Vindell said:
I need help with trying to figure out how to set up a project. I have not
used Project before and have just taken one class.
Project: Revise administration plan for non-profit organization
Phases: Review Current Plan, Revise current plan, Obtain approvals
Background: there are 27 chapters that must be reviewed and revised.
Question: Should I set up each chapter as a task? is this project something
that might be better tracked in excel?
Any suggestions will help.
Vindell,
Welcome to the world of Project and to this newsgroup. Taking one class
isn't going to help much unless you had a whole lot of hands on
exercises with the class. For an on-line tutuorial, I suggest you go to
our MVP website at,
http://www.mvps.org/project/links.htm, and click on
the link for fellow MVP, Mike Glen's tutorials.
With regard to your project. Whether or not Project is the right
application depends on what you want to track. If you simply want to
track fixed dates and cost, then Excel would probably be a better bet.
However, if you want to track a dynamic schedule of interlinked tasks
with resources (labor and material) as well as track cost for those
tasks, then Project can do that.
If your only tasks are, "Review the plan", "Revise the plan", and
"Obtain approvals" then those would be repeated 27 times, once for each
chapter. However, is there a subset of activities associated with each
of the three main phases? If so, then those would be your "performance
tasks". A performance task is simply an activity performed by one or
more individuals that results in an output of a product or service. That
output may simply be something that allows the next task in the sequence
to get started. This sets up a normal finish-to-start relationship
between the tasks. However, there are many variations to logically
linking sequential or concurrent tasks. Mike's tutorials will explain
more.
Take a look at Mike's tutorials, put together what you feel is your
basic plan, and then post again if you have questions. One of us may
even be willing to review your plan and make comments.
John
Project MVP
