I must admit that I am a novice at best when it comes to
anything having to do with project management, so I often feel out of my
element when trying to do certain things such as estimating budgets and time
spent on activities for a certain project. Thankfully the Internet exists and
there are a lot of different resources out there. Here are a few that I found
that helped me wrap my head around the idea of budgeting time and money.
The first is the program Project in Microsoft Office, who
knew? Not me! Check out this website:
Project uses a scheduling engine that will align the
projects and tasks with the available resources, but as with any kind of
program you have to understand how it works. This is a great website full of
different articles that explain how Microsoft Office Project works. It touches
on how you schedule a project, how the start date affects the schedule, the
default settings, constraints, deadlines, calendars, resources assignments, and
any other information that can help analyze the progress. If you are like me,
it will overwhelm you at first, but having a program that can help you do the
thinking is awesome.
I then stumbled across the Bright Hub PM website and a page of glorious Excel templates.
Again, major novice over here so ANYTHING that is already set up for me is
going to make my life so much easier. You can click the link on the page to
download project budget templates. It also goes on to say that by using a
template you will be less likely to forget about different important items that
should be included and not to mention the calculations are already set up for
you. There are three different templates to choose from that range from
personal to business. If you are as excited as I am by this check it out here:
Resources:
How Scheduling works
in Project (2013). Retrieved from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/project-help/how-scheduling-works-in-project-HA010213027.aspx
Levine, R. (2010). Use our excel project
template to simplify your life. Retrieved from http://www.brighthub.com/office/project-management/articles/75727.aspx
Great resources Stephanie! I am a novice for sure so I love anything with "simplify your life" in the title. I like the variety of templates of Bright Hub PM, as well as the depth of the explanations on the Office page. Very helpful. -Loren
ReplyDeleteMicrosoft Project is what we utilize at my office. I learned this week that there is a portion of the program that once you assign who your resources are and to which tasks and your dates, you can actually get a visual to see if you over-allocated one resource and need more assistance in a given area. Our DBA says on any project he uses this to ensure that no one resource is stretched too thin at any given point in the project. Thanks for sharing
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