Project planning and tracking tool

Being hard core technical savvy developer it was difficult to switch my career towards project management area. But trust me the experience of handling team ,planning and managing the team is an awesome experience. I usually create my team work plan in excel spreadsheet and it was a mundane task for me . It was very hard on my part to transit from primitive practice of making plan in excel to new microsoft project planner.Above all Microsoft office project 2003 is one of the master piece I ever used in my life. The tool really encompass all the aspects of planning and tracking the progress of the plan execution.

I would like to impart some of my knowledge to you people who are novice learner like me. Before one jump start the planning in project planner. One should have thorough understanding of below listed tuples.


1)Work break down structure-It is important for one to identify the task in fine granular level. Once this task is identify it important for one to understand the priority on which it is executed.

2)Critical path

3)Types of Calendar-Night Shift Calendar/Standard Calendar and Custom Calendar

3)Consider Leave/holiday in working Calendar

4)Set Milestone

5)Baseline Project Plan

6)Constraint related cost,budget,schedule

7)Risk

8)Assumption


Main Entity of MPP:
1)Task
2)Tracking
3)Resources
4)Reports

Important Tips:

Work and Duration defination
work 18 hours/man
duration 2 days

Effort driven scheduling and resource loading and unloading can affect duration but the total work effort remains unchanged.

To mark a task as a milestone, type 0 in the Duration column.

Set Precedence:A dependency of one task on other hence help in tracking critical path in project life cycle.

Type of Resource

1)Generic Resource and
2)material resource

For now I hope this will atleast help one to remember the above points and help one to go deep while planning an activity. All the best!