| Preparatory interviews
Prior to the Tutoring, the Consultant Tutor will contact you by telephone to ask you about
- your knowledge of Project Management and planning and scheduling techniques,
- your skill in the use of other software programs, and
- the types of projects which you want to plan and track using Microsoft Project.
You may also want to provide examples of your current project documents and Microsoft Project files (if you have worked with the program before).
Preparation by Consultant Tutor
Based on this information, the Consultant Tutor will prepare exercises relating to the specific tools and techniques which you require in your organisation.
| TUTOR
Tania Melnyczuk is experienced in guiding organisational leaders, entrepreneurs and career-minded individuals towards the initial fundamental changes required for effective Project Management. In addition to this, she has also conducted hands-on training in Microsoft Project for post-graduate university students and for business owners, engineers, policymakers, and professional Project Managers in South Africa, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania and Mozambique, with some participants coming to South Africa for training from Kenya, Nigeria and other African countries.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONSULTATIVE TUTORING
The learning methodology for the Consultative Tutoring in Microsoft Project grew out of the customised individual training in Microsoft Project conducted for some of the clients mentioned above. As such, the tutoring approach has been honed to provide relevance and applicability to the participants' own projects, an outcome which is not easily achieved by generic training for large groups of participants from a variety of backgrounds. |
| The Consultative Tutoring sessions
To ensure individualised attention, the maximum number of participants per group is 4.
A Consultative Tutoring engagement typically takes 1–3 days, depending on the outcomes required.
There's no fixed syllabus; your learning will be as basic or as advanced as it needs to be to address your requirement.
The outcomes required by the various participants are reviewed throughout the sessions, while participants are guided through exercises which build the necessary skills to deliver these outcomes. In some instances, formal Project Management processes and techniques may have to be explained to give be context to the features provided by the software.
Topics and techniques covered will vary depending on what the participants and organisation need. These may include:
- Creating a clear Work Breakdown Structure
- Selecting task types suited to your own projects' activities
- Working with dependencies and constraints
- Using the Network Diagram to optimise your activity logic
- Creating resources appropriate for your projects
- Allocating resources with attention to task types and effort-driven scheduling
- Working with multiple projects and a shared resource pool
- Viewing your project budget and cost flow
- Creating custom fields for integrating information unique to your own types of projects
- Working with calendars and other time information
- Tracking progress on projects
- Exporting and importing project data to and from other programs
- Standardising the Project environment by means of global settings and templates
- Creating an integrated approach for working with other users
- Creating reports
- Grouping, filtering or sorting resources and tasks according to the requirements of your projects
- Common mistakes in using Microsoft Project
- Limitations of the software and workarounds for advanced requirements such as Earned Value tracking of Cost resources
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