Microsoft Project
Step by Step

I am coauthor with Tim Johnson  of Microsoft Project Step by Step, 2000 through 2016 editions. These self-paced tutorials are category best-sellers with well over one million copies sold, and have been translated into multiple languages. Here's the story.

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In 1999 I became a user assistance (product documentation) team manager in the Project product group at Microsoft. To be effective in the role, I undertook a deep dive into two subjects:

• Project management domain and methodology

• The Microsoft Project application

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For the first subject, I joined the Project Management Institute (PMI), and prepped for the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam. The PMP is the standard industry certification in project management. I earned my PMP in 1999, and have recertified every three years since then.

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To learn Microsoft Project, I of course had direct access to the user assistance and product development teams. I also had the good fortune to work closely with a highly talented UX research team. I was able to participate in several research projects including contextual inquiry at customer sites, and lab-based usability tests. This gave me great insights into Project users, and in particular how they can differ from other Office application users.

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Concurrently, I had the opportunity to make a pitch for authorship of the upcoming 2000 edition of Project Step by Step--the self-paced tutorial book published by Microsoft Press. The previous edition of this book had taken a feature-centric approach, comparable to the Step by Step titles for other Office applications. I knew I could do better. My main pitch for authorship was:

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“Project is fundamentally different from other Office productivity applications. To varying degrees the other Office applications don’t penalize you if you are not especially good in the broader domains they support. Microsoft Word, for example, lets you effectively use its full feature set to produce what may in fact be terrible content. Not so with Project. A Project user must practice good project management methodology to effectively use the full range of Project’s features. Therefore, an effective instructional book for Project must frame Project in the context of practicing good project management.”

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And with that, I got the gig. However I knew I needed help. I recruited the smartest Project expert I knew—Tim Johnson, who at that time worked in Customer Support and helped real-world Project users every day. Tim and developed a unique authoring partnership:

• I generally focused on instructional strategy, information architecture, and wrote most content.

• Tim generally focused on the correct framing of Project features and use cases in the content, represented the user's point of view, and served as penultimate technical reviewer. Tim also developed and managed the substantial number of sample Project files used throughout the book--an enormously complex task!

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We had a great authoring partnership that saw us through six major editions of Project Step by Step. 

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Here is the outline of the 2013 edition, with some explanations of instructional strategy added:

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PART 1, Introduction to Microsoft Project

1 Microsoft Project, project management and you (Right from the beginning we tie Project usage to success in the field of project management.)

2 A guided tour of Project

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PART 2, Simple Scheduling Basics (Project is complicated. Project management is complicated. We opted to sequence two complete project lifecycles between Parts 2 and 3. In Part 2, the reader creates a simple plan with resource assignments, and tracks progress at a basic level.)

3 Starting a new plan

4 Building a task list

5 Setting up resources

6 Assigning resources to tasks

7 Formatting and sharing your plan

8 Tracking progress

 

PART 3, Advanced Scheduling Techniques (After the reader feels confident about what they’ve done in Part 2, this part leads them through a much more complex project lifecycle. They still plan and track the work, but this time they really utilize Project’s “power user” features.)

9 Advanced task scheduling

10 Fine-tuning task details

11 Fine-tuning resource and assignment details

12 Fine-tuning the Project plan

13 Organizing project details

14 Tracking progress on tasks and assignments

15 Viewing and reporting project status

16 Getting your project back on track

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PART 4, In-Depth and Special Subjects (We wanted to keep Parts 2 and 3 as focused as we could on successively more complex project lifecycles. We covered other high-value features in this part, so they would not overload our focus in the previous two parts)

17 Applying advanced formatting and printing

18 Advanced report formatting

19 Customizing Project

20 Sharing information with other programs

21 Consolidating projects and resources

 

Appendices

A. A short course in project management (At the time, virtually no other Project training book went to this depth of connecting successful Project usage to the domain of project management.)

B. Developing your project-management skills (Training content is not just informative; my goal is to affect behavior!)

 C. Collaborating: Project, SharePoint, and PWA

D. Using this book in a classroom (After the 2000 edition launched, Tim and I were visited by a sales manager from Microsoft Press. He came to us with an odd question: “Good news, your book is doing great in the higher ed academic market! But we don’t know why, because we don’t even push it to the academic market. Do you know why it’s doing well there?” I had a theory: Because the book has a sound instructional design connecting Project usage to project management best practices, instructors of project management courses were essentially offloading the hands-on tools training (Microsoft Project) to the book. Later, we got confirmation of this from multiple project management instructors that this was indeed the case. After the 2000 edition, we added this appendix to give instructors details to help them best integrate the book into their own curricula. Again, this was unique in the Project book market.)

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Coda: After the 2016 edition was published, I was by then pretty far removed from the Microsoft Project product group. Tim and I were satisfied with what we had produced, and we retired from the Step by Step authoring gig. A highly capable new author named Cindy Lewis licensed our content as a starting point for the next edition, and produced the excellent Microsoft Project 2019 Step by Step.