Section 1: Introduction and Overview. This section, based on PMI® principles and doctrine, provides an introduction to the scheduling and the techniques required to create a comprehensive and manageable schedule plan for your projects. The history and types of schedules (Gantt, Network, etc.) used in industry will be discuss, along with the typical applications and the positive and negative aspects in using each type of schedule. This section will also provide an introduction and overview to the Edwards Industries BMPP method for developing comprehensive work breakdown structures and schedules, determining task and milestone interdependencies, and outlining internal and external project constraints.

Section 2: Properties and Options. This section begins the use of Microsoft® Project. Here we discuss the property and option settings in MS Project. We will define each property and option, explain how data is evaluated based on the setting of the property or option and provide recommendations for the setting of each.

Section 3: Templates and Calendars. This section covers the templates and calendars available in Project as well as how and when to use them. The uses of global and local templates are reviewed with discussions on setting up, using and modifying them. Custom scheduling templates, developed by Edwards Industries to support our PMI-based methodology are presented and discussed. These templates, which are provided on media (floppy or CD) to each student taking the course, have been developed by Edwards Industries over many years of managing projects using MS Project to present schedule and status data to customers and senior management. Calendars are also discussed in the section of the course. We will cover setting up, using and modifying project "master" calendars, resource calendars, task calendars and special purpose calendars. A complete explanation of each type of calendar along with recommendations on which types to use under different scheduling scenarios will also be covered.

Section 4: Analyzing Project Progress. Now that the schedule status is entered, we can analyze the current status of our project based upon the data entered and the baseline schedule established in section 5. This analysis will be performed using (a) standard and custom views such as the various "Usage" views and the Project Statistics screen; (b) Macros and procedures to extract static and timephased data from MS Project for viewing, using or manipulating in MS Excel. Several examples and reports will be generated for the project schedule developed in sections 4, 5 and 6.

Section 5: Project Reports. An overview of the various "canned" reports available in MS Project will be discussed and demonstrated in this section. The custom report generator will also be discussed.

Section 6: Open Discussion. During this section, an open forum discussion is held to review some of the management as status techniques used by the executive attending the class. Real issues faced by the audience are discussed and common problems are resolved.

Section 7: Supplemental Information on Microsoft® Project. In this final section of the course, we will review some of the lessons learned from the 1-day of training. We will also share with the class some of the nuances and anomalies in MS Project 2002 and how to avoid or work around them. Finally we will discuss some of the additional benefits and features available in future releases of Microsoft® Project.