Approaching the Planning Process

After securing approval for a concise but comprehensive goal statement that defines the scope of the project, your next major planning function is to draw up a list of activities or tasks that must be completed to achieve the project goal. Using Microsoft Project to help create the task list can save a great deal of time and effort. At this stage of the process, the computer's major contribution is as a word processing tool to help you enter, annotate, revise, and rearrange your ideas. You take advantage of its impressive computational powers in later chapters when you tell it how to schedule the tasks and assign resources to them.