Reflection on Business Impacts of Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a project management software program that was first released in 1984 by Microsoft. Over the course of next 29 years, Microsoft has enhanced this program tremendously and has added a number of very useful features in MS Project 2013 version that are now vital for managing projects. It is no surprise that the number of Project Managers adopting to this tool has been constantly increasing over time.

MS Project offers integration with other Microsoft products such as Word, Excel and Outlook that are already very popular. MS Project is a desktop application, which means the Project Manager can work on the project schedule even if there is no Internet connection.

With MS Project, it is easy to manage project schedules and finances, communicate and present project details and status, and organize resources to ensure deadlines and commitments are met. It enables to simplify project management by providing tools and resources that facilitate project planning, resource allocation, resource leveling and financial management as well as collaboration among project teams.

MS Project presents the diagram of any complex project through Gantt chart that gives a reasonable and realistic timeframe for the completion of the project along with resource constraints.  It also tells about the activity with the greatest amount of slack as well as about the critical path.

Whenever our bank started a new project such as introducing a new product or expanding in a different region, the management made plans regarding resources needed, cost incurred and duration of the project. The calculations were done in MS Excel and presented through MS PowerPoint. Flow charts for the project were created in Visio. But if we used MS Project for scheduling and planning for the new projects we could reduce the cost of using three applications.

Microsoft project will provide us better scheduling and planning as well as manage our constraint resources. Divisions of bank that are working simultaneously on different projects can prioritize their projects along with resource allocation. We can assign the right workers for the different project.

We have four divisions in our bank and if we purchase 40 MS Project Standard licenses at $588.99 each, it is going to be an investment of $23,560. Each division will have ten licenses of MS project that will give it the opportunity to manage and schedule its different projects. Project Managers can get better evaluation budget allocated to different projects. This investment would be an added value for four divisions as it would enable effective and efficient project management to coordinate resources and budget wisely from start to finish.

In MS Project, we first define the project starting date then we enter the related tasks and specify the duration for each task.  You can include as little or as much details as needed for each task. As you enter this data, a Gantt chart is generated as a visual presentation of the project overview. MS Project will also allow our management team to allocate their resources appropriately to ensure the right team members are assigned to the project. It even allows you to enter the cost associated with resources to be able to track the budget. It will also allow the management to share PDF reports generated by MS project. This way we can avoid occurrence of numerous problems such as revising the budget, assigning the wrong workers to the tasks and estimating poor time frame for the completion of project.

Last year we had one project failure of expanding to Georgia that cost us a loss of $1 million. Investigation revealed that the failure was due to poor scheduling and assigning the wrong workers to the assignment.

MS Project can save us from a lot of hassle and it will give us the ease to schedule our projects and enhance the productivity of each division.