Microsoft Project 2013 Course

(SFX) Hi there and welcome to this VTC course covering Microsoft's Project 2013. This is of course Microsoft's dedicated piece of project management software. It's been around for awhile, it's been included with the Office Suite of Applications for awhile and this is the 2013 version of course. You may have had previous experience, you maybe new to project management software, you maybe new to Project 2013. In any event you'll learn a lot about the application and hopefully learn something about project management as we go along. My name is Brian Culp, I will be your tour guide as we look at this software. I've authored several courses for the Virtual Training Company and I've also authored courses covering Project 2003 and 2007. So I have a lot of experience to draw on and have a lot of very powerful tips and tricks to share with you as we go about this course. I want to start with this by the way. I realize there's a possibility that you are evaluating this course or using this course to evaluate Project 2013. If you're shopping for it just know this about the 2013 iteration here. I said just a moment ago that it's part of the Office Suite of Applications but if you go to buy an Office Suite which is a collection of Office Applications, if you say you're shopping and you want Office Professional 2013 which is kind of the top of the line bundle. You'll get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access but Project is nowhere to be found in that list. If you're shopping for Project from the Microsoft store just note that it is part of the stand-alone programs or it is one of the stand-alone programs. So this is where you can buy Word or Excel just on it's own and if you're looking down at the bottom of the list you'll see Project Standard 2013 and Project Professional 2013. This course will be developed, authored using the Project Professional 2013 edition. In other words I'm using Project Professional 2013. Speaking of which there it is. And we'll do this intro and overview lesson by using Project to kind of give us a clue what's coming up in the chapters to come. So we'll start with some lessons about starting a new project. And mostly that has to do with just listing out the tasks in a project and configuring those tasks. Then we'll look at schedule, so we'll look at how we can schedule our tasks and in turn that will dictate the schedule for our project. We'll then in later chapters start to assign resources to tasks so that work can progress on the tasks and then thus on your project. We will look at relationships between tasks, some tasks have to start at the same time. Some tasks need to finish before the next one can start and so on. So all those are under the heading of relationships. Then we'll look at those topics in later chapters. We will then track progress on our projects and that will involve comparing our project plan to the actual work that's being done so we can see, review and report on the actual progress that's being made. We'll them make adjustments based on some of that progress that we track. We will look at resource capacity, who is being over allocated under allocated and so on. We'll look at topics that have to do with communication and collaboration using information from other programs, creating reports and getting those reports out to stakeholders. And then finally we'll spend a chapter looking at some tasks and topics that have to do with wrapping up a project. Microsoft's Project 2013 has capabilities that help us as project managers conclude a project, do final reports and final communication. So those are the topics that are coming up. I look forward to exploring this program with you, being your tour guide and showing you many, if not all of the very powerful project management capabilities in this software.