Project Management Using Microsoft Project 2013

Book excerpt: This training and reference guide will provide an overview of Microsoft Project 2013, from a project manager's perspective. It is also an excellent preparation guide for Microsoft Exam 74-343: Managing Projects with Microsoft Project 2013. Project Assistants has been providing Project Management Theory and Microsoft Project training material for our training courses since the release of Microsoft Project version 3 (1993). Prior to the release of Microsoft Project 2013, we were surprised to find that there were no hands-on training manuals available for Microsoft Project 2010 that also covered the enterprise features used in Microsoft Project Professional and Project Web Application. This guide has been created to serve as that comprehensive reference and training guide, assembling content and best practices honed over many years of Microsoft Project and general project management training. Many training guides on technology are primarily manuals on features and functions of the software. The goal of this book is to show why those features and functions are important from a project management standpoint (based on PMI's Project Management Body of Knowledge, PMBOK), and then demonstrate how to effectively leverage that value. When used cover-to-cover, this text serves as a comprehensive guide to running a project from initiation to closeout with guides along the way for how to use Microsoft Project. The information in this book was selected based on our 20+ years of project management and Microsoft Project consulting experience, and covers Microsoft Project 2013 Standard, Microsoft Project 2013 Professional, Microsoft Project Server 2013, Microsoft Project Web Application 2013 (PWA) and Microsoft Project Online 2013 for Office 365.