Ms Project Familiarization
How easy or difficult Ms Project may seem to be
MS Project is a tool that is used for managing most projects, the tool gives a simpler way of managing the projects by providing the used with user-friendly interface that is easy to use and interpret. The tool allows the user to effectively and efficiently manage the projects that may be simple or complicated. This makes the entire process of project management to be very productive and also easier to run. This is because the tool has some basic templates that can be used to get started, these templates makes the entire project management simple to run.
Consequently, the project management tool is easier to use and to interact with, this is because its graphical user interface is simple to understand even for the first time users. One can easily navigate between the menu driven commands to execute and event.
Challenges of using Ms Project
One major challenge of using the ms project is because it is unable to provide a risk management tool; the person managing the project using the tool is unable to identify the task that is having a high risk as compared to others. The project management tool is developed in a way that all the tasks have equal risks. Another challenge is that it is not easy to manage multiple projects that have resources that are overlapping; it becomes a challenge to manage the projects that run simultaneously when they share some of the resources.
Ms Projects also lacks the integration to the Outlook, this is challenging since the tasks and the dates are not displayed in the outlook. In the Ms Project, there is no menu driven command that can do the management of change orders. This makes it not convenient to use since it also does not provide control in the changes of the dates.
Importance of Ms Project over other tools to manage projects
In the Ms Project, importing data from other applications is easily possible, this importation of the existing data can be done from outlook and excel. Other tools such as Ms word and excel do not have the inbuilt templates that can be used to manage the projects. This is one instance that makes them to fall short of the capability to effectively be used in managing projects as compared to Ms Project. Ms project also have the ability to analyze and do the reporting of the project data and give its outputs in projects management charts and reports that are professional. It will take one much time and energy to do these activities in other tools such as word and excel; this makes it convenient to use the Ms Project.
Some of the views that are used in the project management may not be preset in other tools such as word and excel, these views include the Gantt chart, the Network view and the Calendar view. Creating such views in other project management tools can be possible, but it will be very tiresome and will take a lot of labor to complete. The Ms Project can be used in analyzing and making track of the progress of various projects, this can be done in the Ms Project by simply setting the baseline. This can be very tedious when done in excel, since one would be required to manually perform the computations. Once one is able to set the baseline in the Ms Project, tracking the progress of the project can be made easy using the already inbuilt tools that are present in Ms Project.
