Save time, accelerate your project planning process, and improve the quality of your project plan by having a Schedule Associates facilitator/consultant come to your location to work with your project planning team for one, two, or more days in order to produce an initial project plan or to refine or scrub an existing one!

Our Microsoft Project Working Session is a combination of facilitation, consulting and hands-on training all wrapped into one. You'll walk out of the session with a preliminary plan for your project!

While each of our client's needs are different, a typical Working Session involves gathering with a small team of people who are intimately involved with a current or upcoming project and who are responsible for the project. With the Schedule Associates consultant's guidance, the team works on developing a plan or revising or improving a plan in Microsoft Project that meets the needs of the organization and the project stakeholders.

Each Schedule Associates consultant is an experienced and certified project manager with real world experience using Microsoft Project. Based on his or her experience and knowledge of the application and project management best practices, your Schedule Associates facilitator can assist the team in:

understanding the overall approach to planning projects in Microsoft Project,
defining and capturing the scope of the project,
developing a schedule for the project,
assigning resources to tasks and understanding the resulting demand for staff and equipment on the project,
defining procedures for tracking progress once the project is underway,
developing templates for use in planning projects that are similar to one another,
complying with best practices for scope definition and scheduling and the use of Microsoft Project in general, understanding resource utilization on the project and even across the enterprise if sufficient information exists.

The Working Session can be conducted using any version of Microsoft Project.

To obtain maximum value from the Working Session, the following requirements should be met:

Participants must know how to use Microsoft Project. If they don't then please consider preceding the Working Session with either our 2-day course, Project Management with Microsoft Project, or our 3-day course, Comprehensive Microsoft Project. In fact, this is a great approach in that the Working Session allows attendees to practice, review, and apply what they learned in class to projects in their environment. Two and three day courses are available as open enrollment sessions or may be conducted at your location.

Unsure if you or your colleagues know Microsoft Project? Take our Microsoft Project Knowledge Assessment!

There should be a small number of participants, typically less than ten, and often five or fewer. Attendees will most often be the core project team, those responsible for actively planning and managing the project.
Participants should be on the same project.

Comprehensive Microsoft Project course books are provided as part of the session.

We are unable to do custom development, for example creating macros, during the Working Session. If you have a need for macros in Microsoft Project please contact us to discuss your needs further so that we can assist you in the best way possible. We develop macros in Project for our clients on an hourly basis.

We are unable to set up or configure Microsoft Office Project Server during the course of the Working Session.

Request information about moving your project forward by holding a Microsoft Project Working Session at your location or call Colleen Kaiser today at 1-800-606-1450, x114.