Collaboration:  

Unfortunately, our most heavily-weighted feature is also Microsoft Project’s weakest area. However, that being said, its collaboration features are still above average. The project management software lacks a dashboard, which lets project managers see all current projects and gives quick access to reports, as well as displaying the progress of your projects. However, these features can be made up by integrating your project with other software like Intellisys, OpenMind and Project KickStart. The software does integrate with Microsoft Outlook, eliminating the need to build up a new contact list and instead letting you contact resources through your already-established address book. And the team calendar offers an easy-to-read daily overview of tasks and milestones to be completed by groups and/or individual employees.

Resource Management:  

Microsoft Project Standard makes adding and managing resources (both employees and material resources) extremely easy, which is essential to successful project management. With Microsoft Project, you can create slots for resources and assign them to tasks as simply as entering data in a spreadsheet.

Resource details, skill sets and resource notes let you keep information (such as resumes) about your employees within the project management software, so you can assign the right task to the right resource or the right group of resources, to optimize efficiency.

Microsoft Project also helps you keep track of employee working hours, materials and supplies and project costs.  Keeping control of these various factors is essential if you want to keep your project on budget.

Project Management:  

While Microsoft Project doesn’t boast a complete list of project management features, it has the functions and features you need to manage your project effectively.

Recurring tasks came in especially handy with Microsoft Project, making scheduling team meetings or regular maintenance simple. We also found the expand-and-hide feature extremely beneficial. Some projects might include hundreds of tasks and milestones, which make for a long list to scan through when updating your project. Microsoft Project lets you expand and hide these tasks so you can find what you need as quickly as possible.

Microsoft Project’s scheduling includes calendars for a day-by-day breakdown of tasks, timelines for an overall view of the project, and events for specific milestones within the calendar. But its interactive Gantt chart takes the cake. We know that delays occur in projects. Updating and changing your project as needed right on the graph is extremely easy and much simpler than manually inserting new data into the spreadsheet-like task list.

Up-to-date reports are vital to stay current on projects. Custom reports in Microsoft Project are available to project managers, letting them keep track of different aspects of your project, such as statistics, employee work loads, and financial status.

One area that could be improved is document management. While the functionality to hyperlink documents to certain tasks is available (and extremely convenient when viewing a project and wanting to see which documents are pertinent to success), Microsoft Project offers no option to track different versions of the same document. This can pose a problem if employees begin to unknowingly read and get information from outdated versions of a document.