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- Hi, my name is Margaret Schmidt
and I am a Program Manager for Microsoft Project.
I've been working on the Microsoft team
for about a year and a half now.
And I specialize in Scheduling
and Accessibility for Project.
And today I want to talk to you about how to deliver on time
with dependencies and Gantt charts in Microsoft Project.
So just going over the agenda a little bit.
First, I want to talk about Dependencies,
how to create them and why they're useful, then Constraints,
how to create them why they're useful.
And then lastly, we're going to talk about Effort, Duration,
and Assignment in Project for the web,
and how you can use those to make sure
that your project is delivered on time.
So we're going to talk about most of these in a demo today.
But just to set that up,
we're going to be talking mostly about a worker named Lucy,
who works for a nonprofit in the Seattle area
and has been tasked with organizing a fundraiser
for her organization.
And she's using Microsoft Project to do so
because she's Seattle based,
she doesn't want to do a wine tasting,
she's decided to go with a coffee tasting,
just to be a little bit more location specific.
And just a few of the things Lucy wants
to keep in mind when she's setting up her project.
First of all, she wants to ensure that everything she needs
to get done gets done in the right order.
Secondly, she needs to ensure
that everything gets done before the date of the fundraiser,
because the date has already been decided.
So she needs to make sure everything gets done before that.
Then lastly, she wants to track how much work she's doing
and how much work her colleagues are doing.
So they all get the appropriate amount
of credit when the event happens.
So I'm going to pull up Microsoft Project now
and we can just jump in.
So I have signed in as Lucy,
and I've opened up Microsoft Project project.microsoft.com.
And I am now on Project for the web home.
If you haven't seen that before,
you can see down here I have a few projects,
but I have two versions of my coffee tasting fundraiser.
So I'm going to go ahead and open up that second one there.
That was the first one that Lucy made.
And as this opens up you can see Lucy has already put in all
of the tasks that she needs to do
and all of the dates when they need
to get done by if I go to the timeline,
I can see that it is actually laid out for me
to see when all of the tasks need to happen.
And I'm even going to expand this bar.
So I can see all of the names of all of my different tasks.
So the first thing we want to talk about here
is constraints.
So Lucy has assigned herself
to all of the tasks dealing with event location,
and she's laid out when they need to get done,
and when all of the other tasks need to get done.
But as we all know, you know, working on projects,
our initial plans are never quite what we expect them to be.
And things slip out, which is totally fine.
But we want to be able to track those in Microsoft Project.
So let's say that Lucy's identified potential locations task
slips out a little bit.
And you can see I dragged that task and it slipped out,
which is fine again, but we see that, you know,
identify potential locations,
and then the next task is choose location.
But we can't really choose the location
without first identifying locations.
So I'm also going to drag zoom in a little bit
so that it's easier to grab.
But I'm also going to drag that task out.
So it happens after
the initial identify potential locations task.
And then we have a reserve location task, which you know,
we can't reserve a location until after we choose it.
So I also have to drag that task out,
I have assigned location contract and pay deposits,
which we can't do until we've already reserved the location.
So I'm also going to drag that task out.
So just slipping this one task caused all
of these other tasks to get slipped out
and created a lot of work for Lucy to do.
And let's say that this was, you know,
attached to another task.
Say we have an invitations task down here.
And now I have to make sure
that I'm not designing the invite before
I've chosen the location
because the invite should have the location on it.
So by slipping one task,
it created actually a lot of work for Lucy.
But let's go see our
other coffee tasting fundraiser project.
So I'm going to open up my copy.
And while I wait for that to load,
I can see that all of the tasks are the same.
But when I go to the timeline,
I'm going to see dependencies.
So dependencies are these little arrows,
we're going to give them a moment to load
that show the relationships between tasks
and projects for the web,
we support finish to start dependencies
which say that when task A finishes, task B can start.
So let's do the same thing
that I did in the last project here.
So I have my identify potential locations task
and I'm going to drag that out say ends at the end
of this week.
As we can see all of these other tasks jumped out too.
Project saw that this was going to end a little later
and Project rescheduled all of these tasks,
we can even see this dependency here,
where we're saying, hey,
the event day relies on the location being chosen.
So everything is connected.
And we can make sure
that everything is getting done in the right order.
Even if as I said in the other project,
I wanted to have a dependency between the locations,
I could grab this little thing here,
let's zoom out a little.
To make that a little easier,
I can grab this little bubble here,
and scroll down to my invitations task,
see the design invite and create a dependency.
So that arrow is there now.
And now if the location tasks ever slip beyond,
when the invite tasks are scheduled,
the invite task will be rescheduled.
So that's how you use dependencies in Project for the web.
Now, once you have your dependency setup Project
for the web tries to schedule all of your tasks
as soon as possible, or ASAP.
As you can see here with our event location example.
As soon as the identify potential locations task is done,
the choose location task is scheduled.
And then the reserve location task is scheduled
because Project wants you
to get everything done as fast as possible.
This isn't always what you want, though.
For example, we can scroll all the way down
to when the event day ends.
And I'm going to open up the task details for that
the event day is happening on
May 3rd, and that can't change.
So no matter how fast, Lucy and her team get done all
of the tasks leading up to the event,
the event date can't change.
And we represent this in Project using constraints.
So when I open up the start date pane,
I can see this little star and down here,
it shows me that I have a constraint on this task,
which is that it should start no earlier than May 3rd.
When I remove this constraint,
the task actually gets rescheduled
to the earliest possible day
that Projects thinks this task can happen.
In this example, it gets rescheduled to April 28th.
Again, no matter what,
the event day has to happen on May 3rd.
So I really need a constraint there.
And I can do that by coming in
and manually selecting the date that I want it to happen,
that automatically creates a constraint in here.
And then again, this task can't be scheduled
for any date earlier than May 3rd.
So I'm going to come in here and Lucy is going
to start assigning tasks to different people
who are working on this project.
And as we can see up here in the group members section,
Lucy has already created a group for this project
that includes herself and three of her colleagues.
And I've also added the effort field to my Project grid.
And you might say to yourself, you know,
effort and duration, those seem really similar.
But there's an important difference here.
Duration represents the amount of time between the start
and the finish of your task.
So for example, on the choose location task,
the duration is one day
because it starts and finishes on the same day.
However, we don't usually spend an entire work day
working on only one thing.
So the effort field is there
to measure the actual amount of time
that someone is spending on a task.
So I'm going to go in and assign
this choose location task to Lucy.
And Project is going to automatically update
the effort field being eight hours
because Lucy works eight hours during the day.
But I know that Lucy isn't going to spend her entire day
working on this choose location task.
So I'm going to update this to two hours.
So everyone knows
how much work Lucy is actually doing on this task.
Now, here's the trick when it comes to duration,
effort and assignments in Project,
Project reschedules your effort to ensure
that your effort keeps up with the amount of people
and the amount of days on your task.
So if I come in, and I'm going to assign a second person
to help Lucy with this task, which is Brooke.
I'm going to click out of there.
And Project has automatically updated the effort
to four hours because it's assuming
that Lucy is doing two hours of work.
And Brooke is doing two hours of work.
And of course, if I actually think
that this is still only two hours,
I can come in and fill that out.
And Project understands that that is just two hours.
And again, this is really helpful
because it lets your managers know
how much time you are actually expected to spend on a task.
Or if you are a manager, it helps you keep track
of how much time your different
employees are spending on a task.
And maybe if they're a little bit overworked
or under worked in Project.
So that is everything about how to use effort,
duration and assignments in Project.
Of course, Lucy has a little bit more work to do here,
but we're going to let her do that on her own.
We're going to go back to my presentation.
So now that you've learned everything,
let us know what you think.
First of all, I recommend going into Project
and trying this out yourself creating dependencies,
constraints and messing around with effort and duration
to see how they affect each other
and also checking out our support documents
on support.microsoft.com. to learn more.
The other things I recommend you do.
We have another session on resources
and calendars in Project for the web.
I recommend you check that out as creating resources
and calendar really changes how effort
and duration work in Project for the web
if you want to learn more about that,
that's a great place to learn.
We also have a few scheduling roundtables scheduled
for Project Conference.
If you're still watching
this within Project Conference time,
check out the website to see when those are happening,
if you want to give us direct feedback on
what your scheduling experience is.
And then the last thing is,
you can always give us feedback about this
or anything else using our in app feedback button.
So if you're in Project for the web,
there's a little smiley face in the top right corner
of the product.
And if you click on that,
you can actually send us a direct message telling us
what you like and dislike, which I read every single day.
And make sure if you do that, that you include your email
with what you're sending,
so that we can email you back if we have any questions
or concerned about your feedback.
And that's it.
Thanks so much for watching.
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