Project Planning Made (Somewhat) Easy

Author's Rating:

Pros: Tight integration with Microsoft Office; wizards, tutorials make creating a project plan easy.

Cons: None that I can see.

The Bottom Line: 
By more tightly integrating Project Professional 2003 into the Office suite of applications, Microsoft has created an application that can turn almost anyone into a decent project planner.

Author's Review
Allow me to preface this review by stating that I am not a Project Manager (PM); I have yet to ascend to those lofty heights of my profession. I’m on my way, but I am not there yet. And I have started to take on more and more projects as my role within my new company diversifies and grows. That has led me to stick my index finger into the world of project management. And what is the world of project management without Microsoft Project Professional 2003?

Like I stated at the outset, I am not a PM, I manage networks and mail servers, so don’t expect any lofty or even cursory comparisons of Project Professional 2003with other project management tool; Project Professional 2003 is the first and only such tool I have used. With that said, on with the review Bard style.

Project Professional 2003 is apart of the Microsoft Office Professional 2003 suite of applications that also includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, InfoPath, OneNote, Visio, and Publisher.

Product Description (From Microsoft): Project Professional 2003 is the Microsoft desktop enterprise project management program that is used with Microsoft Office Project Web Access and Microsoft Office Project Server 2003. Project Professional 2003 provides all the core scheduling tools in Project Standard 2003, plus powerful portfolio and resource management capabilities when connected to Project Server 2003. Project Professional is used by project managers who need to schedule projects, assign team members from a central resource pool to project tasks, and save their information centrally to Project Server 2003 to share with others.

Features:
• Tightly integrated into Microsoft Office 2003;
• Familiar interface;
• Provides powerful enterprise project management capabilities when used with Project Server;
• Use for portfolio management, modeling, resource management, and project collaboration;
• Microsoft's desktop enterprise project management program;
• Used with Project Server 2003 and Project Web Access;
• Offers all the tools found in Project Standard.

Project Professional 2003 is a fairly complicated beast but at the same time it is simple enough to create your first project plan. When I open Project Professional 2003 for the first time, the application un-wrapped itself in the Gantt chart view with tasks to be performed on the left and a timelines on the right.

Note: A Gantt chart is a standard Project Management tool that presents a project as a diagram consisting of triangles, circles or rectangles representing project events or milestones.

Project Professional 2003 network diagrams, which can be imported from Visio, can also be incorporated into the design of the project plan making the design and implementation of network-centric projects almost seamless. Project Professional 2003’s plentiful reports can also be integrated into your project plan, negating the need to cross to a new application to complete the plan.

The Project Professional 2003 interface is familiar, taking the form of most Microsoft Office applications, most notably Microsoft Excel. This make navigating Project 2003 somewhat painless; it’s all a matter of finding the buttons on the correct toolbars.

One of the toolbars I found helpful was the Project Guide, which opens by default when you start Project Professional 2003. The Project Guide toolbar afford you access to commonly used Tasks, Resources, Tracking Information and Reports. Each button has a pull down menu associated with it. In addition a task pane can be opened and placed on the Project Professional 2003desktop; this also affords one access to functionality of the Project Guide.

I started my project with a blank page, but before I started to list my tasks I found it useful to define my resources (I decided not to use the programs plethora of wizards in designing the project, but I did take advantage of the tutorials). Project Professional 2003 makes this fairly easy thing to do by clicking on the Resources button on the tool bar. Once my resources were defined, I set about defining the tasks, and by right-clicking the task I can then assign a resource to it, and then define a time line for the task. All-n-all it was pretty easy for me to lay out my entire project from scratch in about two hours.

Of course there are some powerful tools I never touched, but at least laying the tasks out I was able to gauge the scope of the project. Project Professional 2003 makes it easy to then go back and tweak the tasks (adding, deleting or editing) in order to get a more refined project.

Conclusion

Even if you are not familiar with the arcane science of project management, like me, don’t despair because Microsoft Project Professional 2003 makes creating a project plan fairly simple by offering a useful series of tutorials, wizards, and online support that any IT Professional can use to master the plan. By more tightly integrating Project Professional 2003 into the Office suite of applications, Microsoft has created an application that can turn almost anyone into a decent project planner.

Minimum Requirements

• Computer and processor: Personal computer with an Intel Pentium 233-MHz or faster processor (Pentium III recommended)
• Memory:: 128 MB of RAM or greater
• Hard disk:: 130 MB of available hard-disk space; optional installation files cache (recommended) requires an additional 124 MB of available hard-disk space;
• Display: Super VGA (800 × 600) or higher-resolution monitor;
• Operating system: Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 (SP3), Microsoft Windows XP, or later;
• Other Considerations: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with SP3 or later, or Oracle 8.0.5, Oracle 8i, or Oracle 9.2 or later, is required for projects stored in databases (Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is required if you are using the enterprise features of Microsoft Office Project Server 2003); Project Server 2003 is required for enterprise project and resource management capabilities; Microsoft Office Project Web Access with Project Professional 2003, requires an additional 5 MB of available hard disk space and Microsoft Outlook® 2000 or later is required for importing tasks to the Outlook calendar