Enter Estimates Workflow
Primarily, Microsoft Project takes six proven project management concepts and techniques and bundles them together in one software tool for project managers. Activity 6 is the next logical step in project planning after creating a Work Breakdown Structure, suggesting that Microsoft Project has a built-in underlying process for planning and executing. Users might flip #2 and 3, but this is the process:
Enter Work Breakdown Structure.
Enter Estimates (Timing, Cost, and Work) at the Detail Task Level
Schedule Activities Schedule Logic (Critical Path Method)
Level Resources
Baseline project
Update and modify the project
Entering estimates in Microsoft Project is a function of three things:
Entering estimates of duration, work or both
Selecting how you want a task to calculate when you assign resources
Making resource assignments
Typically, enter an estimate of Duration for a task. Microsoft Project will calculate the Work and Cost for the task when resources are assigned, thus completing the estimate for a task.
Typically, if you enter an estimate of Work for a task, Microsoft Project will calculate the Duration and Cost.
Undeniably, understanding the calculations and how to efficiently and effectively assign resources and then schedule those resources is the most difficult aspect of learning and using Microsoft Project.
However, our experience is that the effort involved in learning this feature set creates an opportunity for the project manager. Almost every manager in every company and organization sees the need to manage resources on projects better.
Microsoft once reported that less than 20% of users had taken the time to learn this feature set across millions of Project users worldwide. We estimate that it takes a project manager about 20 hours to learn this functionality independently. Approached systematically, we believe managers can understand it well in three or four hours.
There are two estimating approaches in Microsoft Project described in the following image.
