Project Management Using Microsoft Project 2013: A Training and Reference Guide for Project Managers Using Standard, Professional, Server, Web Application and Project Online

This training and reference guide will provide an overview of Microsoft Project 2013, from a project manager’s perspective. It is also an excellent preparation guide for Microsoft Exam 74-343: Managing Projects with Microsoft Project 2013. Project Assistants has been providing Project Management Theory and Microsoft Project training material for our training courses since the release of Microsoft Project version 3 (1993). Prior to the release of Microsoft Project 2013, we were surprised to find that there were no hands-on training manuals available for Microsoft Project 2010 that also covered the enterprise features used in Microsoft Project Professional and Project Web Application. This guide has been created to serve as that comprehensive reference and training guide, assembling content and best practices honed over many years of Microsoft Project and general project management training. Many training guides on technology are primarily manuals on features and functions of the software. The goal of this book is to show why those features and functions are important from a project management standpoint (based on PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge, PMBOK), and then demonstrate how to effectively leverage that value. When used cover-to-cover, this text serves as a comprehensive guide to running a project from initiation to closeout with guides along the way for how to use Microsoft Project. The information in this book was selected based on our 20+ years of project management and Microsoft Project consulting experience, and covers Microsoft Project 2013 Standard, Microsoft Project 2013 Professional, Microsoft Project Server 2013, Microsoft Project Web Application 2013 (PWA) and Microsoft Project Online 2013 for Office 365.

Gus Cicala is the president, CEO, and founder of Project Assistants, a regularly published author on project management, and an acclaimed speaker. He is a Wharton Business School graduate with more than twenty-five years of project management experience and thirty-years' worth of information technology development and consulting expertise. In his 17 years with Project Assistants, he's offered his expertise to help organizations achieve better, faster and more cost-effective project-based results. He's provided solutions across the whole spectrum of People, Process, Technology and Governance—especially training on project management, courses methodology, design and implementation of Microsoft Project and consulting on project portfolio management. His clients have come from all across the US and Western Europe and from industries ranging from Product Research and Development to Information Technology. Effective project management combines strategy, theory, leadership skills, and technical knowledge, which is reflected in Gus' slate of publications and speaking tours. He regularly publishes articles on strategy and theory in several of the top project management venues, including Project Times, ProjectManagement.com and PMI. He was a contributing author to the third edition of Expediting Drug and Biologics Development, and on his latest speaking tour on project theory, he presented on risk management. On the topic of project leadership, Gus contributed the chapter “Leadership Is Taken Not Given” for the recently published The Keys to Our Success: Lessons Learned from 25 of Our Best Project Managers, and he has spent much of 2013 touring this topic at speaking events. As for technical knowledge, Gus is regularly published by the Microsoft Project Users Group (MPUG) and has been a contributing author to Macmillan’s Que book series: Special Edition: Using Microsoft Project as well as Microsoft's Step-by-Step guides for Microsoft Project. He was also a longtime member of Microsoft's product advisory council. In Gus' personal life, he has been married to his wife, Susan, for 33 years, with whom he has four children. He is the president of the Limen House, a non-profit organization dedicated to turning around the lives of recovering addicts.