sheet it defaults to

creating a Max of one resource

and if we looked at the resources

already allocated in the original

project we would see that within the

sports day and barbecue summary task we

already have more than one volunteer

assigned tasks now in fact there's an

even bigger problem here with the

resource because although I now have two

projects and they each have for instance

a sports day PM resource these sports

day PM resources are completely

different resources

each of the projects is using its own

resources

and even though each of them has a

resource called sports day PM obviously

that resource name is the same on both

resource sheets

so as far as project 2019 is concerned

those are completely different resources

those two resources are essentially

unrelated to each other because these

two projects do not share resources

so before we go any further with

splitting our program of work into four

separate projects what I really want to

do is show you how to share resources

and that's exactly what we're going to

cover in the next section so I will see

you then

hello again and welcome back to my

course on Project 2019 advanced

in the previous section I discussed some

of the key points around project

consolidation the reasons that you might

want to split projects up and the

reasons why you might want to join

projects together

and one of the key aspects that comes

out of that is the importance of

deciding how to deal with resources

and in relation to our charity event we

came across the first key issue which is

if we start to split the event into

separate projects we somehow need to

make sure that those projects are using

the same resources

and so what I'm going to do in this

video is I'm going to show you how to

set up a resource pool and also show you

how to share the resource pool between a

number of projects

so my starting point for this section is

the ending point for the preceding

section so I still have my complete list

of tasks here in my charity event file

and I also have open at the moment the

individual sports day project that I

created in the preceding section

now it's worth noting that the tasks

involved in the sports day project are

also still in this all charity event

project the main project

so it's clear that at some stage I'm

probably going to need to remove those

as they're now in separate projects

but I'm going to set up the resource

pool first

now one of the key aspects of a resource

pool is that generally speaking we set

it up as a project with resources but

with no tasks

and quite often you'll want to set up

the resource pool right at the beginning

of the project so that you can then

share that resource pool

so on many occasions you'll start off

with a completely empty MPP file

you'll go to the resource sheet and

you'll start entering in your resources

which will make up your resource pool

you'll then save your project but with

no tasks

now on this occasion we already have a

really great starting point for our

resource pool because if I look at the

resource sheets

I've already got all of my resources

and I'm going to basically save a copy

of this project I'm going to remove all

of the tasks and then that will become

my resource pool

so what I'm going to do is I'm going to

click on file

I'm going to go down to save as

and then I'm going to browse to my

normal course files folder

and my saved project is going to be

called charity event underscore

resources.mpp

now having save charity event resources

what I'm going to do is I'm going to

select all of the tasks

and I'm going to press the delete key

so I now have a project with no tasks

but if I click across to the resource

sheet

of course I still have all of my

resources and this is now my resource

pool

now let me switch back to the individual

project the sports day project

and what I'm going to do here is to

specify that this project uses that

resource pool

so if I go to the resource tab and in

the assignments group there is a

resource pool button so I'm going to

click the drop down and I'm going to

select share resources

now from here I'm given a choice it's

asking me do I want to use my own

resources and essentially that's what

I'm doing at the moment

or do I want to use a resource from at

least one open resource pool

so it is worth noting that when you want

to use a resource pool that's already

been set up you do need to have that

resource pool open

so let's click use resources and I'm

going to select the drop down and I

currently only have one other file open

which is the charity event resources and

that happens to be where my resource

pool is located so I'm going to select

that

now the meaning of the lower pair of

radio buttons will become more apparent

a little bit later on but let's just

quickly look at it briefly now

so it says here on conflict with

calendar or resource information the

poor takes precedence or the sharer

takes precedence

now what can happen sometimes is that

when you're looking at resource

information for shared resources there

may be a conflict between the resource

pool and any calendars applying to

resources in the resource pool

and for example a calendar in the

sharing project the sharer project

what you need to do is to specify here

which takes presidents the pool or the

Sharer now I'm going to leave this set

at the pool which is the default value

at the moment and I'm going to click on

OK

now when I did that I don't know if you

saw but if you were looking carefully at

task ID 10 we did have an over

allocation there and you'll see that now

that I've set up those shared resources

it's disappeared so I no longer have an

over allocation on task 10.

so let's jump across to the resource

sheet

and you'll see that I'm now using that

resource pool

and because I am you can see that there

are now 10 volunteers available which is

why that over allocation has been

removed

so what I have now open is a resource

pool and an individual sports day

project that uses that resource pool

so the other thing that I need to do is

to get the main project file the charity

event project file to use the resource

form

so let me open it again

so this file is of course still using

its own resources

so I'm going to click on resource

I'm going to go to the assignments group

and click on the resource pool and

select share resources

I'm going to say use resources and we

only have one option again I want it to

share the resources from the charity

event resources file

and we're going to say that the pool

takes precedence and click on OK

so now essentially what I have are two

projects sharing the same resources

now one of the next things that I need

to do is separate fully the charity

event project into four separate

projects and each of those needs to

share our resource pool and I'm going to

make a start on that in the next section

before I do I want to talk a little more

about resource sharing and one or two

aspects of resource sharing that are

important to be aware of

now in order to do this what I'm going

to do is I'm going to go across to the

resource sheet

and there of course is our resource pool

now you'll notice that we do have an

over allocation here on the sports day

pm

and the reason we have over allocated

resources now is of course that I still

have the sports Day activities in the

main project file

and I'm going to sort that out in the

next section

but what I want to do is change the view

here from resource sheet to Resource

usage

and what I'm going to do is I'm going to

add a new column so let me just drag

that along

I'm going to select new column and what

I'm looking for in here is project and

remember everything is in alphabetical

order which makes it a little bit easier

to find

I'm going to select project from the

list

and I'm just going to drag this column

next to work so it's a bit easier to see

and let's just make it a bit wider as

well

and what you can see now is a very

important aspect of a resource pool

because the resource pool knows where

the resources are being used

and as you can see it's got a list of

the unassigned tasks or that's tasks

which haven't been assigned resources

but where we have specific resources

let's go down

and you can see there we have the

over-allocated resource the sports day

pm

and you can see it's over allocated

because it has resources in the charity

events sports day project and also the

charity event overall project

now some of these as we know are

duplicates because we copied those

resources across but some of them aren't

and as I said we'll be dealing with that

in the next section but when you're

dealing with shared resource pull and

Consolidated projects it can be very

useful to include the project column in

the table or tables that you're using

while you're working on those projects

because it very often just clarifies

which project or resource is being used

in and that's very often a good clue to

resolving over allocations when you're

dealing with multiple projects and

possibly multiple project managers

so in the next section we're going to

turn our attention to splitting up the

charity then into its constituent

projects so please join me for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

in this section we're going to set up a

master project for the charity event and

we're going to start with our original

project that's the one called charity

event and also the sports day project

that we've already created

remember that those two projects are now

both sharing a resource pool called

charity event underscore resources

and really when it comes to splitting a

large project or program into a number

of constituent projects or sub-projects

the key area where there is usually the

most effort is in restoring any links

that existed in the original project or

program

and this goes right back to a point that

I made a couple of times already on this

course

it's a good idea to decide whether

you're going to split a program or

project into a number of separate files

as early on in the process as you can or

you do finish up with quite a bit of

work to do at the end

now what I'm going to do here is to

demonstrate how to deal with that one

project and then what I'm going to do is

to set you exercise one where you're

going to split off the other projects

that make up all of the charity events

now the first thing I'm going to do is

open up the charity events project file

foreign

now look carefully at what happens when

I do this

now it says this file shares resources

from a resource pool what do you want to

do

you can open the resource pool to see

the assignments across all share of

files or do not open other files

now if I open this project on its own

although I'll be able to see the list of

resources that it uses I won't be

looking at the resource pool and all of

the sharer projects so I won't get an

accurate picture of resource usage

so what I'm going to do here is to

select the first option

now it's very interesting if you go to

the view tab here

and look at the switch windows

what you'll see here is that we have the

charity event open

and we have the charity event resources

in read only but we don't have the

sports day project open

now let me just jump into resource usage

and let's just drag that across a little

bit

now you'll see here that although I

don't have the sports day project open

the resource pool is aware of the

resource assignments in the project and

I can see them here on the resource

sheet in resource usage View

so if I just drag this out a little bit

so you can see the full details

and you can see the full path there for

the sports day file as well as the other

files listed below

so that's a very important point I can

see how the resources are being used

even though I don't have all of the

projects open

I do however need to have the resource

pool open

so having pointed that out let me go

back to the Gantt chart for the all

project

and let's expand the planning summary

task

and you'll note that the gala dinner and

fashion show and buffet lunch summary

tasks are both collapsed and the sports

day and barbecue summary tasks are still

expanded

now as you can see from this there are

links and dependencies between the

sports day and barbecue summary task

tasks and the planning summary task

tasks

and what I need to do is to replace the

sports day summary task with my separate

project and then re-establish these

links

now I need to explain a couple of things

as we go through this but the first

thing I need to do is to insert the

sports day project into the charity

event project

so I'm going to select an empty row

I'm going to go to the project tab

and on the left I have an insert group

with a sub project button

so let's click on that

and I'm going to browse to the course

files folder

and select sports day and then click on

insert

now you can immediately see that this is

an inserted sub project because you can

see the icon there in the first column

but note that as usual when you insert

something into a table it assumes the

indentation of the task above

so this particular project although

we've inserted it as a separate project

it's currently within the sports day and

barbecue summary task 46.

so one of the first things I need to do

if I go to the task tab

is to out Dent it so that it isn't part

of that summary task

now let me expand the sub project

and return to a point that I made

earlier on in the course

when I selected the task to make this I

selected the summary tasks sports day

and barbecue

and that has been included within the

sub project

it may well be that when you do this you

also want to do that but it may well be

that you don't actually select the

summary task when you create a sub

project in the way that I did earlier

now if I hadn't have selected the

summary task when I did that copy then I

would have only had the tasks here so

from 2 down to 11.

and in fact I could lose the sports day

and barbecue summary task within the sub

project now if I wanted to

so let's select task two down to 11.

and if I outdent them all

and then get rid of this one

I've still got everything I need within

my sub project

so now I've got everything within it

that I need but of course the scheduling

is very wrong and the reason it's very

wrong is that I don't have the correct

dependencies

within the sub project I have internal

dependencies but I don't have the

dependencies relating to the planning

summary task in this file

the other thing to notice here is if you

look at the charity event project up

here

the ID numbers they go right down to 56

and in fact task 58 is the inserted sub

project

but within the inserted sub project it

has its own ID numbering so you have

tasks one two three four and so on

so when you look at the dependencies

within the sub project for instance the

dependency here

task two

obtain Insurance

its predecessor is Task one perform risk

assessment

whereas in the charity event project

task 48 obtain insurance

its predecessor is Task 47 perform risk

assessment

so although we need to establish all of

the correct dependencies bear in mind

that the numbering system within the sub

project is a little bit different

having said that all of those internal

dependencies are there so that's fine

so it's only the dependencies to the

charity event project that I need to

establish

now the great thing about leaving the

original sports day and barbecue summary

task in there for the moment is that I

can use the dependencies there in order

to build dependencies to the sub project

so for instance let's start at the

beginning with task 47 perform risk

assessment

this has a predecessor of task number

10.

if I go up to task number 10 I can see

that it's actually book venue so I've

selected book venue

now I'm going to go down to my sub

project

and I'm going to select perform risk

assessment

and I'm going to create a link

and now I can see that some of the tasks

in my sub project are correctly

scheduled

but interestingly if I look at the

predecessor the predecessor is expressed

in a different way to the other

predecessors in the project

you can see that if we're dealing with

dependencies between projects we have

the project path and let me just widen

this out a little bit so you can see

the project file name and the task ID

within the project as part of the

dependency

and let's just drag that back in to save

us some space

now I can go up and follow exactly the

same principle now

for example if I go to the next task

down

so prepare drafts sports day program of

events

that relates to task four which if I

scroll up is meeting one

so I can select them both and click on

the link and that task is also now

scheduled correctly

now there are a couple more of those to

do so I'll do them and you can join me

again in a moment

so basically now I've specified

hopefully correctly all of the

predecessors for the tasks within the

sub project

but as you'll see from the Gantt chart

the bars and lines there's also some

dependencies in the other direction

so for instance if we look at the final

task in the sports day summary task up

here so task 61.

it has at least if we drag this across

one successor in this case task 13. so I

also need to make sure that any

successes are set up correctly as well

so what is Task 13 let's scroll up and

take a look

so I can see that it's vacate venue

so I need to set up that as successor to

task 13 in the sub project

so I essentially need to do this the

opposite way round so I'm going to

select

sports day and barbecue first

then I'm going to scroll all the way up

to that successor task which was task 13

vacate venue

and select that as well and click on

link

and if I scroll down

I now see that I have a link in the

successors column

so having made sure that I've set up all

of my predecessors and successes

correctly the next thing that I'm going

to do is to delete the sports day and

barbecue summary task as it's now

completely replaced by the sub project

so I'm going to scroll up

I'm going to select it and I'm going to

hit

delete

and you'll notice here that if I click

on continue it will delete sports day

and barbecue and all of the subtasks so

let's click on OK

and that's now been deleted and has an

effect been replaced by the sub project

now one of the things that you've

probably noticed by now particularly if

you look at the IDS within the sports

day sub project is that the numbering

has got gaps so you can see here it goes

two three four six seven so on and so

forth

you may also have noticed as we've been

going through doing the work in this

section that the numbering of tasks in

the main project also has gaps you can

see here it goes one two three four and

then jumps to six so on and so forth now

don't worry about the gaps because I'm

going to talk about those a little bit

later on in the course

for the moment I've replaced the summary

task by the sub project and the

scheduling of sports day is correct at

the moment

so the last thing I'm going to do in

this section is to close down Microsoft

Project so I'm going to click on the

cross in the top corner and it says do

you want to save your changes to all so

I can do yes to all or no to all so I'm

going to say yes I do and again do you

want to save your changes to the sports

day file yes

and then I get a message saying do I

want to update the resource pool to

reflect the changes for all the open

sharer projects it's important that you

read this particular message carefully

because it explains what to do in a

situation where you only want to save

some of the changes in the share of

projects

but for the moment we're going to save

everything so I'm just going to click on

OK

so that's the end of this section I will

see you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced it's now

time for exercise one and although this

is only the first exercise on the course

it's the one that will probably involve

you in the most effort I'm afraid

because there's quite a bit to do in

this exercise

you've seen how I separated out one part

of the original charity event project

into a separate sub-project

well in the exercise folder you'll find

an MPP file called exercise

underscore01.mpp

it uses its own resources and it has all

four parts of the charity event project

now at the moment all four of them are

in the same single project and I want

you to separate it out into a master

project which will have no tasks of its

own and four sub projects one of them

for planning

one of them for Gala dinner

one of them for fashion show and one of

them for sports day

and all of those five projects that's

the master project and the four sub

projects should all share the same

resource pool

so what you'll see in the exercise files

folder apart from exercise zero one MPP

which is effectively the input to this

exercise you will see six files there's

all

fashion show Gala dinner

planning and sports day and then there's

the resource pool as well

now you certainly don't have to name

your six files exactly the same as mine

but I do suggest that you keep all six

in the same folder as each other

although technically you can separate

out a master project and its

sub-projects and a resource pool it does

introduce complications that can cause

some trouble so either keep them in a

folder all of their own or perhaps keep

them in your own version of this

exercise files folder but definitely

keep the six files together

and just to repeat myself from earlier

on don't worry too much about getting

exactly the same dates and exactly the

same result as me because your calendar

may be different your public holidays

may be different and you may have

different options settings that mean

that things in your projects aren't

quite going to work out exactly the same

as mine but you should finish up with

something that looks very similar to the

all file that's in the exercise folder

which represents my sample answer

now I've still got quite a few more

things to tell you about in relation to

consolidation and resource sharing but

we're going to cover those after

exercise one so good luck with the

exercise and I will see you in the next

section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

having looked at some of the basic

aspects of resource sharing and

consolidation what I'd like to look at

in this section are some of the more

practical aspects of how this can all be

made to work

now before I proceed I'd like to give

you a small word of warning in my

experience consolidation and resource

sharing in Microsoft Project works fine

if you follow a very clearly defined set

of rules if you like protocols and in

order for this to be the case your

requirements really must be pretty

straightforward

and the situation you're trying to

achieve will probably be pretty similar

to the situation I'm going to describe

in this section if in fact your

requirements are more complex so for

instance if you have a number of pools

or resources and sometimes you need to

get resources from one place and

sometimes from another maybe lots of

different projects and programs and

consolidations and so on then Microsoft

Project isn't really going to cope with

it without you being extremely careful

and even then you'd be working in an

environment where a relatively small

slip or deviation from the rules might

cause a problem

if your requirements are even a little

bit more complicated then you really

need to go for Microsoft Project server

where you can use what's called Erp or

enterprise resource planning and the

ability to deal with shared resources or

resources from multiple sources is

supported in a much more comprehensive

flexible and resilient way so that's

just a word of warning if you're looking

at this section of thinking well my

situation is a lot more complex than

that then you really need to consider

whether project itself is going to be up

to the job

now the second word of warning is very

closely associated with the first one

if you have a situation such as the one

I'm going to describe in this section

where you have say four project managers

sharing a Consolidated project and a

resource pool it's very important that

they all know what they're doing because

even if one of them doesn't understand

how to do this one person can cause

chaos for everybody else

so not only is it important that they

all know what they're doing but it's

probably worth making sure that you have

some sort of written rules and protocols

to cover the situation

now having said that let's take a look

at what I consider to be a fairly

typical situation and I've taken the

charity event the six MPP files

there's the all master project the

resources resource pool and the four

individual projects and I've saved them

into a cloud location so that's a shared

location where other people can access

those files

and in this case I have my files saved

to Microsoft OneDrive

in your particular organization you may

have a network storage area that you

might want to save the files to but in

this case I'm going to be using cloud

storage

so let's start with the situation where

I know that the project is there and all

I want to do is take a look at the whole

thing

so what I'm going to do is I'm going to

open charity event all and let's just

see what happens

well first of all project 2019 realizes

that charity event all uses a resource

pool and we're given two choices we can

either open the resource pool to see the

assignments across all share of files

that is the files that share the

resource pool or we can say do not open

the other files

now the reason we might choose the

second option would be for example if we

weren't really interested in resource

usage at that stage and only perhaps

wanted to look at some projects maybe

some schedule dates and times maybe to

just run off a report related to tasks

with no particular interest in the

current state of resourcing

well in that case the second option

would be fine because we'd see all of

the tasks but we wouldn't be able to get

information about resource assignments

and resource usage

on the other hand if you do want to look

at resource usage and assignments and

possibly even make some changes to these

then it's necessary to choose the first

option

so on this occasion I'm going to choose

the first option

so now I have access to charity event

all and within this file I have the four

constituent sub-projects that are

included within the master project

now one very important aspect of this is

that all five projects that is the

master and the four sub projects and the

resource pool are all in the same

location

so that's the situation in which I can

do this

so let's take that as an ideal situation

I'm working in a shared office looking

at these projects in a shared location

now supposing that I was the gala dinner

project manager and any particular time

I only needed to see the gala dinner

project

so let me close this file

and now I'm going to open the gala

dinner project from the same shared

location

now once again I get the message about

opening the resource pool to see

assignments across all Sheriff files or

of not opening the other files

note that I also have in the far behind

what is an effect dummy or ghost tasks

and these are temporary dummy versions

of the task to which the tasks in the

gala dinner project have dependencies

either predecessors or successors now

they're not real tasks but they

represent tasks in other sub-projects of

all and they are just to give me

information about what are to this

project external dependencies

now on this occasion I'm going to say

open the resource pool to see the

assignments across all share of files

and I'm going to click ok

now there is my project

I can work on the guarded inner project

if I want to and if I go into the

resource pool

I will see the actual shared resource

pool and I can use those resources in my

project

now if in fact I wanted to change the

view of the resources say I wanted to go

over to the resource usage View

I could see how those resources are used

or I should say where they're used

and in resource usage view one thing I

could do is insert a column to show

project

so let's click scroll down

and select project

and let's just widen that column out

very slightly

and even though I only have the gala

dinner project open I can still see

where the resources are used in relation

to other projects

so it's really worth noting that even

though I don't have all of those other

projects open the resource pool is aware

of where the resources are being used

now let's look at a very different

situation the Garland in a project

manager has decided to work on the

project at home and from home he doesn't

have access to the shared location

so with the gala dinner project manager

take the resource for home

well in theory that is possible and

provided everything were managed

extremely carefully it could even be

made to work but in my general

experience that is a bit of a recipe for

disaster because once the Garland in a

project manager has made whatever

changes they were to make including

potentially changes to the resource pool

if they bring the resource pool back to

the shared location on the following day

and the other project managers have done

the same how do you manage to reconcile

all of their changes with each other now

of course you may be able to set things

up so they can still access the shared

location from home but I'm going to

assume that on this occasion that's not

possible

what is a much better idea is to let the

person work on the project at home but

to understand the implications of any

changes that are made and be able to

incorporate those changes into the

shared set of projects

so what we have here is the gala dinner

project in a location where the resource

pool the shared resource pool is not

visible

so let's see what happens when we open

the gala dinner project

now of course project 2019 knows that

this project shares a resource pool and

has actually tried to find that resource

form so in this case we don't say open

resource Porters see assignments across

all Sheriff files we just say do not

open other files

so it's worth noting that that doesn't

mean that this project has fundamentally

stopped sharing resources it just means

we're not going to look at them at the

moment

and what you'll see here is that we get

a warning about links that can't be made

because this project is no longer in the

shared location so what I'm going to do

at the moment is just close

and go to the resource sheet and take a

look at that

so on the resource sheet you now have

just two resources and the two resources

are the two specific resources that are

used in the gala dinner project so Gala

dinner project manager and volunteer

and what happens in this situation is

that project 2019 creates a sort of

temporary working resource sheet and

only includes the resources that it

knows about which of course are the

resources that are used in this project

it's unaware of the other resources

because it can't see the shared resource

pool now as far as project 2019 is

concerned these are at the moment local

resources in a local resource sheet so I

could change assignments so let's jump

back to the Gantt chart

and let's look for instance at prepare

dinner venue and let's look at the

resources

and let's change that from three units

to say

two

and click ok

now notice the warning just there check

to see how the current assignments are

adjusted to accommodate the change of

units

so if I click to get my options and I'm

going to select the third option change

the amount of work but keep the duration

the same and that's now fine

and then the other thing we might want

to say is could I actually assign an

additional resource here

so let's suppose that what I wanted to

do was to assign the volunteer that I've

just freed up to make bar arrangements

so let's do that I'm going to double

click

I'm going to select volunteer

one unit

and click on OK

and you can see I now have one volunteer

assigned to task Aid to make bar

arrangements

but what about assigning a resource that

we can't currently see

supposing we're going to assign somebody

to help with training the gala dinner

volunteers so let me go to the resource

sheet

and I'm going to add a resource and that

resource is going to be caterer

foreign

that person

so there are the changes that I'm going

to make to the gala dinner project

so having finished work for the evening

I'm going to close this down and I'm

going to bring it back to the shared

location and replace the garlic dinner

project in the shared location so let's

see what the consequences of that are so

it's the next day and I've replaced the

gala dinner project in the shared

location and I've opened up the charity

event project file

so let me scroll down to Gala dinner

and let's look at our changes so first

of all prepare dinner venue

let's double click

and I can see that I have two volunteers

and let's just check another one so

let's go into make bar arrangements

and I have one volunteer assigned to

that

and if we look at the final change that

we made we'll double click on train Gala

dinner volunteers

and you can see that we have the caterer

assigned to that task and if you look

now at the resource sheet of course now

we're looking at the Shared resource

pool and we have a ninth resource that's

been added in there caterer so that was

a local resource for the gala dinner

project and now it's been added into our

shared resource pool now there's

absolutely no problem with this person

now being added to our resource pool but

it's important to understand that if in

fact the assignment we wanted to make

was one of the existing resources we may

have to do a resource replacement

on this occasion we didn't already have

Caterers set up but caterer is now part

of our resource pool

so you can see that all of those changes

that we have made to the Garland in a

project without the shared resource pool

being available on this occasion have

worked out absolutely fine

so that's it from this section we're

going to look at resource sharing and

consolidating some more in the next one

so I'll see you then

welcome back to our course of project

2019 advanced in the preceding section

we looked at some of the Practical

aspects of sharing and consolidation and

in particular at how a project manager

can work separately on a project which

is actually part of a Consolidated

project

in this section we're going to start by

looking at another important basic

question and that is how do you maintain

a resource pool

so what I'm going to do on this occasion

from the shared location is just to open

the resource pool

foreign

options it's important to bear in mind

that when we talk about updates to the

resource pool we're really talking about

two different things

one type of update is where it's

actually changing the information in the

polls so for example like a pay rate as

the example there says or perhaps

somebody's initials or a group or a

calendar

the other type of change isn't really a

change to the resource pool at all it's

a change to an assignment

and in this case it's the sort of

running total that the resource pool

keeps of assignments for each of its

resources

now if you open the pool using the first

option open resource pool read only

allowing others to work on projects

connected to the pool you can look at

the properties of the resources you

can't make changes to them but you can

certainly look at the pool and maybe run

off some reports

so let's open the resource pool in this

case as read only

and a very important point to make here

is that when you do this you're

basically taking a snapshot of the

resource pool at a moment in time and of

course other project managers May well

be working on their projects either

individually or maybe somebody's got the

all project open and it's quite likely

that they'll be making changes that

affect the resource pool

now if at any time you want to refresh

the information you have in the copy of

the resource pool that you're looking at

if you go to the resource Tab and to

Resource pool one of the options there

is refresh resource pool

and that will update the information

that is available to you

conversely if you have the resource pool

open and you're making changes such as

resource assignments and so on if at any

stage you want to update the resource

pool with the changes you're making then

you click the option below refresh

resource pool which is update resource

pool now that's grayed out at the moment

because I'm not in a situation that I

could possibly need to make any updates

and just while we're looking at this one

other thing I showed you this earlier on

I'd just like to emphasize this as a bit

of a useful technique let's suppose that

I don't have resource sheet view here

and I have say resource usage instead

it's very often extremely useful to

insert project in here so if we add a

new column

and remember these are listed

alphabetically

and we're going to scroll down

and select

project

and remember that will give you the

location of the project files

and one other thing to be aware of so

let me jump back to the resource tab

again if you look at the resource pool

and click on share resources

the share resources dialog here for the

resource pool itself shows you a list of

the files of the projects that are using

this particular resource pool and again

that can be very useful information

now let's look at the second option open

resource pool read write so that you can

make changes to Resource information

like pay rates Etc although this will

lock others out of updating the pool

with new information

if what you need to do is to do

something like change pay rates or any

other fundamental change to the

information about one or more resources

then you're going to need to open the

resource pool read write

now when you do that you don't stop

other users opening projects that share

the resource pool from opening their

projects but they won't be able to make

changes to the resource information

now the third option is in a way a

variation on the second option open

resource pool read write and all other

Sheriff files into a new master project

file you can access this new

masterproject file from The View tab

switch Windows command now so far when

we've been talking about project

consolidation the implication of what

I've done is that there is an element of

permanence to this all project in this

case

this all is if you like the framework

that contains the four sub-projects and

I've really done that on the basis that

this would be something that would

continue throughout the life of the

overall project

but in some cases either you don't need

that or in fact that creates its own

problems such as the fact that it

restricts how many users manage their

projects and it may actually be better

for the users to keep their projects

completely separate on a day-to-day

basis

they can still share the resource pool

but the projects are not permanently

Consolidated into a master project

however it may be that once a week for

example you need to run a report and in

order to run that report you need all

the projects together in a master

project file

so that's the third option and I'll

leave you to experiment with that one

and that just leaves me with a couple of

other things I'd like to cover in this

section and one of them is that I've

shown you how to share resources but

what about stopping sharing resources

the most important thing to remember if

you want to stop sharing is that you

need to have the pool and the file open

so I'm going to open the resource pool

in this case as read write

and then I'm also going to open the gala

dinner file now one way of doing that is

if I go to the resource form

and click share resources

I can go to the gala dinner file here

and click open

and as we know the gala dinner file

shares resources so let's go to the

resource pool

and share resources

and at the moment it says use resources

from the resources file

so let's change that back to use own

resources

now if I close the garlic in a file

and make sure that I save the changes

and if I now look in the resource pool

and share resources

you can see that Gala dinner is no

longer listed as one of those files

so let me now close the resource form

and save the changes

and I'm going to go back and open the

gala dinner file again

and of course if I now look at its

resource sheets

I just have the three resources that we

saw earlier on and of course under

resource pool

and share resources it says use own

resources

finding this section I'd like to look at

one other thing now I just stopped the

gala dinner from sharing resources and

I've opened charity event all again

let's just look at the resource sheet

now note that the resource sheet has now

still got the nine resources from the

shared pool but it recognizes now that

because one of the sub projects doesn't

share resources with the others its

resources are shown on the sheet as well

so this makes a point first of all about

the fact that the resources are now

coming from two different places but

also that we're then a Consolidated

project you don't have to have only

projects that share the same resource

pool they can share a resource poll and

they can have their own resources Etc

and the very last thing if I just go

back to the Gap View

if I wanted to stop say the gala dinner

from being an inserted project so

instead of being a sub project I just

want its task to be in the all project

it's a pretty straightforward thing to

do all I need to do is to select the sub

project

right click

and select information

and that brings up the inserted project

information dialog box and I'm going to

jump straight away to the advanced tab

now the thing that specifies that this

is an inserted project and that the

information here is linked to the

separate project file at that location

is this check box just here

the one that's currently checked and

says linked project

if I uncheck that box

and click on OK

and now look at that sub project you can

see that it's no longer showing as an

inserted sub project it's actually just

a set of tasks within the all project

project file

and one thing to bear in mind here is

that when you convert an inserted

subproject back to being separate tasks

again that's not a reversible process so

make sure that you've got backup copies

of where you started from

so that's it for this section I will see

you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to my

course on Project 2019 advanced

in this section we're going to look at

recurring tasks now the use of recurring

tasks may not be something that you've

come across before and if you're going

to use the technique of occurring tasks

you need to be a little bit careful

about one or two of the limitations that

apply

you also need to understand quite

clearly how to set recurring tasks up

correctly

now let me start by giving you an

example of where you might use a

recurring task and I'm going to create a

little project here comprising just of

recurring tasks but of course you can

create recurring tasks within any kind

of project

and the example I'm going to use is an

example of a progress meeting and it's

going to be in our case on a certain day

of the month it's going to be on the

29th of the month each month and it's

going to be a three hour meeting on the

afternoon of the 29th so it's going to

run from 1400 hours to 1700 hours

now given that sort of pattern if you

are managing a project that say lasted

about a year you'd be looking at about a

dozen progress meetings now this is the

first very important point to bear in

mind if you're going to set those up as

a recurring task you need to be in a

situation where you will not often vary

from that pattern in fact you're in a

situation where you pretty much stick to

that pattern all of the time now there

are some natural variations so for

instance the 29th of the month isn't

always on a working day now project 2019

can cope with that sort of natural

variation so that's just fine but if

what in fact happens is that every month

you decide what time of day you're going

to have the meeting and you decide that

it's not going to be on the 29th it's

going to be on the 24th or some other

apparently fairly random change each

time then recurring tasks are definitely

not the way to go you need something

that really is pretty consistent

although as I say project 2019 can deal

with some of the more obvious natural

variations now before we do this I just

want to demonstrate one other thing and

that is something that a surprisingly

large number of people don't generally

get to do with project

and that is to use times as well as

dates in start and finish quite often

you don't need to do it people tend to

schedule in terms of whole days but let

me just adjust these column widths very

very slightly let's move that across

and give these a little bit more room

and then I'm going to go into file and

down to options and on the general page

I'm going to reset the date format to

include time

and click on OK

all right so now what I'm going to do is

to create my recurring task

so on the task tab

in the insert group on the task drop

down we have an option there for

recurring task

and that brings up the recurring task

information dialog

now I'm going to give my recurring task

a name and we're going to call it

project

meeting now the duration of the task in

this case is just three hours

and the recurrence pattern is what I

Define next

so this is going to occur

monthly and we're going to say we want

this to occur on the 29th

of every month so now I need to enter in

the range of recurrence so I'm going to

select the uh 29th of May

which is fine but I also need to edit

the time just here so I'm going to

change that

to 2PM

I need to specify when this recurrence

is going to end and I have two options I

can end after a specified amount of

occurrences or I can end by a specific

date and time

so I'm going to say end after and we'll

do seven occurrences

and the final thing I need to specify

here is the calendar so is there a

calendar for this recurring task well

I'm just going to use the standard

calendar

then I click on OK

so now what happens is that project 2019

tries to schedule these project meetings

for me and if it runs into any problems

with any of them it will tell me here

and give me options of what I want to do

now in this case what's happened is that

for two of the dates or two of the tasks

they are scheduled to occur on a

non-working day and it really gives me

three options my first option is I can

click yes and it will reschedule it for

the next available working time now in

this case that may well be at the

beginning of a Monday morning

if the problem here is it's hitting a

weekend day then the meeting will finish

up scheduled for early Monday morning

now we'll address that in just a moment

if on the other hand I decide that all

that happens that month is that we won't

have a meeting then I click no and then

that particular task occurrence will not

be created

and then the third option is to stop the

operation entirely so basically I've

seen the problem and I thought okay I

don't know what I want to do about this

I better not proceed creating these

tasks if that's how I feel then I just

click cancel

now on this occasion I'm quite happy for

it to create the project meeting task on

the next working day so I'm going to

click yes and you can see that for each

of them there is a three hour duration

and you'll see that for two of them so

task number three here and also task

number six they've been rescheduled to

the first available working day so

that's July the 1st and September the

30th respectively now unfortunately for

those tasks it actually makes the

meeting from 8am in the morning until

11AM but I can in fact go into these

tasks by right clicking and selecting

information

and just manually update that

and click ok

I'm going to do the other one and I will

see you in a moment

Now setting up recurring tasks in this

way would probably save me quite a bit

of time it's certainly better than

creating seven different meetings

but going back to something that I said

earlier on if each of those meetings did

have a very specific difference from the

others so if each of them had some

particular features then it might well

turn out better in the long run to

schedule them individually and another

aspect of that is if for example we

change our minds and decide that it was

going to be a two-hour meeting from

three till five on the 29th if I select

that recurring task itself

which effectively works the sort of

summary task right click and then select

information

and if I then change the duration to two

hours

and change the time down here to 3 pm

and click ok

and click yes again it would delete and

recreate all of those individual tasks

again so what will happen is that my

exception the two that I just

demonstrated I would need to put them

back again so if you remember we had two

tasks it was this one here task three

and also task six down here we would

need to go back in and edit them

individually as well so I've covered

there the main points in relation to

recurring tasks but there are a couple

of other things to add one of them is

that when you're creating a recurring

task and specifying how many times it's

going to recur or when it's going to

stop recurring there is no limitation

based on the end date of the project so

you can easily schedule this recurring

task Way Beyond the end of the project

if that happens you will actually then

extend the project up to the end of

these recurring tasks so you do need to

be careful that you're not actually

scheduling too far off into the Future

and another useful thing to know is how

to collapse and expand

so if you double click on this case the

project meeting summary task it will

collapse up all of those meetings

double click again to expand and also

note the little icon there if we hover

over it you'll see it says that this

task occurs seven times between May the

29th 2019 at 3 pm and November the 29th

2019

the calendar standard is assigned to

this task

and perhaps the final thing to point out

here is I haven't assigned resources

here but supposing I want to select the

recurring task itself and assign

resources so let's right click

and select assign resources

so now you can go in and choose one two

or all three if you want to I'm just

going to choose two of them

okay

and click close

and let's just widen this column out a

little bit

and there you can see that those team

members have been assigned to all of the

meetings or all of the individual tasks

and perhaps just one other thing going

back to when we actually created this

task one of the options towards the

bottom if you remember was we selected

the calendar for scheduling this task

so scheduling ignores resource calendars

so let's suppose that you actually

assigned the resources to this task and

one of the resources was on holiday on a

particular day they were having some

annual leave

if all of the resource calendars were

taken into account then project 2019

wouldn't be able to schedule the meeting

for that day

if you want to follow the principle

which will often be the case in things

like project meetings that basically

you're going to schedule the meeting and

anybody who happens to be on holiday

isn't going to be there then you can

right click and go back into information

and just check this box scheduling

ignores resource calendars so that's it

on recurring tasks I will see you in the

next section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

in this section we're going to start to

look at custom fields

now it's probably the case that in your

use of Microsoft projects so far you've

seen and used many of the fields

associated with tasks and resources

so for example if we're dealing with

tasks there are many fields associated

with the task such as its duration its

start date and its actual start date

and although in some cases you'll

specify values for these yourself

sometimes Microsoft Project does the job

for you

so for instance if you set up a task

starting on a particular date then

create another task with a dependency on

the first so say it's going to start 20

days after the first task starts

Microsoft Project will calculate the

start date for you

it also calculates things like the

amount of work involved in a task based

on the duration the number of resources

assigned and so on although the number

of fields available to both tasks and

resources in Microsoft Project is very

large in any particular situation it may

be that there is other information that

you want to store

and the way that we approach keeping

other information is to use what are

called custom fields

now the things that you can do with

these custom fields are many and various

as we shall see

but project goes part of the way there

to enabling custom fields for you by

providing a set of dummy fields and you

can use these as the basis for custom

Fields now what I'm going to do in this

section is to demonstrate a very simple

example of a custom field and that will

both show you how we'll use those dummy

fields and also the sort of things that

you can do with custom fields

now the example I'm going to use is one

which most project managers will be

familiar with although this is a

relatively recent Innovation it's been

around for a few years now and many

project managers Keep information about

the tasks in a project that's called rag

status

now rag rag stands for red Amber green

and it's a very simple indicator of how

a task in a project is going now

basically the way this works is that for

each task in a project it's given a rag

status so for example something that's

going well on schedule no particular

problems is given a rag status of G for

green

something where there are some kinds of

issues or some problems or some sort of

threat to the overall performance of the

project may get a status of a for Amber

and a task in our case where things have

gone horribly wrong and we really need

to give it some attention get the

project back on track we might give that

a status of R for red now people assign

these statuses in different ways so some

project managers May assign status

manually several might look at the

situation and say I'm going to make that

a red task or I'm going to make that an

Amber task but in other cases these

values will be calculated based on the

current performance of the project so

for instance the rag status may be based

on Time Performance how late is this

task or maybe based on costs so how over

cost is this task

now in this section I'm going to

demonstrate setting up rag status for

use manually so we're going to set up

this new rag status custom field and

then I'm going to assign values for the

project here based on Purely my own

subjective assessment of the state of

each task now the project I'm going to

demonstrate this on is a project for a

new website for the company National

Farm Foods

the details of the project at this stage

don't matter but what does matter is

that I'm going to assign rack status to

the tasks in the project so what I'm

going to do is I'm going to go up and

click on the project tab which I

fortunately already have selected and

then one of the options in the

properties group is custom Fields And as

things stand at the moment I have no

defined custom Fields now first of all

when we're working in a non-enterprise

environment we basically have two

choices as far as custom fields are

concerned

first of all we can have a custom field

that applies to tasks or we can have a

custom field that applies to resources

now on this occasion we're going to set

up a custom field that applies to tasks

now one of the things you need to decide

early on is what sort of field is this

what type of field is it and you can

choose from the drop down on the right

you can have a text field cost field

date duration finish flag so on and so

forth now on this occasion we're going

to use a text field so I can just click

away and my text field will only contain

one character it's going to be an R an A

or a g but it's still a text field and

with text selected here it's showing me

all of the dummy text Fields available

in the list and if I scroll down you can

see that there's quite a lot of them now

generally speaking there's no real

preference over which of the available

dummy text fields to use you do get a

total of 30 so hopefully that will be

enough and we only need one so let's use

the first one here text one what we

normally do is rename the custom field

in order to make it easy to remember so

we need to kind of state what the

purpose of that custom field is

so on this occasion I'm going to rename

it to be r a g

now when I click on OK look how it

appears in the list it's referred to as

rag but in Brackets afterwards it says

text one that's partly There To Remind

me that this is a custom field and which

of the available dummy text Fields it's

using and you'll see that at various

points from now until later on in the

course so let's work through some of

these other options first of all custom

attributes so we can have no custom

attributes look up or formula

now we can say no custom attributes in

which case the user can type into our

new rag text field pretty much anything

they want to

or we can say look up the available

values from a list or we can say apply a

formula maybe do a calculation to

determine which value this custom field

takes in any particular case so on this

occasion we're going to use a lookup

table so let's click on the lookup

button and it will take us to the edit

lookup table for rag dialog box

and what we're going to put in here is

the available values for rag status now

if you've got a long list of options to

put in here it's probably useful to put

the most used ones at the beginning or

you may choose to say well with a long

list it may be best to put them in

alphabetical order and then people can

find them easily on this occasion we

only have three values so let's start

with the one we want to see the most

often which is G so I'm going to click

in the value field and just type G

gonna go across to description and for

this I'm going to say that g means

progress

good

I'm going to put in my second value

which is a for Amber

and the description for this one is just

warning

and then finally my third option

which is r and my description here is

that there is an issue or an exception

now as you're putting these in you do

have a number of options you can for

instance change the order by selecting

one and then using the buttons to move

up or down

and you can also do things like uh

cutter row you can copy a row

you can paste

insert a row and also delete a row as

well so don't forget that you do have

those icons just above the table to help

you manage your list as well you also

have some options underneath the table

so this one here use a value from the

table as the default entry for the field

now I want my default entry to be green

so the G so I'm going to select it and

I'm going to say

use value from table as the default

entry and I'm going to say set default

and note now that the color has now

changed to Blue so that tells me that

that is the default for the field I also

have a couple of other options under

here so let's just expand where it says

display order for lookup table so I can

choose to display the order by row

number so one two three as I have them

here I can choose sort ascending or sort

descending but I'm pretty happy just to

keep it on by row number

and let's expand data entry options and

what we have here is it says allow

additional items to be entered into the

fields now I really want to restrict

this to just those three values R A and

G so I'm not going to check this option

and another option I have right at the

bottom is the ability to import a lookup

table so for instance if I've been

keeping my lookup values in an Excel

spreadsheet or maybe a text file I can

import them using this facility

however at this stage I'm happy with the

list that I've set up here so I'm just

going to click on close

so having set up my list of available

values the next set of options I have

relate to calculation for task and group

summary rows

now let's suppose that I look at this

particular summary task here development

in my project

it has three subtasks so three tasks

within the summary task

and let's suppose that I gave all three

of them a rag status value of G

so do I calculate a rag status value for

the summary task on the basis of that

or if one had a g one had an A and one

had an R would that make the summary

task have a rag status value of a for

example do I average it out in some way

now if you're going to do some sort of

calculation on averaging for summary

tasks you can specify it here but if you

don't do that if summary task rag status

is not calculated in some way from the

rag status of the individual tasks

you'll leave this set at none which is

what I'm going to do for the moment

the next option is how we would do

calculations for assignment rows well

again on this occasion we're not going

to calculate values for assignment rows

so again we're going to leave that set

at none the final set of options here

values to display gives a choice between

displaying the values R A or G or using

some sort of graphical indicators

so let's click on graphical indicators

and it brings up the graphical

indicators dialog box now using this

dialog you can specify which graphical

indicator is shown for any value or

combination of values for non-summary

rows

summary rows and for the project summary

task itself

and with the last two of those you can

see whether the summary rows or the

project summary inherit criteria from

the non-summary rows or summary rows

that they own

now on this occasion I'm going to stick

with data and I'm going to click on OK

and my first custom field is now set up

so let's take our custom field for a

little bit of a test drive first thing

I'm going to do here is I'm going to

insert a column so right click and

insert column

and I'm going to scroll down for my

field type and if I go to the bottom

that's where I should find those custom

fields and there they are all of those

text ones so let's choose the one we

created so text one rag

and let's go through some of these tasks

so the first one here tendering process

contract I can see that that task is

actually complete it's got a tick in the

information column so I'm going to

select the drop down and I'm going to

say that progress on that task is

complete or good in this case

if I move down to requirements

definition and look across at the Gantt

chart well we're not making as good a

progress on this task it's probably

about 75 complete so I'm going to give

that one an a for warning and I'm going

to go and I'm going to give this one an

a as well

so let me just go through and complete a

few more of these I'm going to give most

of these a status of progress good

and of course typically you can use this

field in any other way you might use a

field so you could use it in filtering

for instance so if I wanted to filter

this list I could go up to the view Tab

and I could set up a filter or

alternatively if I just wanted to see

all of the tasks with a rag status of G

and of course I could click on the drop

down I could select G

and click on OK and it will just filter

out all of those tasks that don't have a

status of G

so that's the basics of setting up and

to some extent using a custom field in

the next section we'll look at custom

fields in a little bit more detail

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

in the preceding section I showed you

how to add a custom field in our case a

rag status field and how to manually

enter values into that field for the

tasks in this particular project the

northern Farm Foods website project

now when it comes to using custom Fields

there may well be situations where you

set up a custom field where values are

entered manually but as I pointed out

earlier quite often you may want to

automate the calculation of values for a

custom field

so what we're going to do in this

section is to introduce a second custom

field I'm going to stick with the idea

of a rag status field but this time the

values in that field are going to be

calculated

now as I pointed out in the preceding

section there are many ways that people

calculate rag status it can be based on

Time Performance cost performance Etc

but the way I'm going to do it in this

section is to calculate rag status

purely on the basis of cost so what I've

done is to move the whole project

forward a little bit the Project's not

been going particularly well everything

was behind schedule in the version that

you saw in the preceding section that's

the version here but I'm now going to

move it on to a later stage where we've

reflected the fact that things aren't

going too well by extending some of the

durations of the task to make them more

realistic in line with what's actually

happening

and the version of the project that

you're going to see now quite a few of

the tasks have had their durations

extended

so this is version two

note that you can see the custom rag

status column there to the right of the

task name in the table

now as I said just now I'm going to base

calculation of Rags status the new rag

status on cost so what I've done here is

to apply the cost table and remember you

can access those from the tables drop

down and just select cost from the list

and if you note in particular if you

look at the variance column so if I drag

this over slightly

this one just here

that quite a few of the tasks now have a

positive variance for example they're

currently running over budget which I

think in every case in the update that

I've done is because the task has had to

be extended and therefore the cost of

the resources on the task has increased

now if you look at task five you'll see

that the variance is just over two

thousand dollars for that task task 10

the variance is just under one thousand

dollars and there are a couple of other

variances as well

so for instance task 14

has a small variance of plus ninety

dollars now what we're going to do is to

calculate rag status automatically based

on cost variance and the rule that I'm

going to apply is that anything that has

a cost variance of zero or less so I.E

the currently planned cost doesn't

exceed the Baseline cost

any of those tasks the rag status will

be G or green

for any task whose cost variance is

positive but doesn't exceed one thousand

dollars the status is going to be a or

Amber and for all other tasks so tasks

whether cost variance exceeds a thousand

dollars the rag status will be R for red

so let's see how this is set up this

automatically calculated custom field

so let's set up this second custom field

I'm going to go up to the project tab

custom fields

and this time I'm going to select task

2. and I'm going to rename that to

rag

Auto

just to distinguish it from the existing

rag custom field note that on this

occasion I'm not going to use the lookup

I'm going to use a formula

so any existing data in the rag auto

field will be discarded as all values

will now be calculated by the formula

now this is an important point if you

already had values in that field as soon

as you started to look at them maybe try

to enter values for your new field you'd

see them there and you'd be aware that

there was maybe a conflict but with a

custom field whose value is calculated

using a formula you can easily overwrite

existing values in the field in this

case the text 2 field without realizing

that that's what you're doing so this is

a little bit of a warning if there's

anything in text to already it's going

to be overwritten by the values

generated by the use of the formula now

I don't have anything I need in text to

so I can proceed with entering in my

formula into the dialog box

so this dialog Works in pretty much the

same way that Microsoft expression

Builders and formula Builders generally

work you have a set of buttons that let

you do things like mathematical

functions you can also do text functions

and you have various kinds of brackets

inequality is logical operators and so

on

you also have access to all of the

fields that are available for a given

task in this case and then you have a

whole host of functions now I'm going to

do this job in a couple of stages and

the first stage I'm going to do is to

say let me identify the G's what would

identify a status of G

well a state sub G would be identified

by a cost variance which is 0 or

negative

so I need to do an element of testing

something or comparing something so

let's click on the function button

and look down at the categories of

functions now the sort of function that

I need to begin with comes in the

category General and it's an IF function

now the way this if works is I specify

an expression if the expression is true

I do whatever it says in the true Parts

if it's false I do whatever it says in

the false parts

now the expression I need is a

comparison between the cost variance and

zero so what I need to do is if the cost

variance is less than or equal to zero I

want the value of rag Auto to be green g

otherwise I want it to be either a or R

now I'm going to deal with the either

ARR part in the second stage of building

up this formula so I'm just going to

deal with the G part first

so the first thing I need is my

expression so I'm just going to delete

out where it says expression now my

expression is if now what's the cost

variance called well if I go to my field

drop down and go to cost

you see I have an option in here for

cost variance

so what I want to say here is if the

cost variance is greater

than zero

what do I want to do if that's true well

if it's true it's going to be r or a now

I still need to do that part so I want

to come back to that later so for the

time being I'm just going to put in here

an X

but if it's false I want rag status Auto

to be G and that's it that's not a

particularly complicated formula if the

cost variance is greater than zero make

rag Auto X if it's not greater than zero

make rag Auto G now when I click on OK

the formula is checked for correct

syntax and the syntax must be correct

you'll often get another warning there

reminding you that anything that's

currently in the text 2 field will be

overwritten once you implement this

formula now let me look down at the

other options in the custom Fields

dialog do I want to worry about task and

group summary rows at the moment no not

really assignment rows no what about

values to display well I'm going to put

that onto data for the moment and let's

click on ok now of course in my table

I'm not currently showing rag Auto

status

so let's insert a column which we should

be used to doing by now

and let's scroll down

and select our rag Auto

and as you'll see for any of the fields

where the cost variance is positive

we're getting an X they're the ones we

really need now to sort out but for the

others where the cost variance is zero

or negative we're getting a g so the

first version of the formula is working

now what we need to do is to implement

the second part of the formula so I'm

going to go back into custom fields

make sure rag Auto is selected

click on formula

and I can edit the existing formula the

existing formula is based on that if

statement where we compare cost variance

with zero and if it's true X says

literally the value of rag Auto is going

to be the letter X and if it's false the

value of rag Auto is going to be G

but we can make either the true parts or

the false Parts something else

altogether

so for instance instead of making that

literally X we can make it yet another

if statement so what we're going to do

is we're going to replace this x value

so I'm just going to highlight it

and delete it

and we're going to use another if

statement in here so back to function

General

and if

now our expression we're still testing

against cost variance so let's delete

that out

and use our cost variance field

and our test this time is if it's

greater than

a thousand

if that's true the result is going to be

r

and if it's false the result will be

a

and click on OK to accept that

and I can see that the syntax has been

accepted

and let's click on OK

and I can see now that that rag status

column has updated we no longer have any

X's showing in there it's either g r or

a which is exactly what I wanted so in

this section I've showed you how to

create a calculated custom field I've

got a couple of other things to tell you

about these calculations and we're going

to take a quick look at graphical

indicators in the next section and then

I'm going to set you another exercise so

please join me for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

in the preceding section we set up a rag

Auto Custom field and the value of that

custom field for each of the tasks in

our website project was calculated using

a formula

as I pointed out in that section the

formula that you can create can be

pretty sophisticated and there are many

facilities there to help you to

calculate values for custom fields in

very sophisticated ways

now in setting up the formula to

calculate rag auto values we used if

statements and there is a very good

alternative to that which can make

things a lot simpler and which can deal

with situations where you have more than

three alternative values

I'm going to show you how to do that in

this section but I should point out this

is just one of the many available

functions and it really is a good idea

to get as much practice as you can at

creating and using formula for

calculated Fields so let's once again go

into custom fields and choose rag Auto

and click on the formula button and

there's our formula with those nested

IFS now what I'm going to do is to

replace that with a switch statement now

the switch statement can have as many

options as you like so let's replace

that with the switch function and I've

just typed that in there but of course

you could select it from that function

drop down and our first condition again

we're using the cost variance

and we're going to say if that is less

than or equal to zero

then produce a g

our second condition again is going to

be cost variance

if that is less than or equal to a

thousand comma then that will produce

an A and then our final condition again

is against cost variance if that is

greater than a thousand

then produce an R

and that's it so let's click ok to check

our syntax

and that looks good so far the other

thing I'd like to show you now is how to

use graphical indicators in association

with custom fields and what we're going

to do is replace the R A and G letters

there with some kind of graphical

indicator

so let's jump back into custom fields

and right at the bottom where it says

values to display we're going to switch

this from data to graphical indicators

and what we're going to say in here is

that if it's equal

to Value R then which image are we going

to use to represent this well I'm going

to use this one here

and I can do the same for the rest of

them so if the value

equals

a

I'm going to use the orange indicator

and if the value equals g I'm going to

use the green indicator

now before I click on OK and show you

what that looks like just look at the

top half of this dialog

I'm setting this up here for non-summary

rows

I can also either have the same or

different graphical indicators for

summary rows and for the project summary

and note also the option towards the

bottom of whether I want to show the

data values in tool tips

so I'm going to stick with the images

that I've set up and I'm going to click

on OK

and OK again

and now my graphical indicators are in

force

so that's it I've shown you the very

basics of graphical indicators it's time

now for you to do another exercise and

I'm going to cover that in the next

section so I'll see you then

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 Advanced it's

time now for exercise two and in

exercise 2 I want you to create a custom

field for a project that you haven't

seen before

this here is a straightforward building

project in fact the schedule is not even

quite finished and we haven't even

assigned any resources to it yet either

but in the process of planning this

project we've got almost to the end of

the overall planning and we've saved a

baseline little while ago but we've had

to change some estimates

and having changed some estimates we've

got a finish variance for some of the

tasks in the project now you can see the

project and the Finish variances in

exercise zero two dot MPP in the

exercise folder this is effectively your

starting point for exercise two now many

of the tasks don't have a variance and

some of the tasks have a variance of

just two or three days

we particularly want to flag the tasks

that have a variance a finish variance

of five days or more at the moment so

that we can address that before we go on

to the next stage of planning

the way I'd like you to do this is to

create a custom field but a custom field

of type flag now if you check what each

of the types of custom field is in help

you'll see that a flag field is a data

type

and you need to make sure that the value

of yes is set for any task where the

Finish variance is five days or more

I'd also like you to set that in the

appropriate summary task as well

so if a summary task has a finished

variance of five days or more I'd like

that to have the value yes in this new

custom field type flag what I'd then

like you to do is to indicate

graphically each of the tasks and

summary tasks with the finished variance

of five days or more in the Gantt chart

using an appropriate icon

now I'll show you my answer to this in

just a moment but before that I just

need to explain something that's very

important to you that you may not be

aware of in Project 2019 durations are

stored in minutes and if you want to for

example check the value of finish

variants you need to do that in terms of

minutes

now when I say five days by default

that's five working days not five

elapsed days

so in a project where the defaults are

still in force five days is 40 hours

which is 2 400 minutes

so when you're dealing with anything

related to duration you need to be very

aware of the fact that durations are

stored in minutes

and for example if you're working in

elapsed days you would need to proceed

accordingly because of course an elapsed

day is 24 hours so we're talking here

about a finish variance of five days or

more

and here is my answer to exercise two so

there are no tasks in the top half of

the project where either the task or the

summary task has a finished variance of

five days or more but if we scroll down

to the bottom

there are quite a few and as you can see

the tasks and the summary tasks are

flagged with that red diamond icon

that's exercise two I will see you in

the next section

hey

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced in this

section we're going to start to look at

outline numbering and WBS codes now you

may not have come across these before so

I'm going to start by explaining outline

numbering

for this section and the next one I'm

going to use this house build project

and there's not a lot of detail in it at

the moment but there is enough for our

purposes in terms of outline numbering

now something like building a house is a

pretty structured kind of project and

will very often have a similar structure

to other house bill projects

now behind the scenes project 2019

maintains a set of outline numbers for

you and what I want to do first of all

is to show you the outline numbers for

this particular project

so I'm going to insert a column here to

the left of the start column

so I'm going to right click

select insert column and this one we're

going to look for outline numbering and

remember again everything is in

alphabetical order in this list

so there it is outline number

and the outline numbers that are

assigned to the tasks follow the same

structure of the tasks themselves so for

instance here we have summary tasks site

base lockup and their outline numbers

are one two three and within each of

those summary tasks the next level of

task has a DOT and then the second parts

of the outline number

so for example Clear Sight is 1.1

set out is 1.2 and so on so the good

news about all of this is the project

2019 does all the work on maintaining

those numbers for you and for example if

I was to add another subtask underneath

clear site that would take on the

numbering format

1.1.2 and so on so project 2019 pretty

much handles all of this for us which is

great but you might be thinking well

what is the point of these outline

numbers

well they're used to be able to uniquely

identify a task within a schedule and

the kind of purpose you may put that to

is for example if you want to relate

materials to a particular task

so if you were to say ordering some

steel to use for the structural steel

frame here task ID 21 which has an

outline number of 4.3

when you ordered the steel in order to

make sure that people knew which

particular project and task the steel

was for then you might provide the name

of the project and the outline number of

the specific task that the steel was to

be used for

so it's kind of a way of not only

identifying tasks in the project but

also to adding some structure to that

identification now on the face of it

that sounds like a pretty good idea but

in practice the use of these outline

numbers is a little bit fraught with

problems

if you have a very very fixed structure

in your project and possibly you're

reusing the same structure over and over

again and there is rarely if ever a need

to vary that structure then this

approach can work

but if in fact what you need to do is

have something that can deal with

variations with the addition of new

tasks then it doesn't

let me quickly show you the sort of

problem you get with this approach

now when I started site had the outline

a number of one and Clear Sight had the

outline number of 1.1 and set out had

the number of 1.2 as they still have

those outline numbers you can see that

trim because it is a subtask of Clear

Sight it became

1.1.1 but supposing that trim had to go

in but it wasn't a subtask of Clear

Sight it was a subtask of sight

so in other words it wasn't indented to

that third level

let me out Dent it again

and what happens is that the outline

number for set out has changed it

started out with the outline number of

1.2 and it now has an outline number of

1.3

so you can see that as you change the

structure particularly if you insert or

delete tasks then outline numbers

potentially can change for example if I

inserted a new summary task between bass

which has an outline number of two and

lock up which has an outline number of

three that summary task would get

outline number three and everything from

lock up onwards would have its outline

number changed so look up will become

four and so on

so although outline numbers work and as

I say project 2019 looks after them for

you they are very prone to change if you

either introduce tasks into a project or

remove tasks from a project or indeed if

you just move the tasks around

now as we're going to see later on there

is a way of getting around this problem

by using outline codes but before we

look at that I'd like to look at another

feature that is in effect built into

project 2019 and that is the use of WBS

codes and if you're not sure what that

stands for WBS stands for work breakdown

structure Now the default set of WBS

codes like the outline numbers are

maintained by project 2019

so I've just made a little bit of space

here and I'm going to insert another

column

and I'm going to insert a WBS column now

as we've seen before we can scroll

through the list right to the bottom to

select WBS alternatively to make this a

little bit quicker for ourselves we

could use this little search at the top

and type in WBS and that will bring up

all of the available options

so I'm going to select WBS and you can

see there it's brought up some numbers

which are kind of consistent with the

outline numbers that we have so for

example for the task number one site it

has an outline number of one and the WBS

code currently is zero zero one same

thing for base so on and so forth now

one of the major differences though is

that you can customize the WBS codes

now in order to explain at least in part

why you might want to customize the WBS

codes let me explain a little about

where WBS codes came from

WBS codes originated in government work

in fact I believe they originate in the

U.S military possibly specifically the

U.S Navy

and the idea was not only to be able to

identify the task activities in a

project using a coding system that was

understood by everybody involved but

also to do things like relate WBS codes

in one project to WBS codes in another

project

and what generally happened back then

was that when you're dealing with some

kind of government project or military

project and this system soon spread

pretty much around the world you would

be given WBS codes to use and you would

need to set up your project scheduled

WBS codes so that your project conformed

not only to government requirements but

often to International standards in

terms of identifying the elements within

a project

now WBS codes are still used today they

are still very commonly used in

government public sector type programs

and projects

and in fact I've used them relatively

recently on some of the government

projects that I've worked on

but one of the key aspects of WBS codes

is that they don't often look as simple

as this the coding system is normally a

lot more complex and a lot more specific

to the type of project or situation that

you're working in

so if you were given a set of WBS codes

to use in a project you would need to

know how to customize these standard WBS

codes and that's what I'm going to show

you now

the example I'm going to use is a

fictitious example there aren't any real

WBS codes from anywhere but once you've

seen how to do this in a relatively

straightforward case you should be able

to do it more generally so let's see how

to set up some WBS codes

let's jump across to the project Tab and

then within the Properties Group

WBS and Define code

so that brings up the WBS code

definition dialog now first of all we

have to choose a project code prefix now

bear in mind of course what I've just

said you'll normally be given all of

this but let's put our own values in

here so our project code prefix is going

to be HB

0 1 perhaps standing for house build 0 1

and then what we do is we decide how

many levels of code we need now I'm

going to have three levels of code

and the first level is going to be a

numbering level so when I click in

sequence just here I get a drop down

list with some options and I'm going to

select numbers ordered

the length of numbers well I'm going to

say it's going to be 3 and then I'm

going to have a separator of a slash

character and you'll see what all of

this means and what it looks like in

just a moment now the next one I'm going

to use if I just click the drop down

again and this one is going to be

uppercase letters ordered and maybe

we'll just have one character just there

and then for the separator there I'm

going to use a full stop or a DOT which

as you saw was the default and for the

third level

I'm going to go back to numbers ordered

again

I'm going to say the length is two

digits

and the separator there I'm going to

leave that as the default as a DOT and

you can see at the top as I've done that

we now have a code preview and all of

these are now in action in that code

preview what I also have are two check

boxes towards the bottom of the dialog

which says generate WBS codes for new

tasks so that means that when I insert a

new task into my schedule

does project 2019 generate this code for

me so I'm going to say yes which is why

I'm going to keep that ticked

if I uncheck that box I would have to

put in my own codes in there and then

there is a second check box verify

uniqueness of new WBS codes so do I want

project 2019 to make sure that when I

put a WBS code in it's Unique it's not

already been used so I'm going to say

yes to that as well and keep that

checked

now those last two choices are actually

very important and particularly if you

think about the first one do you want

project to generate WBS codes for you or

are you going to enter your own

if you've given all of these WBS codes

and they may not follow a very specific

sequence then it's important that you

uncheck that because you're going to

need to put your own WBS codes in

but as you can see I've got both boxes

checked I'm going to click on OK and

just watch what happens when I do that

now all of the tasks in my project have

been given WBS codes let me bring up

that dialogue again

and just look at those three levels that

I set up and let's look at the task here

trim

first of all hb01 project code prefix

note I didn't put any separator after

hb01 it runs straight into the code

itself

and the code itself is three numbers in

sequence so 0 0 1 is the first

the separator is a slash

then it's a single uppercase letter so

in this case a then a full stop and then

an ordered number zero one so that's two

numeric digits or number length two

now although I specified a separator at

the third level because there was no

fourth level component for this

particular WBS code because it's only

going down to the third level then I'm

getting that separator at the end

project 2019 knows whether it needs to

put in a separator or not the next task

in the plan of course project prefix the

same hb01

the first outline level is the same so I

get 0 0 1 again

slash again but the second level is

different so the letter is B

there is no third level for this

particular task so it's WBS code is

empty

so it finishes with the B

if you look at the lockup task here

notice how the numbering goes

hb001003 slash a slash b c and so on so

you can see how that numbering system

works

if I wanted to separate between the

project code and the specific task all I

need to do would be to put in here

perhaps I'd put a hyphen in there for

example

click on OK

and now all my codes would have a hyphen

in there as well so that's how you set

up your WBS codes and in the next

section we're going to start by looking

at how well WBS codes work in terms of

giving you a consistent and reliable way

of identifying the tasks in a project

but that's in the next section so I will

see you then

I course on Project 2019 advanced

in the preceding section we took a look

at outline numbering and WBS codes and I

pointed out some of the problems with

outline numbering in terms of producing

a consistent and reliable way of

identifying the tasks in a project and

the structure of those tasks

we then created custom WBS codes and I

said the first thing we're going to do

in this section is to take a look at

whether the problems we encounter with

outline numbers are the same with WBS

codes well what you're going to discover

is that you still have problems but

they're at least in part slightly

different problems now in just a moment

I'm going to demonstrate the sort of

thing that happens but before I do an

important point to bear in mind there is

a fundamental difference between a

situation where you are given codes to

use and they need to be assigned to the

tasks in a project in such a way that

those codes never change and the

procedure whereby the tasks in a project

are outline numbered in some way and

that the numbering is updated as you

update the structure and contents of the

project so at different times you may

want either of those behaviors

do you want your codes to be absolutely

fixed once they're applied or do you

want your codes to be flexible and

adaptable as the content and structure

of a project changes

well in order to demonstrate some of the

differences between the two systems that

we've looked at so far let's take a look

at task 11 the lockup task and we're

also going to look at task 18 down here

the frame task now lockup has an outline

number of three and a WBS code of 0 0 3

and frame has an outline number of four

and a WBS code of 0 0 4. what I'm going

to do is I'm going to change the

sequence of those summary tasks so what

I'm going to do is I'm going to take

frame and I'm going to select frame and

all of its subtasks and I'm going to

drag it above lockup

now notice that the frame is no longer

outline number four it's outline number

three and its subtasks are accordingly

renumbered and of course lookup has the

corresponding switch the other way so

it's now numbered as four and the tasks

are renumbered it corresponding to

number four so the outline numbering in

my project has stayed consistent so the

outline numbering in my project has

stayed pretty consistent but look at the

WBS codes the WBS codes have in effect

done exactly the opposite it appears

that the WBS codes have actually

traveled with the moving summary task

so as far as WBS is concerned frame is

still zero zero four and lock up is zero

zero three now that actually seems to be

quite encouraging but there are certain

things to be wary of because supposing I

now make the move the other way so let

me select frame again and drag it back

to where it was before

now when I drag it back to where it was

before the first problem is that by

default of course when I in this case

cut and paste or if you drag it it will

assume the indentation level of the task

above so the frame task is now indented

and what I need to do is I need to go

back to my task ribbon and I need to out

Dent that again

and you can see it's now got back to the

top level and my outline numbering is 4

4.1 so on and so forth so everything is

okay as far as the outline numbering is

concerned

but if you look at the WBS codes what

happened there is something really quite

strange because frame hasn't become

hb01-004 it's treated as though it's an

insert into the whole project and the

numbers that are assigned are in the

next available range and if you look

down at sign off at the end of the

project you'll see that that has a WBS

code of hb012

and so frame now has a zero one three

WBS code as it's the next one in the

sequence

so although the WBS code Behavior seemed

at first to be better there are some

inherent problems with this as well

one key aspect of this is that when

we're dealing with either outline

numbers or WBS codes and in our case

we're actually dealing with custom WBS

codes project 2019 does do the

maintenance on those codes

it does make changes to them

and its own internal intelligence to

decide when they need to be changed and

in what way they need to be changed and

sometimes what it does may not be quite

what you want it to do now that's not to

say that you're not going to use these

codes because for most of the problems

that occur there are ways of resolving

them provided you keep an eye on what's

going on

so let's take it for example the last

change that I made where I moved frame

back to its summary task situation and

the WBS codes assumed a value that I

didn't want so in this case the zero one

three extension so if I right click on

frame and and go down to information

and jump across to custom Fields you'll

see there that one of the custom Fields

is WBS now I can manually change that to

the value that I want to have it so I

can change it to

hb01-004 so let's do that

and click on OK

and you can see now that the summary

task and its subtasks have been

corrected back to the values that I

actually want

so in a situation where basically my WBS

codes are okay but I may have the odd

change to make the odd addition to make

and so on I can normally make WBS codes

and specifically custom WBS codes work

so it's not a case that they can't work

it's a case that a you need to make sure

that you've done as much preparation as

possible before you apply and customize

them and B you may need to make some

changes to those codes as you make

changes to your plan in order to

compensate for anything the project 2019

does that you don't actually want it to

do so I showed you there how to make a

change to correct what might Loosely be

called an error in the WBS coding system

but there are other options as well

so if for example you've got a situation

where you've got a number here that you

didn't want like zero one three so let

me for a moment just undo

to put those frame tasks back to zero

one three so I don't like the way this

is currently looking I want it all to be

in sequence one of the options is if you

go to the project tab

and go to the WBS drop down you have an

option for re number

and you get the wbs3 number dialog box

pop up and you can either choose to

renumber for the entire project or for

selected tasks so if you have selected

tasks you can renumber those with WBS so

I'm going to stick with entire project

and watch what happens you'll see that I

get a warning so it says you have

selected WBS code renumbering for the

entire project do you want to proceed

with renumbering all the WBS codes in

your project

so I'm going to click on yes

and it goes back to what is in effect

renumbering according to the custom code

that I've set up

so I pretty much finish up where I was

in the first place

but if you have that option then the

renumber either of the whole project or

a selected task can often give you a

usable set of WBS codes again as well

however going back to the point that

I've made a couple of times already now

sometimes you just need codes that are

fixed and in this case you need to use

the codes that project 2019 doesn't set

you need to use codes that you set and

the project 2019 leaves alone

and for that we need to use outline

codes and that's what we're going to

cover in the next section so I will see

you then

hello again and welcome back to my

course on Project 2019 advanced

section we're going to look at outline

codes

now so far when we've been talking about

the structure of a project I've

generally been talking about the

structure of the tasks in the project

so for instance summary tasks subtasks

and so on and we've looked at outline

numbering and WBS codes that reflect and

identify that structure and the elements

of the structure but apart from the fact

that these intrinsically have some

problems that we've been looking at in

the last couple of sections in some

situations there are many other ways

that you may want to add structure to

your project now in this section we're

going to look an alternative way of

setting up structure for a project and

we're also going to be looking at a

different sort of structure

now in order to do this I'm going to go

back to the northern Farm Foods website

project it's a very simple project with

a few resources and instead of showing

you an alternative way of setting up a

structure that you can see there in the

table on the left what I'm going to do

is to reflect the requirements of an

accountant and what the accountant wants

to do is to be able to identify cost

centers and cost center structures for

these resources

we need to set up structure which

reflects how we charge for the use of

these resources

so in this case we're not looking at a

task structure we're going to look at a

resource structure instead

so let's take a look at the resource

sheet and I'll explain to you more fully

what we need to do in this case now what

the project accountant has told us is

that we need to identify internal

resources against external resources and

then we need to identify which of the

internal resources are chargeable and

not chargeable and we need to do the

same for external resources

so we're going to set up a very simple

structure and we're going to use this

structure in order to clarify the

charging within the project

now I appreciate that in reality you may

well often have a much more complex

situation than this but this one will

serve to demonstrate the use of outline

codes pretty well so let's look at the

resource sheet there are many resources

so in the case of Northern Foods the

First Resource is the client and let's

look at the sort of things that they're

doing on the project so I'm going to

click on resource usage

and I can see that Northern Farm foods

are assisting with their requirements

definition of course and we would expect

that as the client

they are contributing on the analysis

and design and they're also doing some

testing now as the client we don't have

to pay them for what they're doing their

contribution is overall part of the

commercial arrangement we have with the

clients now if I look at this resource

here Adam Lacy he's a member of staff

and he's paid by salary and for salaried

staff working in their normal areas of

activity the department of which that

person Works would not charge for their

time so basically Adam as with several

other members of Staff will be allocated

to work on a project and although we'd

obviously need to keep track of his work

know what his work commitments were and

so on his time isn't actually charged to

the project let's move to the next one

so Jane Hill

she's working on analysis and design in

exactly the same situation however

Christian Waters is a member of Staff

who works for a quality team and he's

actually helping to write some test

Scripts

and within our quality team the time

that they work on a project is

chargeable so although Christian Waters

is an internal resource his time is

chargeable now that gives you some idea

of the sort of situation we're dealing

with and I'll go through all of these

when we come to allocate the outline

codes but first of all we need to set up

the outline code structure so on this

occasion we're going to be setting up a

custom field for a resource so we're

going to go up to the project Tab and

down to custom fields

and resource is going to be our option

and then from the drop down we're going

to select outline code now we're going

to choose outline code one and I'm going

to rename it and the new name is going

to be

charge code and click on OK

and you can see now that resource

outline code 1 is now called charge code

now notice that in this case most of the

options in the custom Fields dialog are

grayed out

the most notable exception is the one

we're going to use which is the lookup

option now you cannot use a formula from

an outline code but you can use a lookup

so we're going to click on look up and

that allows us to specify the values

that are available for the new custom

field charge code now first of all we

have the option of adding a code mask

and in the case of these charge codes

it's a very simple code mask so we start

with code mask and we're going to say

edit mask and there are two levels to

the charge code the first level

comprises three characters and then we

have a DOT separator

and then the second level so we'll

select characters again also uses

characters that comprise of three

characters with a DOT separator so once

we've done that we can click on OK

so there we have our mask in place and

you can see it's just three Asterix dot

three asterisks as defined in our mask

so let's put in the first value and this

is going to be

int

and that's for internal

resource

the next level we have I'm going to say

chg

and that's our abbreviation for

chargeable

[Music]

and then the next level we have n c g

and that's our abbreviation for

non-chargeable

[Music]

you have EXT

and that's the abbreviation for external

resource

for external I'm also going to have

the same so we're going to have

chargeable and also

non-chargeable now you'll notice here

that project is warning me that I

possibly have duplicate values in here

because I have chargeable and

non-chargeable listed twice but of

course we can get around that by

indenting some of these values so these

first two here so chargeable which comes

underneath internal resource I'm going

to indent and the same with

non-chargeable

and do the same down here and you can

see that those red warnings have now

disappeared so now we've done that let's

explore some of these options underneath

the lookup table so our first option

display indenting in a lookup table we

currently have that ticked for yes which

is fine and then use a value from the

table as the default entry for the field

well we're not going to put a default

entry in there display order for the

lookup table we're going to stick with

by row number that's the order in which

they're displayed there and for data

entry options we have allow additional

items to be entered into the fields so

definitely not

and allow only codes that have no

subordinate values so that means

basically that you have to choose

something from the lower level you can't

just choose int it has to be a full code

such as int charge

so I'm pretty happy with how that looks

so I'm going to click on close

and my new field is defined so I'm going

to click on OK

and what I'm going to do here is I'm

going to insert that column so I'm going

to right click and select insert column

and I'm going to scroll through the list

looking

for my outline level so there we go

charge code

and then I'm going to go into Northern

Farm Foods and from the drop down I'm

going to select external resource

non-chargeable

I'm then going to go down to Adam Lacy

and this one is going to be internal

resource non-chargeable

down to Jane Hill who is also an

internal resource non-chargeable

and finally Christian Waters who is an

internal resource chargeable

and there we are each of my resources

now has a charge code assigned

now of course one of the issues you may

spot there is that you may well have a

resource where some of their time is

chargeable and some of it isn't and what

you may want to do in that case is to

assign a code not to the resource but to

the resource assignment but for the

purposes of this exercise let's stick

with assigning them to resources

themselves

so let's now see how this new outline

code the charge code is going to enable

the accountant to analyze the resource

costs on this project very quickly and

easily

let's go to the view tab

and on The View tab there is a data

group and I'm going to apply Group by

and I'm going to say new group by

and the group by field that I'm going to

use

is you've probably guessed it charge

code so let's scroll down and select

charge code

and click on apply

and what you can see is we have at the

top level external resource and internal

resource at the next level we have

chargeable and non-chargeable note that

with non-chargeable that of course we've

got the hourly rates included so they

appear to be costs there but because

they're going to be not chargeable we

know that the cost is not actually

incurred

but we've just got a cost calculated at

the resources normal rate it may be more

appropriate to go back into the resource

sheet and Define the cost for the

non-chargeable resources to be zero but

in this case the accountant can look at

the non-chargeable elements and realize

that the overall cost within each of

those parts of the structure is zero

so there we have it we've set up a

custom resource field of type outline

code and used it in a specific example

as a way of breaking down the charging

structure for resources on a project

in the next section I'm going to set you

exercise three and exercise 3 will

involve you in setting up an alternative

outline custom field on this project

so that's it for this section I will see

you then

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

in this section I'm going to set you

exercise three and in exercise three

it's going to be based on the web

development project that we've been

looking at

I've updated it and the starting point

for exercise three is in the exercise

folder and it's called exercise

underscore zero three dot MPP

now apart from a very minor change to

the structure of the project if you look

at the custom Fields so if I jump into

custom fields

go to resource

and select outline code you'll see that

the custom field for resources that we

created in the preceding section is

still there and of course that custom

field was put in at the request of our

accountancy team to give some structure

to the cost charging for resources on

the project

in exercise 3 we're returning to custom

fields for tasks and what I'd like you

to do in exercise three is to use a

custom field of type outline code to

reflect the structure of the project so

we're more or less going back to what we

were doing with outline numbers and WBS

codes before

the big difference of course when we're

using outline codes is that project 2019

doesn't maintain the values for us so we

have to actually enter the values into

that custom field

but the good news the good consequence

is that it also won't change them

unexpectedly or remember them when you

don't want it to

basically you assign a value to a task

in the project and the task keeps that

value

and that means that you can put in a

structure that very much is fixed and

under your control this is a

particularly useful situation of course

if you've been told what codes to use

for the tasks in your project

now I'm going to show you my answer and

then I'm going to explain one or two of

the specific requirements of the

exercise

now here's my answer

and the column shown there is my custom

field web dev proge code

and basically in the organization this

web project is being run for they have a

way of coding all web development

projects and it's quite a simple method

basically they divide projects into

these categories of tendering

requirements design and development

testing and implementation so if you

like they have five main headings and

the third heading only design and

development is split into design and

development.001 then there's analysis

and design and design and

development.002

that covers the actual programming or

the database the coding and the HTML

pages

now even if you go down to a lower level

so say for example here task nine

analysis and design which has a web dev

project code of design and

development.001

every task at a lower level has the same

web dev project code

so the code stop with the codes that you

can see here

if I click on any one of those tasks in

the column

and click on the drop down you'll see

the full coding structure there so

there's only five top level values

tendering requirements design and

development testing and implementation

and the third one is divided into two

parts

that is all we require when we're

structuring our project

and in the case of testing for example

you had dozens and dozens of subtasks

under the testing summary task each of

them would still only get that web dev

project code of testing you'll quite

often see coding systems that only go

down a relatively short way into the

structure of in this case tasks possibly

in the case of resources as well

so that's exercise three my answer is

exercise underscore zero three

underscore answer and it's in the usual

place that's it for this section I will

see you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

in this in the next few sections I'm

going to look in some detail at costs

once again I'm going to assume that you

have good basic knowledge of using costs

in Project 2019 and I'm going to look at

some aspects that you either may not

have come across so far or perhaps where

you need to know a little bit more about

the detail of when and why you would use

these tools and techniques and how to

get the best out of them

now in this first section on costs I'm

going to take a look at fixed task costs

probably the case that with many of the

projects that you manage a very large

proportion of the costs are associated

with the use of resources and of course

this could be the cost of work resources

the amount that you pay people to do

various tasks and it can be the cost of

the materials that are used as well

but sometimes you have costs which are

fixed costs for specific tasks and I'm

going to demonstrate this one with a

particular example in the building

project that we looked at earlier on now

in that building project under the

summary task services

there was a task connect to services and

you can see it there task number 32. and

very often with this kind of task or

perhaps with the task associated with a

legal cost or a regulatory cost there is

a fixed part to the cost

so for example in the case of a house

build there may be costs associated with

connecting the house supplies to the

services that are provided locally

so for instance connecting to the water

supply or connecting to the electricity

Supply

now in this particular case I'm going to

assume that in this Locale the fixed

cost of connecting to Services is

295 US dollars this isn't a cost for

resources this isn't a cost for people

working on it and it isn't a cost for a

material it's a cost associated with the

specific task of connecting to services

now the way that you would enter a cost

like this is via the cost table so what

I'm going to do now is to switch from

the entry table

to the cost table

and let's start by having a look at

what's in the cost table

by default the cost table contains a

fixed cost column a fixed accrual column

they're the ones that we're going to use

now

and then you have a total cost Baseline

cost variance actual and remaining which

is just hidden behind our Gantt charts

and I'm going to talk about some of

these other costs as we go through the

next section but in this particular case

the fixed cost for connecting to

Services we'll just put it in here as

295 dollars

now we also have the question of how

this cost is accrued and I'm actually

going to look at Costa cruel in the next

section but for the moment I'm going to

record this cost as being accrued at the

start which is what I have as my default

option just there

now notice that this task now has a

total cost of 295 dollars and the

Baseline cost as we haven't saved a

baseline here is zero dollars

so at the moment we have a variance of

295 dollars and the remaining cost to

incur is also 295 dollars

now if you have assigned a fixed cost to

a task you still need to assign other

costs

so if for example a member of my team

had to spend time here or a few hours

get involved in connecting to services

that can still be added to the cost of

this task so this is a fixed cost often

paid to an external party and often as I

say associated with things like standard

charges legal costs regulatory costs and

so on

now I switched to the website project

here and you'll see that one of the

tasks in the website project has a fixed

cost of two thousand dollars

it's only possible to record one fixed

cost against a task but if you actually

have more than one fixed cost to apply

what you would normally do is to add

those costs together to give a total and

put the total in the fixed cost column

there and then it's always a good idea

to put in a note explaining that fixed

cost

so if I go into this particular task

here so task 2 by double clicking

and jumping across to that notes tab I

could put an explanation into here

explaining that fixed cost and in this

case it says it's being provided by

Trevor in the contracts department and

covers the preparation of itt's

distribution and initial processing of

responses as well as all Associated

discussions and costs

so if you had more than one fixed cost

you could list them there and explain

what each cost was and where you got

that figure from

now with fixed task costs there's one

other special case that can sometimes

occur let's suppose that you are getting

external consultancy on something from

an expert and let's suppose for example

in the case of this tendering process

contract task we also need to appoint a

consultant to help us with that

and the consultant doesn't charge on an

hourly basis but charges a fixed cost

for their services

now what you can do in this situation is

to set the work resource up for the

consultant on the basis that their

standard rate is zero but there is a

cost per use so let me jump across into

the resource sheet

and I'm going to add a new resource

so their standard rate is going to be

zero dollars per hour but the cost per

use

is say 400 dollars

so that is the consultant's fixed cost

for providing consultancy on a contract

now in this case I'm going to say that

this is accrued but I'm going to say

it's accrued at the end and the rest of

this I'm fairly happy with so let's jump

back to the Gantt charts and let's

assign that resource so you should be

pretty used to doing this now

so now if we jump back into the

information for that task so double

click

and click on the resources tab which

we're already on

you can see that I now have two

resources assigned so Deborah Ashby was

assigned before with a unit of 0.05 and

a cost of eight hundred dollars

but I now also have the contract

consultant assigned and the contract

consultant's cost is 400 dollars

so it's not pro-rated and in fact it's

not accrued until the task is complete

and in addition for this particular task

I have a fixed cost of two thousand

dollars

so that's a full explanation of the

breakdown of the cost for this task

that's it for this section in the next

section we're going to look at accrual

so I will see you then

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced in this

section I'm going to take a look at Cost

accrual and this may well be something

that you're very familiar with if you've

been using project for a while but for

some people who perhaps aren't very

familiar with accounting practices Costa

crore can seem a little bit of a mystery

so what I've done in this section is to

create a sort of dummy project it's just

got five tasks in it and I've also

created a few resources as well

the resources have different accrual

methods so resources one to three are

pro-rated resource four a cruise at the

start and resource 5 accrues at the end

now when it costs a cruise that's

basically the point in time at which the

accounting function associated with a

project recognizes that the cost has

been incurred and generally speaking

people recognize how Costa crawl works

for example in terms of labor costs so

you would normally pro-rat labor costs

over the course of the task in which the

labor is employed of course there are

always some exceptions

and with some of the less usual costs

associated with a project it's important

to recognize exactly when the accrual

will occur particularly as some of the

costs might be quite large figures

so it's not possible for me or indeed

anybody else to say costs are always

accrued in this way or that way but what

is important is to understand how Costa

cruel actually works within project 2019

so when you enter a task or a resource

or you set up a resource assignment it's

important to understand the consequence

of the accrual method that applies in

that case

now at the moment as you can see I have

no costs incurred at all on this project

in fact there are no costs associated

with the project at all I haven't

assigned any fixed costs or resources to

it so the first thing I'm going to do is

to assign a fixed cost for task a and

the fixed cost for task a is going to be

100 dollars

and the accrual method for that is going

to be at the start

now for task B I'm also going to have a

fixed cost and that is also going to be

a hundred dollars

and this one is going to be Pro routed

now what I'm going to do is I'm going to

go up to the project Tab and I'm going

to set a status date

on this project to today

and click on OK

now what you'll see is that task a is

now in effect 20 complete so one-fifth

of the work is done but the actual cost

there of course is the full amount of

the fixed cost which is accrued at the

start of task a

so the actual cost for task a is

currently a hundred dollars and the

remaining cost is zero dollars

and basically what happens with a cost

that is accrued at start is that as soon

as the task has an actual start date so

as soon as you record any progress which

causes an actual start date to be

recorded then the cost is accrued all of

that cost is accrued for task B however

where the fixed cost is pro-ranted we've

done one tenth of the task so one-tenth

of the duration of the task is complete

and so we have incurred one tenth of the

fixed costs so the actual is ten dollars

and the remaining is ninety dollars so

now what I'm going to do is I'm going to

go through each of the five tasks and

assign one of the resources to each of

the tasks so Resource One to task a

resource two to task B and so on so join

me again in a moment when I've done that

so having made those assignments you can

see the effects on the cost

for task a for example of course we've

incurred the whole of the fixed costs

for task a which was accrued at the

start

but now we also have eight hours of work

at fifty dollars an hour for Resource

One whose cost is accrued pro-rated

throughout the project for task B we've

accrued just one tenth of the fixed cost

so that's ten dollars but we've had 80

hours of work from resource 2 and

resource two's 80 hours at sixty dollars

an hour that's four thousand eight

hundred dollars Etc

toasty toasty we have an actual cost of

a hundred dollars bear in mind that the

resource 4 that's assigned there doesn't

have an hourly rate only has a cost per

use and that is accrued at the start

whereas for task e resource 5 also

doesn't have an hourly rate it has a

cost per use but that is also accrued at

the end so there is no actual cost so

far

so it's important to understand how this

accrual works

I'll just make one other change I have

one other point to make here if you like

if we go back to the resource sheets and

change resource 2 so the cost is accrued

at the start

and then go back to the Gantt chart

and you'll see that the cost that's

already accrued for task B is a pretty

large amount so we're talking about 80

hours at sixty dollars an hour so that's

four thousand eight hundred dollars

and then we have ten dollars which is

one tenth of the fixed task cost

the fixed task costs of course accrued

pro-rated

so basically that's how accrual works

but let me just finish this section by

referring you to the project options so

let's go to file

options

and go to the schedule page

and right at the bottom there is an

option that says default fixed cost

accrual and the default is pro-rated you

can of course change that to one of

those other options and just above that

another setting you may not be familiar

with actual costs are always calculated

by project Some people prefer to do all

of the work on actual costs themselves

so they uncheck this box and then they

calculate actual costs rather than let

project use the sort of methods you've

seen in this section to calculate actual

costs as you go along

so that's it on accrual in the next

section we're going to look at budget

costs so please join me for that

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

this section we're going to look at

budget costs

I'm going to explain to you why people

use budget costs why you may want to use

budget costs and how you can compare

progress on a project with a project

budget with specific reference to costs

now I should point out that you can

pretty much do the same thing with

budget work

and the approach with budget work is

actually very similar but we're going to

concentrate here on budget costs so I'm

back here at the house build project

this is version zero three if I go to

the resource sheet you'll see that

currently it's empty and in fact there

are no costs or resources assigned at

all on this project yet

so one thing I might do very early on in

a project like this is prepare a budget

now this wouldn't necessarily relate to

any very accurate estimate of costs but

I might say for example think that labor

costs are going to be forty thousand

dollars and the material costs are going

to be thirty thousand dollars and the

legal costs are maybe going to be ten

thousand dollars and so on so I might

come up with some budget figures and

then during the course of the project

I'm going to want to see how the project

is progressing against my budget now

rather than do all of those all I'm

going to do is take one element and show

you how you might deal with one element

and then other elements will be dealt

with in an equivalent way now one thing

I must make very clear at this point is

that you shouldn't confuse budget costs

with Baseline cost

a baseline is a copy a saved copy of a

detailed schedule at a point in time in

fact it can be a detailed or perhaps not

very detailed schedule but it's a copy

of the schedule which will include

details of start dates end dates costs

Etc whatever has been added at that

point budget costs are assigned at the

project level and although we can

compare the budget cost with our actual

costs in whatever categories we've set

up it's not the same as comparing

progress actuals with a baseline so

let's use as our example the budget cost

for services and by Services we mean

things like connecting the house to main

services and getting the inspection by a

local Builder

so first of all let's go to the resource

sheet and we're going to set up a

resource called service costs so in the

resource name let's type service costs

the type is going to be

cost the initials I'm going to say are

serve

costs and we're also going to create a

group called service

costs group and I'll explain the use of

the group in just a moment now I'm going

to open up that resource by double

clicking

and I'm going to check the budget box so

I'm just here on that General Tab and

let's select budget and click on OK

and now what I'm going to do is to

assign it to the whole project

now when I assign a budget cost it must

be assigned to the Project's summary

task you can only assign it to the whole

project and you do that by assigning it

to the project summary task

you can't specify the units you can't

specify the cost you can only assign it

however once you have assigned it you

can then specify the cost in one of a

number of ways one way of doing it is

we've currently got the Gantt chart View

and let's make sure we're in task usage

view which we are and you can see here

the service costs and what I'm going to

do is in the budget cost I'm just going

to say 500.

now bear in mind that I may have a

number of budget items there each of

them can have its own individual budget

value and the zero summary task in this

case house build 0 3 has a total budget

cost for the project

now in order to specify the budget costs

you're already quite restricted in how

and where you do it

in this case I selected the cost table I

then inserted a column and again this

should be something we're getting used

to doing

and in this column I'm going to show

budget work so I'm just going to type in

budget and select budget work and of

course I would specify it against the

particular budget work resource that I

had already assigned to the project

summary task and then I would give it

the budget work amount in whatever units

I wanted to the default there of course

is hours so there's my budget for

service costs now what I'm going to do

is to create a couple of resources that

are going to basically be in the same

category as that budget cost now when I

say in the same category I actually have

a number of ways of doing that

what I've done on this occasion is to

create a group and I'll specify what you

might Loosely call this category by

putting those other resources in the

same group now let me set up these other

two cost resources you can join me again

in a couple of moments once I've done

that

so there we are I've set up the local

inspector who is going to inspect the

build and hopefully give it approval and

I've set up the service company who will

be connecting the services to this new

build so let me go back into the Gantt

chart

and I'm going to first find all of the

connector services and assign one of the

resources to that so let's select

connect to services right click

and assign resources

and we're going to select service

company

and I've discovered that the cost of

using the service companies do the

connection is

295 dollars so I'm going to type that

into here

and notice now that I've done that that

cost is updated in the cost table

and final inspection

and we're going to assign the local

inspector

and the cost charged by the local

inspector is

265

and again you can see that's been

updated in the cost table so against my

original budget of 500 I've now got two

specific costs

now don't forget you could do this for

many categories of cost and work and I'm

only demonstrating it with one but let's

now see how we could report on this in a

very convenient way

so we're talking about budget cost here

and the category we've been dealing with

is a resource category so let's jump

back to the resource sheet and there it

is with just our three resources on it

and what we're going to show instead of

the resource sheet is resource usage

View

and we're going to apply a group so

let's select group by and we're going to

create a new group by field name we're

just going to type

group

and click apply

now see here is that for the group

service cost group the budget cost 500

and then we have the actuals we have the

fine inspection

265 dollars and connect to services

295 dollars

and apart from seeing that budget cost

five hundred dollars you can see the two

planned costs and you can also see that

at present our plan spend in service

cost group exceeds budget by sixty

dollars so that gives us a very

convenient way of comparing the budget

for one or more categories with the

planned and ultimately actual values in

those categories as well and as I've

mentioned two or three times already we

can apply the same principle to work

just one other thing to show you here

which is also pretty important and that

is you may be interested in the time

phase aspects of this so let me show

cost as a detail

so I'm going to switch to cost

and let's just get the whole project in

view so on The View tab I'm going to

click entire project

and you can see over on the right there

those two costs being incurred the

connector Services cost and the final

inspection cost you may want to see how

the planned cost compares to the budget

cost over a period of time in this case

you only have two items in that group

but you may have many if I right click

again on details

and go into detail Styles if I go down

the list of available Fields one of them

is budget costs so let's click on show

and okay

now what project 2019 does is to

actually time phase that budget cost for

you over the period of the project and

of course it just divides up the budget

cost into those convenience slices for

you

you may want to at the outset if you

realize that you're only going to be

spending from this budget cost amount

towards the end of the project you may

want to change this distribution of

budget costs to reflect the fact you're

going to be spending the money later on

otherwise you'll appear to be doing

better on cost earlier on the project

than perhaps you should be because you

won't be spending any of your service

costs until right near the end of the

project so that's an overview of budget

costs and that is also the end of this

section so please join me in the next

one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

section we're returning to a version of

the website project and we're going to

look at Cost rates and changes in cost

rates I'm sure you're familiar with the

signing resources to tasks and we've

already looked at calculations involving

cost of resources working on tasks

but sometimes when you assign a resource

to a task there may be the added

complication that the rates that you pay

for that resource will depend on the

particular tasks that that resource is

being assigned to

so let's jump across to the resource

sheets

and this is the resource sheet for

version zero five of the website project

and if you look at the standard rate

overtime rate and cost per use columns

for the resources you can see for

example that for the generic resource

Northern Farm Foods we have a standard

rate of 35 dollars per hour and an

overtime rate of 35 dollars per hour I

should point out that in this section

we're working on the principle that

everything is chargeable

so we're working out a full cost for

this version of the project

even though money won't necessarily

change hands in all cases we need to

know the cost of producing this website

so even time attributed to the northern

Farm Foods team the customer will still

be charged at least on paper so for each

of the resources there we have generally

speaking a standard rate and then an

overtime rate in one case in particular

we don't have an overtime rate for is

the contract consultant at the bottom

there but that's because their contract

consultant works on a cost per use basis

now when you set up these resources

those rates that you enter in columns

like standard rate overtime rate are

treated as what are called the a rates

so they're the default rates for those

resources

so for example if I looked at Adam Lacy

right click and select information

and then click on the costs tab you'll

see that Adam's a or default rate is 35

an hour standard rate and 50 an hour

over time rate and the per use cost is

zero dollars in addition to that a rate

Adam can have a b rate a c rate D rate

so on and so forth so let's jump back to

the a rate again

in addition we can schedule changes to

any of those rates now I'm going to come

back to rate changes a little bit later

in this section so let's stick with the

a or the default for Adam at the moment

I've not made any changes so I'm just

going to cancel that

and I'm going to switch now from

resource sheet view to Resource usage

view now currently Adam is only assigned

to the HTML

Etc task on this project but if I go

down to say Bakersfield Associates which

is one of the companies that works for

us on these projects you can see that

Bakersfield Associates are assigned to

quite a range of different tasks they've

got analysis and design graphical

resources and branding test scripts and

testing and if I look at the rates for

this customer so again I'm going to

right click and select information

and jump across to the costs tab I can

see the default rate for Bakersfield

Associates is 60 per hour with an

overtime rate of a hundred dollars per

hour and that is the rate that they

would normally charge for it related

work but when it comes to graphical work

such as graphical resources and branding

they generally charge a higher rate

they're much more specialized skills so

they would charge for that type of work

their B rates

now when I click on B you'll see that

their B rate is a hundred dollars per

hour standard rate and a hundred and

fifty dollars per hour overtime rate

now what I need to make sure of is that

I have the correct rate assigned for

each of the tasks that Bakersfield

Associates is working on now one way

that I can do that is let's just widen

this out slightly

and I'm going to insert columns so right

click insert column and I'm going to

select I'm just going to type this in

cost rate table

and what you'll see is at the moment

everybody but Bakersfield Associates in

particular have been assigned according

to their a rate now what I need to do is

to change that to their B rate that

particular task that 60-hour task I'm

going to assign to the B rate so now

that's 60 hours at a hundred dollars an

hour so let's put another column in here

and again right click insert column and

this time we're going to add the cost

column

so now let's take a look at our

graphical resources and branding tasks

you can see 60 hours at 100 an hour

gives us a cost of six thousand dollars

whereas the 102 hours at the a rate

would give us a cost of

6120 and if you work that out correctly

it comes out at sixty dollars per hour

so one thing to bear in mind is that

when you're setting up and maintaining

resource information if a resource does

have different cost rates you need to

maintain the value in those tables and

when it comes to assigning resources

there's no option here to specify the

cost rate table to use so what you would

normally do is to assign the resource

anyway and the resource will be assigned

with the default a rate and then if you

change the views so in this case from

Gantt to task usage

and let's take an example here we have

Claire Smith assigned to database

implementation

if I double click to open up the

assignment information it's in this

dialog that you can set the cost rate

table so in this case for Claire Smith

the task is a much more highly

specialized technical task and her time

is charged on this at the higher

B rate and I can click on OK and

Claire's time on that task is now being

charged at the B rate something else I

mentioned earlier on is what we're going

to look at next and that is over the

life of the project in particular if you

use a particular resource pool and a

succession of projects you may well need

to change rates normally increase rates

perhaps with increased rates charged by

clients or in fact your own internal

charging rates may also change so let's

jump back into resource usage

and let's look at Bakersfield Associates

again and let's jump into the costs Tab

and you can see the rate there is sixty

dollars per hour standard rates and then

the B rate is a hundred dollars per hour

now let's assume that Bakersfield

Associates have notified us that from

Monday the 29th of April all of their

rates are going up and in fact the

standard rates are going up by five

dollars per hour and overtime rates by

ten dollars per hour

so on the B tab here

let's go in and select a date so we're

going to say Monday the 29th of April

the standard rate is going to be 105

dollars per hour and the overtime rate

is going to be a hundred and sixty

dollars per hour and the cost per use is

going to remain at zero let's jump back

to a the default and again we're going

to pick the same date so we're going to

go to uh April the 29th and we're going

to say that the standard rate is going

to be 65 dollars per hour

and the overtime rate is going to be a

hundred and ten dollars per hour and

again the cost per use stays the same

now each of those five rate tables you

can schedule rate changes for and you

can schedule up to 25 rate changes so

you can set this up essentially way into

the future

so let's click on OK

and of course the changes you'll see

reflected in all of the costs there are

associated with the tasks that

Bakersfield Associates are working on

and let's take a look at another option

for changing rates we've also been

notified that from May the 1st internal

costs will increase by five percent so

that's not a dollar increase that's a

percentage increase

so let's look at Claire Smith's rates

and jump across the costs

so what we're going to say is from May

the 1st the standard rate is going to

increase by five percent so all you need

to do is type into the standard rate

column here plus five percent so note

here that the current rate is 50 per

hour so a five percent increase will be

52.50 per hour and I'm going to do the

same for the B rate so again we're going

to select May the 1st and we're going to

say plus five percent and those will be

reflected in the additional costs for

any tasks that go beyond May the 1st for

Claire Smith

so that's a couple of ways of dealing

with cost rate changes I've mentioned a

few times over the sections here

overtime rates and we're going to look

at that in the next section but that's

it for now please join me in the next

section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced

in this section we're going to take a

look at the use of overtime and we have

a particular problem here with version 6

of the website schedule in that the

current end date is right about the

middle of January and we're really

hoping to have all of this wrapped up by

the end of December so what we're

looking at is some way of getting back

some of the time that we seem to have

lost here

now what we've identified is that

potentially we could save some time on

the testing task that I have highlighted

just here

the testing begins in mid to late

October and runs right through to the

end of December and that involves 400

hours of work so that's 50 working days

at eight hours a day and we have three

different resources working on it now

none of these resources are working on

it full time but they do have other

commitments on other projects so what

we're looking at here is one option for

winning back some time is to get those

resources to do overtime work on this

task

now that's not the only option for

clawing back some time but it is the one

that we're going to look at in this

section now one thing I'd like to cover

first of all before we actually apply

over time here is to look at the cost of

testing because one of the unfortunate

consequences of overtime is usually that

it involves an increase in cost

so let's add another column

and we're going to look at Cost here

and again against the testing task 50

days 400 hours the total cost is 20 500

so let's now take a look at how we might

use over time here now I'm going to jump

up to the task Tab and I'm going to

click on the details button which you'll

find in the Properties Group

and that will just display the details

for the tasks that I currently have

selected and you can see here it says

I've selected the task named testing and

I can see in the table below all of the

resources currently assigned to that

task the units and the work

so you can see here that we have a

hundred hours assigned to Northern Farm

Foods 100 hours assigned to Deborah

Ashby and 200 hours assigned to

Bakersfield Associates and those are in

the units 0.25 0.25 and 0.5

now this is not quite the same as the

Baseline work that was originally

established here but I'm going to ignore

Baseline work at the moment and we're

just going to deal with overtime now the

very simplest way to do this is to give

everybody a proportionate amount of

overtime work and one very important

point to bear in mind when you allocate

overtime work is that it isn't shown in

some special way on the schedule you

don't even have to adjust any calendars

to accommodate overtime work the way

that it works is that there is an

agreement that overtime will be done and

then the resource or resources that need

to do the overtime just do it

they do it within the duration of the

task when they do do it how they do it

what Arrangements they make are

completely up to them although of course

if they do have a specific overtime rate

we will notice the difference in the

cost for the task so what I'm going to

do here first is just try and say well

let's give everybody a quarter of their

workers over time

so I'm going to give Northern Farm Foods

25 hours now it's important to realize

that the overtime work figure is

included in the work figure to its left

so the 100 hours work on Northern Farm

Foods is still 100 hours work for

Northern Farm Foods But it includes 25

hours being done as overtime so let's do

the same for Deborah Ashby so we're

going to again say 25 hours

and Bakersfield Associates is going to

be

50 hours and let's click on OK

and I'm just going to get rid of that

details pane now notice the date at the

end you can see that we've clawed back

quite a bit of time if you remember

previously that end date was in

mid-January and now we are back towards

the end of December but as a consequence

the cost has gone up from 20 500 to 23

125 dollars

so the use of overtime has achieved the

schedule objective our project is now

finishing roughly at the end of December

but there has been a monetary Financial

cost to that now note a couple of other

options there one option we might have

had would be for example if one of the

participants in the testing had said

well I don't actually have the capacity

to do any overtime we might have

redistributed the amount of work now

I've kept the work at 400 hours the idea

wasn't to cut down on how much work we

did on testing just to get part of it

done as overtime if I redistributed it

so for example if Deborah said I can do

overtime and Bakersfield Associates said

no that's all the capacity we've got we

could maybe move a hundred hours of

bakersfields to Deborah's and let

Deborah do more over time so with a

combination of possible redistribution

and the allocation of overtime according

to capacity that resources have got to

do over time you have one option for

reducing the duration of a task now

although we're primarily here looking at

issues related to cost and in this case

how the use of overtime has increased

cost in order to shorten the task

another way you might deal with this

specific problem might be for example to

give the testing task a task calendar

so for instance a calendar that would

allow work to be done at the weekend or

maybe late in the evening and then the

provided resource calendars allow them

to work at the weekend or late into the

evening then work on the task could be

scheduled so for the moment we've

achieved our objective of shortening the

project time scale even though we've had

to spend a little bit more money to do

that

that's it for this section I will see

you in the next one

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced in this

section we're going to look at variable

material costs

now so far in this sequence of sections

on cost we've primarily been looking at

work resources and Associated costs but

there are some special situations that

arise with costs associated with

materials

and one of them is a situation where you

assign a material to a task or maybe a

set of tasks and the amount of material

that's required depends on some possible

variable factors for example the example

we're going to use here is another

building example I'm just going to take

a small fragment of a building project

and show you how we deal with a

situation where the amount of material

that's used is dependent upon the

duration of the task

now I'm going to create version 0 4 of

our house build but this will only have

one task and a few resources

and it's a grossly oversimplified case

of putting in what is sometimes called

the footings or foundations of a house

and basically we're going to pour

concrete into a hole in the ground and

whilst this is going on we need to run a

pump to pump out any water that is

within the space that's having the

concrete poured into it so the materials

we're using are basically the concrete

the pump that's being used to pump the

water out and the fuel to operate the

pump so what you can see here is that I

have a file called varial material cost

demo that currently has one task in my

project called footings and that's

currently scheduled to run for three

days now again I don't suggest that the

figures I'm using here are particularly

realistic but for the purpose of

demonstrating variable material cost we

should be just fine

now let me go to the resource sheet

and we're going to set up the three

resources that I need now the First

Resource is going to be

concrete and that is going to be a

material resource and the use that we're

going to use are cubic yard

the initials are going to be just

concrete

and it's going to be eighty dollars

per cubic yard and we're going to accrue

that at the start my second resource is

going to be the pump again that's going

to be a material the material is going

to be day use because we're only using

it for the day

let's give it initials of pump and the

standard rate for the use of the pump

for one day is going to be ten dollars

and that is going to accrue at the end

and then my third material is the fuel

for the pump so the units here are going

to be liters and we buy the fuel for

this pump in liters and it costs just

one dollar a liter so let's add that one

in as well so let's add fuel

again it's a material and our

measurement is liters

our initials fuel

and it's going to be one dollar per

liter and we're going to leave that as

Pro routed so there we are those are my

three resources and what I need to do

now is to assign them to a task

so the First Resource that I'm going to

assign to the task is the concrete so

let's right click and select assign

resources

and make sure that we have concrete

selected and I need 20 cubic yards so

the total cost should be 20 cubic yards

multiplied by 80 per cubic yard

the next resource I'm going to assign is

the pump now with the pump when it comes

to specifying the units I need to

specify the units in terms of the

duration of the task because basically

we're going to use one pump day each day

so the units I've put in as one slash d

for one day now for the fuel the amount

of fuel I use is one liter per day so

the units here are one slash h

and notice also here that I'm when I

press the Tab Key it automatically

assigns it to the task I don't have to

click assign I can just press tab to get

that assigned as well so now if you

notice the fuel the total cost is 24 so

that's a three day task eight hours a

day 24 hours of use so that's going to

cost 24 so the total cost of this task

is

1654 dollars

so that's basically how we assign

variable material costs and what I'm

going to do now is show you what happens

if things change let's suppose that we

decide that it really isn't going to

take three days to do this task it's

only going to take two days

so click on the three days here

and change it to two days let's see what

happens to our cost well the fuel now is

only two days eight hours a day 16 hours

the fuel only costs 16 because the

amount depends on the duration of the

task for the pump that's two lots of ten

dollars for the two days

and the concrete is not dependent on the

duration it's the same cost so 20 cubic

yards of concrete will still cost

sixteen hundred dollars

so that's about it that's the variable

material costs I will see you in the

next section

hello again and welcome back to our

course on Project 2019 advanced it's now

time to set you exercise four and the

starting point for exercise 4 is a

version of the website project and it's

called exercise underscore zero four and

it's in the exercises folder

and in this version I've got the

schedule at the stage where there is

1634 hours of work scheduled

now let's switch to the resource sheet

and hopefully there are no surprises

there but I have removed the schedule

resource cost increases that I spoke

about a few sections ago

having said that this particular

exercise isn't really about costs it's

going to be about work now I know we've

been talking about costs in the last few

sections but this exercise is simply

about the work and it's about budget

work because as I've mentioned a few

times already if you're setting up a

work budget it works in a very similar

way to the way that cost budgets work

and what I want you to do is to work on

the principle that when you started off

on this project there was a work budget

of 800 hours for internal resources and

800 hours for external resources

now at the moment we've got

1634 hours of work in the plan and I

don't know how that's distributed I

don't know how much of that is being

done by internal resources and how much

is actually being done by external

resources so I basically want to see a

split of internal and external work

now let me switch to my answer which is

exercise underscore 0 4 underscore

answer now the first thing to point out

here is that if I showed budget work

here and I have that hiding just behind

the Gantt chart

I've got 1600 hours against the current

running total of 1 634 hours

let me switch to my resource sheet

and you'll see there that I've actually

grouped the resource sheet by external

and internal resources now the way that

I've done the grouping is on the code

field now I chose to use the code field

as one of the ones that you can use but

you can only use it once really and you

may well prefer to use a custom field

and use a coding system similar to the

one that we've used for charge code so

you could have a simpler custom field

that just specifies a value of external

or internal now I leave up to you as to

which of those options you want to

follow but let me just show you the

resource usage for my answer

now in my answer for external resources

against a budget of 800 hours we're

actually using

894 hours

and for internal resources the budget

was 800 hours and we've only got 740

hours of work scheduled

now it's not necessary to do anything

with the time phased aspects of the

budget and what you can see there is

really just for your information and

possible assistance

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