Microsoft Project 2019 For Dummies

Keep projects on track

Microsoft Project 2019 is a powerhouse project management, portfolio management, and resource management tool. Whether you’re a full-time project manager or manage projects as part of a larger set of duties, Microsoft Project 2019 For Dummies will get you thinking and operating at the level of a project management guru.

Written by a noted project management pro, this book covers the ins and outs of Microsoft Project. Throughout the book, you’ll find project management best practices and tips for keeping any project on schedule and under budget.

• Reference the full set of Microsoft Project 2019 features
• Learn to think like a project management professional
• Get into the nuts and bolts of Project for better productivity
• Create a task schedule that keeps a project moving
• Identify the golden rules that keep projects on track

With Microsoft Project 2019 For Dummies, you’ll soon get a grip on all the powerful features of this popular project management software. No matter your level of training or experience, this book will show you how improve your project management with Microsoft Project 2019.

Introduction 1

About This Book 1

Foolish Assumptions 2

Icons Used in This Book 3

Beyond the Book 3

Where to Go from Here 3

Part 1: Getting Started with Project 2019 5

Chapter 1: Project Management, Project 2019, and You 7

Introducing Project Management 7

Defining project manager 8

Identifying what a project manager does 9

Introducing Project 2019 10

Getting to Know You 11

Navigating Ribbon tabs and the Ribbon 13

Displaying more tools 17

Tell Me What You Want to Do 18

Chapter 2: Starting the Project 19

Creating the Project Charter 20

Introducing the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) 22

Organizing the Work 23

Starting the Project 24

Entering project information 25

Weighing manual scheduling versus automatic scheduling 27

Entering the WBS 29

Entering tasks 30

Importing tasks from Outlook 32

Inserting hyperlinks 34

Inserting one project into another 35

Promoting and demoting: The outdent-and-indent shuffle 36

Saving the Project 37

Chapter 3: Becoming a Task Master 39

Creating Summary Tasks and Subtasks 39

How many levels can you go? 41

The project summary task 41

Moving Tasks Up, Down, and All Around 43

Moving tasks with the drag-and-drop method 43

Moving tasks with the cut-and-paste method 44

Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Collapsing and Expanding the Task Outline 44

Showing Up Again and Again: Recurring Tasks 47

Setting Milestones 48

Deleting Tasks and Using Inactive Tasks 49

Making a Task Note 50

Chapter 4: The Codependent Nature of Tasks 53

How Tasks Become Dependent 54

Dependent tasks: Which comes first? 54

Dependency types 55

Allowing for Murphy’s Law: Lag and lead time 58

Setting the Dependency Connection 59

Adding the dependency link 59

Words to the wise 61

Understanding that things change: Deleting dependencies 62

Chapter 5: Estimating Task Time 65

You’re in It for the Duration 66

Tasks come in all flavors: Identifying task types 66

Effort-driven tasks: 1 + 1 = ½ 69

Estimating Effort and Duration 70

Estimating techniques 71

Setting the task duration 72

Controlling Timing with Constraints 74

Understanding how constraints work 74

Establishing constraints 75

Setting a deadline 76

Starting and Pa