Software Reviews: Review of MSP

Microsoft Project popularly called as MSP is the most useful and handy software for managing a project. It is the most popular Project Management Software that helps to monitor the health of the project. In this article, I want to share my experience with this software from a new user perspective. This software is very user friendly, but one needs practice or a good training is needed to understand the all the features and how to use them and when to use these.

Features that I am very impressed with:
First it's user friendliness. And I am really impressed with the features that support the Project Management Life Cycle :
a) Ability to define tasks, sub-tasks, project phases, create dependencies between tasks, define holidays
b) Earned Value generations, (basically the cost management and health of the project),
c)Resource management,
d)Generate various reports,
Ability to
e) merge projects into a final project,
f) interface with other Time management systems like WMS.
g) to export to different formats like Excel sheet, HTML.
h) work load balancing of resources
Creating the project:
Once you decide on the tasks, sub-tasks, resources start and finish dates etc., creating a project is next the step and using MSP comes in handy with feature of defining tasks and sub-tasks, ability to assign tasks to the resources, ability to define milestones and ability to put constraints on the tasks, etc.,.
Monitoring the Health of the Project:
As the project is on going, the health of the project can be monitored using the MSP ability to generate EV, SV, CV, SPI and CPI and helps to take appropriate actions.
Reports:
This is one of the excellent features. A number of different reports can be generated and even custom (meaning you can only those fields that you want) reports can be generated.
Training: I recommend this software for anyone who is interested in Project Management. And recommend a training of at least 4 days and rest can be learned practically.
Upgrading: Definitely, we upgrade to the latest version always.
Difficulties:
1. Could not find a way to generate resources work load per month when the work is spread is few days in a month.
2. There is no way to mail the reports or status.

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