Comprehensive Guide to Project Scheduling and Tracking in Project Management Software (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Now, right at the beginning, you've got to click on File, click on Options, go to Schedule, and here you must change Assignment Units to Decimal. Furthermore, you should choose All New Projects and change to Auto Schedule. This is very important. Very very important. Click on OK, click File, Close, not going to save the project, and I'm going to open up a brand new project. Please note at the bottom left hand corner, the Auto Scheduled mode is activated. Then let's activate our view bar.

Speaker 2: Right click on the left hand side and activate the view bar. Conventions here that you need to be aware of.

Speaker 1: Firstly, phases should always be typed in the caps, uppercase, Phase 1. Tasks we would recommend are typed in lowercase or sentence case.

Speaker 2: Task 1, Task 2, Phase 2, Task 2.1.

Speaker 1: Please note that we never name a task the same as another task, although Project would let you do it. And here I'm closing the project, and always closure of project is indicated by a zero day duration. We can go and edit the durations here, so two days. Notice the question mark disappears the moment we confirm the duration, otherwise you can leave the question mark. Never ever enter durations for phases. That will become apparent later. Then what we do is we select the tasks below the phases, and we hit the indent button. Select the tasks below the phases, hit the indent button, and notice what happens is the phases now take on the maximum time of the tasks below the phase. So in this case it's two days, in that case it's three days. Now what we need to do is we need to select all tasks, and hit the link button, which is up here. And now the tasks are in a hierarchy, and in fact developed across a timeline. In this lesson we're going to learn how to track a project. As you can see, this project started three days ago. I can work that out from comparing the start date of the project with the dashed line that is out of context. Not the normal dashed line to indicate the middle of a weekend, but a dashed line in the middle of a week that indicates the beginning of a project. In project 2010 it is red, and in project 2013 and following it is green. So that task started three days ago, and we need to track that project. So what we do is we select all tasks, and then we go to the task ribbon, and we can click mark on track. What it will do is, it will put a thin black line through the middle of the task indicating the task's progress. Remember this calculates the costs, the hours worked, and the schedule in terms of tracking. A better way to view it is to look at the tracking Gantt. So the tracking Gantt would be a view that shows how much this project has progressed and how far off the baseline it is. Here we have an error because I didn't re-save the baseline when I reset the date. So let's just do that properly now. I'm going to go to project, set baseline, set baseline, and overwrite the old baseline. Good, now if we go to project information statistics we'll see that the baseline is consistent with the current. So let's hit the tracking Gantt again now. Over here we can go to various views, and here I have tracking Gantt as a built-in view. If I scroll to task, I'll see there exactly is an indication of a number of things, firstly how far we've progressed, we're 80% through this task, we are 67% through this phase, but also there's a non-critical task and there's a critical task. The tracking Gantt has a wealth of information.