Tuesday 1 February 2022

How to use projects to develop a project plan?

Recently need to use project to make a project plan, but found that the use of the process of various questions, online search tutorials, most of them are also very scattered, all kinds of copy and paste can not be prevented, good spirits in 🙁 the spirit of knowledge sharing, i sorted out the things i learned in the next week, for reference only.



recently need to use project to make a project plan, but found that the use of the process of various questions, online search tutorials, most of them are also very scattered, all kinds of copy and paste can not be prevented, good spirits in 🙁 the spirit of knowledge sharing, i sorted out the things i learned in the next week, for reference only. without further ado, go straight to the subject.


developing a project plan using a project can be divided into six steps, as shown in figure 1 below:





let's take project2010 as an example and explain how to develop a project plan in detail according to the steps shown in the figure above:




1. create a blank project



File - New - Blank Project, that is, the creation of the blank project is completed, here I save the project as testProject.mpp, the following steps are all operations on testProject.

2. set up project information



Click Project - Project Information, open "project information for testProject.mpp", and set the basic information of the project in this dialog box, as shown in figure (2):

start date: when the project started


scheduling method: optional project start date or project end date
calendar: which calendar is used for the project, the setting of the calendar directly affects the duration of the project, and the specific setting method is shown in


<>. create a calendar


the project comes with a standard calendar, which sets every monday to friday as a working day, working hours of 8:00-12:00 13:00-17:00, and every saturday and sunday is a non-working day. in the actual project cycle, it is likely that there will be irregularities between the working hours of the transfer, statutory holidays, and working hours with the working hours of the standard calendar, at which point we need to set up our own calendar for the project.


Click On Item - Change Working Time, pop up "Change Working Time", click "New Calendar", pop up "New Base Calendar", enter the name of the new calendar "test Project's Calendar" here. Then choose which calendar to use as the base, you can choose to create a new base calendar or copy a calendar. Click Confirm to create a new "test Project calendar":




next, we have to set up holidays, statutory holidays, working hours, etc., that is, set exception dates and work weeks. as shown in figure (4) below, i have created four exceptions for the calendar: 2017/4/8 (saturday) for overtime, 2017/5/1 (monday) for may day holiday, 2017/5/27 (saturday) for the dragon boat festival, 2017/5/29 (monday) ~ 2017/5/30 (tuesday) for the dragon boat festival. you can set specific working hours for each work exception, as shown in figure (5) is the details of the "dragon boat festival recess (shift)":




if the working hours of the project working day are inconsistent with the default working hours of the project, then we can adjust them during the working week, as shown in figure (6), i set the working hours from monday to friday to 9:30 to 12:00 13:30 to 17:00, which means that the working hours are 6 hours per working day without overtime. it should be noted that the working time of 2017/4/8 and 2017/5/27 is still 8 hours, because we only set the working time from monday to friday. after you confirm that the exception dates and work weeks within the project cycle are set, remember to set the project to use the newly created calendar in the project information, otherwise the project will still use the standard calendar.



fourth, set up resources



the completion of each project requires a certain amount of resources, generally speaking, the use of resources has a corresponding cost, the project will be divided into 3 categories of resources:


  • work: the resource that consumes time (work hours or work days) to complete a task, either a person or a device.
  • materials: supplies or other consumables used to complete tasks in a project, such as consumables such as steel, concrete, or earth.
  • cost: the primary role of a cost resource is to associate a specific type of cost with one or more tasks. common types of cost resources include categories of project expenses that you want to track for accounting purposes, such as travel, recreation, or training.
  • work resources are the most common types of resources we use when planning projects, and only the settings of work resources are described here. click view - resource sheet, open the resource sheet, and enter the list of resources used in this project:






The Maximum Units field contains the maximum percentage or numeric value of the units that represents the maximum amount of work that the resource can use to complete any amount of work during the current time period. The default value for the Maximum Units field is 100%. Joining is 8 hours of normal working hours per day, person A can only invest 4 hours per day in the project, then the maximum unit of person A is 50%, if a resource contains 3 people, and 3 people are full-time, the maximum value of the resource can be set to 300%. If a resource is assigned in an assignment unit that exceeds the maximum unit for all assignment tasks, the resource is over allocated, and the issue of overallocation is described in more detail later.

<>. create milestone tasks



software projects are generally divided into: requirements, design, coding, testing, release of these stages, the end of each stage, is a large milestone node. let's start by setting the task name, task type, start date, finish date, and predecessor for each milestone. click tasks - milestones to add a milestone. as shown in figure (8), i created 2 milestones:




create sub tasks for each milestone



next, we need to determine which tasks each milestone contains, which resources are allocated, how much duration is required, etc., as shown in figure (9) below, i set up the corresponding subtasks for each milestone. i don't know if you are careful, have you found that the construction period is different from what you expected? so how is the duration calculated? please continue to read on~




in terms of task 2 - demand survey, we have set the normal working time of monday to friday in step three to 6 hours per day, and the resource units of the project manager and product manager set up in step 4 are 100%, that is, these 2 resources are full-time invested in the project, then the total working hours of task 2 = 2 (number of days invested) * (6 + 6), that is, 24 man-hours. as for why the construction period appears in decimal points? that's because i set the daily working hours to 8 (under normal circumstances, the daily working hours setting is the same as the daily working hours.


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