Creating Tasks
Now that we have a basic project open, let’s add some tasks. To add a task, simply place the cursor in one of the cells in the Task Name column, click, and start typing. Once you give the task a name, duration, and start date, you will see it represented graphically on the right.
Let’s imagine that a nonprofit is setting up a booth at a local fair. The booth needs to be designed, built at the site, and promoted so that people will interact with it. Let’s create a one-day "Design" task, a two-day "Build" task, and a two-day "Promote" task. The "Promote" task can happen even before the booth is set up.
Tasks can be automatically scheduled or manually scheduled. Manual scheduling allows for vague descriptions, such as "soon" or "a couple of days" for due dates and durations, but Project won’t adjust the task if something else is changed. If a task is automatically scheduled, Project will change durations and start and end dates appropriately as you alter other settings. This is important if your nonprofit or library needs to change the project timeline, which it probably will. You can change from manual to auto scheduling in the Task Mode column.
You can make tasks dependent on one another by linking them. For instance, the "Design" task for our fairground booth needs to be done before the "Build" task can occur. To link these two tasks, select them by clicking and dragging in the gray, numbered column to the left of the tasks. Then click the link button in the Schedule portion of the toolbar. By default, linking tasks means that one has to start after the other one is finished. However, you can also link tasks so that they are required to start at the same time, finish at the same time, or finish before the other task starts. To change these dependencies, double-click on the arrow that connects the two tasks.
You can also group similar tasks into phases. For example, add another task called "Prep" above the "Design" and "Build" tasks. Click and drag over all three tasks to select them and then hit the indent button in the Schedule section of the toolbar. This makes the “Prep” task into a phase, denoted by a black bar encompassing the tasks beneath it. Using phases can also help you plan from the top down – coming up with the major phases of a project first, and then breaking each phase into its component tasks.
Assigning Tasks to Team Members
So now that you’ve created all of these tasks to complete, who is going to do them? Let’s add members of your team to the Resources sheet. Go to the dropdown menu in the View section of the toolbar. By default, this will show a button for Gantt chart and a small down arrow. Click the down-arrow part to get the list of views. Choose More Views, and then scroll down to choose Resource Sheet. Click Apply.
Here you will add resources much in the same way you added tasks. Click a cell in the Resource Name column and type in the team member’s name. In our fairground booth example, we have team members Allen and Jackie and a volunteer who has agreed to build the booth.
Team Planner
Project 2010 has a simple method for assigning tasks to specific resources: the Team Planner. The Team Planner view is new to Project 2010 and makes assigning tasks as easy as dragging and dropping.
To easily get to the Team Planner view, click the Resource tab in the toolbar and then click the Team Planner icon on the far left. You will see the resources at the top of the screen and unassigned tasks at the bottom. (You may have to drag the bar that separates the two sections upwards a bit to see the tasks.)
Drag a task that you want to assign to the row of the respective team member and align it with the date column. For linked tasks, like our "Design" and "Build," Project will warn you if the date you drop the task on is incompatible with the dependency you have already set up. Switch back to the Gantt chart view and you can see to whom each task has been assigned, along with its duration and start and end dates.
Creating Timelines
Another great new feature in Project 2010 is the ability to create project timelines quickly and easily. While on the Task tab, simply highlight the tasks you want to see on the timeline and click Add to Timeline in the Properties section of the toolbar. The timeline expands between the toolbar and the Gantt chart areas with the new tasks assigned to it.
Sharing Your Project with Others
Project offers a number of options for sharing your project with other team members. In the File tab, choose Save & Send from the options on the left-hand side. You can send the project as an email attachment or sync it with a SharePoint server. You can also save it to a SharePoint site. If you have a particular file type that you need for your project, such as a PDF, you can choose that in the File Types section.
Conclusion
Project management is a systematic approach to making the best use of limited resources while achieving program goals. Microsoft Project 2010 makes applying project-management principles to any nonprofit's endeavor easy and rewarding. Project 2010 can handle the smallest projects that need resource allocation, scheduling, and progress tracking, but it’s also capable of managing extremely elaborate and large-scale projects. For more about what Project can do, look into the resources below or try out the program yourself to see what capabilities would be useful for your organization’s technology needs.
Additional Resources