Sometimes things have to be done in a certain order because that's what works best. The film director who shouts "Action, Camera, Lights" would have a flop on his hands, and the pupil on a driving test who understood MSM to mean manoeuvre, signal, mirror would find himself resitting his test at a later date.

So it is when scheduling a project in Microsoft Project. If you take it one stage at a time, and you carry out those stages in a set order, then the project will be governed by a rigid schedule, and so will stand a greater chance of success. Here's a project scheduled by a couple we all know.

Ken's mate has some bricks left over from a building job and he brought them over so Ken can build a barbecue in his back garden. While he was waiting, Ken scheduled his project in MS Project to pass the time.

The first thing Ken did to his blank project was to insert a start date. To do this he clicked on Project and selected Project Information from the list. This opened up the Project Information dialog box with Start date; as the first option. Project automatically defaults to today's date, but Ken is not starting the project till tomorrow, when he has the day off work. Ken clicks the down arrow at the side of the Start date; box to open up the calendar, and he clicks on tomorrow's date. The other defaults, such as the Standard calendar and the Schedule from; Project start date, were left unaltered. He clicked OK and returned to his Task List

Next he entered three tasks into the Task Name column:

Buy cement
Mix cement
Lay bricks

Having done this, Ken observes that all three tasks are displayed as starting at the same time. However, the reality is that each individual task cannot begin until the previous one has been completed. In order to update the project to reflect this, Ken moves his cursor to the first task in the task list and, holding down the left mouse button, he drags the cursor down until all three tasks are selected. On the toolbar he goes to the familiar Link Tasks icon that is represented by three links of a chain. One click of this and his tasks become linked.

Ken noticed that the start date for each task that follows the first one changed to when its predecessor had finished. Also, the tasks in the Gantt chart jumped into position to reflect their new status. There are also small blue arrows to show that those particular tasks are linked. This is showing Ken the relationships and dependencies between tasks. In Ken's schedule, all three tasks have Finish to Start dependencies, which means that after the first task, each following one cannot begin until its predecessor has been completed. This is the most common dependency and the default used in Project.

With all of the tasks entered and linked, Ken moved on to his resources. There are two of these; Ken himself, who carried the bricks and mixed the cement, and his wife Barbie, who bought the cement and laid the bricks. Ken clicked on View and then on Resource Sheet, where he entered his and Barbie's names. Ken can now assign his resources to the tasks.

To do this he went back to the Gantt Chart view and dragged the split bar across the screen. The split bar is the heavy vertical line that separates the columns from the calendar. He dragged it until the Resource Name column was revealed. In the first row, which holds the task of buying cement, Ken clicked on the down arrow in the Resource Names column to reveal his and Barbie's names. As Barbie bought the cement, he clicked on her nameand she was assigned that task. He did the same with the other two tasks and that was his project scheduled.

All that remained after that was for Ken to set a baseline. To do this Ken went to View, where he clicked on Table Entry and chose Variance from the list. This added two new columns to indicate the Baseline Start and Baseline Finish. His next step was to click on Tools and select Tracking and then Set Baseline. This automatically inserted a start and finish date into the Baseline columns. When the project began proper, any variance in the progress of the schedule would be reflected in these columns.

From setting a start date to setting a baseline, these are the fundamentals of scheduling in MS Project. Done in the correct order, they make scheduling a far less daunting task than it can appear.