Dear Project Manager,

Volume 6, number 5

Welcome to 2008's fifth newsletter. 

In this newsletter we're concentrating on providing help and guidance to Microsoft Project users.  Our  "Ask the Expert" section has now started, with the initial posting explaining how you can plan resource overheads across a project's schedule using Microsoft Project.

If you are one of the thousands of PMP^®'s (Project Management Professionals) around the world, you'll have worked hard to attain your accreditation.  To help you amass the 60 PDU credits you need to retain it, take a look at the options that Project Learning can offer you as we are now a PMI Registered Education Provider.

Finally, to help you find the information you need about Microsoft Project, take a look at what we've done to our Microsoft Project Knowledge Base.

Sincerely

Andy Jessop
CEO and Founder
andyj@projectlearning.net

Ask the Expert - Scheduling project-wide resource overheads

Back in June, we asked our newsletter subscribers to submit their Microsoft Project questions to us.  Some of these questions were technical in nature, some were related to Microsoft Project usability.  All of them addressed real end-user needs.

We're therefore delighted to announce a new "Ask the Expert" service that addresses these questions and provides practical help and guidance for people using Microsoft Project in the real world.

The question that we've answered this month is from a Microsoft Project user in Woodinville, WA, USA:

I have two different resource assignment issues to solve:

1) I have a resource who needs to be on a project 25% of their time for the entire project, regardless of when it starts or ends. How do I set that up?

2) I have a fixed pool of days of work that needs to be spread evenly across 'n' resources for the duration of the project. This should then take away some small fraction of availability of those same resources for other tasks (basically allocating specific overhead tasks). How do I do this?

To make this help and guidance readily accessible, we've posted it to our new projectknowledge.net blog, together with worked examples and sample data files.  Over the coming months we'll be creating lots more blog posts, making projectknowledge.net a great information source for anyone who wants to make Microsoft Project work for them.

The answers from our ask the Expert section come directly from our Project Mentor, our comprehensive computer based training package for Microsoft Project.

Find out more about Project Mentor:

• Watch a 5 minute video walkthrough on how Project Mentor works

• Download an evaluation copy of Project Mentor

We're always on the lookout for interesting and challenging questions to answer, so please do keep your "Ask the Expert" questions coming in.  Just click on this link to submit your questions to us: Ask a Microsoft Project Expert a question