Sunday, November 01, 2020

Course Review: MS Project 2016 Live Lessons–Concise Course with Precise Information and Effective Learning

 By Gowri Shankar S


Why this Course?

After I graduated in Engineering, I started and continued my career in construction industry and maintenance works. After getting experience in this field, I felt I was lagging in planning of work activities in a proper way due to working manually and missing my deadlines in some situations. Hence, I decided to work with a planning software tool. I believed that by learning a tool my work can be more precise and get more efficiency in my work output.

MS Project is a widely used software tool in the construction industry and hence, decided to proceed and learn the MS Project Course. As a planning professional, I believe this course will improve my skills in project planning. 


Features in this Course

This course has been designed in a proper way to give precise information in a shorter duration with an effective way of understanding. This makes the course unique compared to other online tutorials, which I’ve had checked. 

The course covers a number of areas such as planning, schedule management, resource assignment, resource levelling, earned value management (EVM), reporting, among many others

I’ll highlight the following key points of this course as I’ve gone through all the videos and related content. 

Basic Planning to Advance Schedule Control: After you have understood the basic planning, the best way to control your schedule is via EVM and related metrics. In the real world, it is more helpful for me while implementing my project activities to forecast my project schedule. EVM has quite a few forecasting metrics.

Balance between Theory and Practical: You can refer to books on MS Project, but with videos the learning is faster. This course comes with practical examples for each and every function in MS Project, which are essential for any project management professional. 

You can take the templates available, apply your real time experience and improve your understanding and knowledge effectively. 

Overcoming Scheduling Problems: As you proceed with the course, you will know many schedule management techniques. With this you can know how these techniques/functions affection schedule and its management and how one can overcome each problem with this course. 

Cost Management: Resources on their own don’t consume money, but they do consume money when assigned to tasks. With this course, the effect of resource assigning to each task is well understood and how it reflects in the overall schedule with cost and duration so that financial aspects of the project can be better improved with proper knowledge. It’s also pertinent to note that resource levelling will have an impact on cost management.

Earned Value Management (EVM): I’ve already mentioned on EVM before. With this course, you will have a more efficient way of finding project efficiency which is being taught in this tutorial with real time experience.

Reporting: For every project management professional, reporting is one of the most important areas and one has to know it very well. This course explains very well for customizing the reports in different ways which can suite management requirements.

Forward pass, backward pass calculation and Critical Path: Finding out critical tasks is most important in any project and with this course, you will learn more about a critical path in an easy way so that we can plan to expedite the critical tasks works by learning forwards and backward pass calculations.


Conclusion

This course has many real-time practical examples. These will teach you how to apply them in the real-world and on the field. It also comes with many keyboard shortcuts, which gave me knowledge on how to expedite my work with MS Project.

Brief Profile: 

Gowri Shankar S, Project Planning Engineer

I’m a Mechanical Engineer with 10 years of experience in industrial construction and maintenance experience in India, GCC regions. I’ve worked on managing the EPC activities in green field projects and maintenance activities in O&M projects. Overall, I’ve been involved in planning a project from initial bidding stage to project handover stage.



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