Microsoft Project 2019 Standard is a comprehensive, well-designed tool suite part of the Office 365 family. It’s an outstanding tool for small and large businesses thanks to its multiple fantastic features, ease of use, and integration capabilities with other Microsoft 365 tools, like Teams and Planner.
If you’re unique to Microsoft Project, you might not know what tools to concentrate on or how satisfactorily to use them. Microsoft Project is here to help! Let’s break down the top Microsoft Project features, so you know where to concentrate your attention and how to leverage Project to its fullest capability.
Features that deserve a special mention
Project Views
The most useful Microsoft Project features start with the numerous views your team can utilize to create, visualize and manage considerable projects. The project primarily presents three different perspectives to try:
- Grid view is a simplified project view you can utilize to manage projects based on task lists.
- Board view lets you make visual kanban boards—excellent for managing workflows, checking project status, etc.
- Timeline view leverages classic Gantt charts perfect for organizing tasks over a project’s entire timeline or multiple timelines divided up between different teams.
With Project, you can switch between these views at the touch of a button or mandate that your team members utilize one idea or another so that everyone visits the same data.
More on Project Timeline view
The Project Timeline view earns special notice because it’s beautifully illustrated and gives you a top-down view of the whole project and all associated work. The Timeline view is necessary because you can utilize it to produce projects for stakeholders, partners, or managers; it permits you to show how a project or program is progressing on a linear, easy-to-understand scale.
Since you can use the Timeline view remotely, it’s ideal for workers like programmers, developers, and customer service agents who might require collaboration from anywhere.
Task management system
Microsoft Project also arrives with a high-quality task management system. Project flexibility and visibility are important, which is why Project management tools allow you to create and adjust plans on the fly.
For instance, say that a user requires to reschedule a task to a typical day because of a switch-up in the schedule. With Project, you can do this fast and effortlessly by simply cutting out the task on any of the above project views and then moving it to wherever it requires.
As shortly as the motion is complete, the plans for both days will automatically adjust to balance the schedule change. This way, Project’s task management flexibility allows your team to adjust according to current expectations and resources without being bogged down in ongoing meetings or slow software updates.
Resource management
Microsoft Project further delivers excellent resource management tools from beginning to finish. Using this software, you can manage project resources by requesting tasks or assigning tasks to individual team members.
Based on the elements you put in, Project will automatically assign those resources, providing that each team member sees the help they’ve acquired and can start work immediately after that. Other team members can also visit how resources are divided between departments or project employees.
If you require a change in resource distribution fast, Project also lets you do that. Managing your organization’s finite resources couldn’t be more effortless!
Project roadmap
With the roadmap, one can track programs and build project portfolios. Project portfolios are clusters of projects, resources, programs, and processes that can simultaneously be managed, edited, and optimized. It’s worthwhile for larger enterprises with numerous projects or programs to tackle simultaneously.
Roadmap allows you to update or track these project portfolios on the fly. With the roadmap tool, project managers will always be able to see if tasks and objectives are moving smoothly or if they require assigning more team members to a specific area of a project, etc. It’s the bird’s eye view you must take to know if your project is on time at every point!
Microsoft Project reporting
Microsoft Project doesn’t cease at assigning tasks and goals. It also has pre built reports you can develop and send to other team members in your business. Depending on your requirements, you can develop reports to:
- Track progress for detailed projects or sub-projects.
- Track resource uses or analyze resource management.
- Information on program status and efficiency.
- Track portfolios and statistics, among other factors.
This all links to the in-depth, comprehensive analytics tools the Project brings. With Project, you’ll be capable of constantly optimizing and iterating your processes and workflows, securing that your company becomes more efficient and productive over time.
File sharing
In keeping the focus on teamwork, it’s no jaw-dropper that Project has file-sharing features. Every team member operating Project can share files with other associates of the same team. This provides efficiency and comfort of use; managers aren’t the best ones who can share files with team members, and everyone can access the same guidelines documents when needed.
This improves productivity, as team members can get the required documentation without having to sit through or cause interruptions. File sharing on Microsoft Project means users don’t have to open up another program to transfer a file for editing.
Download Microsoft Visio Professional 2019 to organize complex ideas visually. With Visio and Project, the business can enhance productivity exponentially. For both products, you can contact the team of DirectDeals; they have been providing the best Microsoft products for the past 23 years.
