Microsoft Project Fundamentals

Lesson 8Check and Adjust the Project

LESSON OBJECTIVES

• View the project finish and cost in the project summary task.
• Explain critical path and how it affects the project finish.
• Show the critical path on a Gantt view.
• List two of the three methods for bringing in the finish date.
• List two of the three methods for cutting project scope.
• Reduce costs in a task sheet and in the Resource Sheet.
• Explain the problem with overallocation and underallocation.
• Reschedule resources in Team Planner.
• Set a baseline and describe how you might use the data.

At this point, you have built your plan in Microsoft Project with all the essential pieces. You've confirmed the requirements with the project sponsor or customer, researched and entered the necessary tasks and their durations, and built the team and assigned people and other resources to tasks.

But before you and your team take off on your project implementation, you must work through one more important task: checking the plan and making final adjustments. If you consider your project plan to be the roadmap along your project's journey, you must be sure that the roadmap will get you where you plan to go and not overshoot, leave you stranded, or veer off in the wrong direction. It's essential you do this before your team starts work on their project tasks. If a project starts with faulty assumptions, it'll be all the harder—and probably more expensive—to fix things mid-project.

In this lesson, you examine and refine three key ...