Getting Started in Microsoft Project 2010 After the Business Initiative Is Approved
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The purpose of this chapter is to position your project for success from the start. Planning a successful project requires leadership and management skills and includes the following tasks:
- Setting the direction— Establish a goal that your stakeholders and team members can understand and work to achieve.
- Sharing the vision— Provide a framework and sufficient detail so that each member of the team knows what to do and when to do it.
- Establishing the rules— Establish methods for work to be accomplished, communication to occur, and methods to track status and manage the changes that will inevitably come your way.
After you set the stage for success, you can use Microsoft Project to do what it does best: help you organize and track the work of your team. If you start with these basics, you can optimize all the features that are available to assist you.
Introduction
A project has been approved and you have been assigned as the project manager. Now what? Before you reach for the keyboard to open Project, you need to set up your project for success.
You can draw upon many resources to help you with this process. Several are used in this chapter as the foundation for the author's approach to running successful projects. Dr. William Casey, principal in the Executive Leadership Group, has provided the foundation for the work on Measure of Success in the next section. The information regarding Work Breakdown Structures is based on two primary sources: Practice Standard for Work Breakdown Structures, Second Edition (PMI, 2006) and Effective Work Breakdown Structures (Haugen, 2002).