Full project schedule from a brief
Deliverable: A complete schedule built from a written brief — work breakdown structure, dependencies, calendar and milestones — with a critical path you can walk somebody through.
Course
MS Project
Project scheduling taught as planning rather than as software training — dependencies, the critical path, resource conflicts and tracking a plan once reality starts disagreeing with it.
- Duration: 6 weeks
- Classroom · Online live
- Level: beginner to advanced
What you will be able to do
- Break a project into a work breakdown structure with realistic durations
- Link tasks with the correct dependency type and lead or lag
- Read a critical path and explain what actually drives the finish date
- Assign resources and resolve over-allocation without wrecking the schedule
- Set a baseline and report variance once work starts slipping
- Produce Gantt charts and status reports a client will accept
Who this course is for
- Site engineers, coordinators and planners in construction or infrastructure
- IT and operations staff running multi-task projects
- Graduates targeting planning and project coordination roles
- Comfortable with Windows and basic Excel
Syllabus
6 modules · 6 weeks
Module 1. Planning before software
- What a schedule is actually for
- Work breakdown structure and task granularity
- Estimating durations honestly
- Milestones, deliverables and constraints
Module 2. Building the schedule
- Creating tasks, summary tasks and milestones
- The four dependency types and when each is right
- Lead and lag time
- Calendars, working time and holidays
Module 3. The critical path
- Forward and backward pass, by hand first
- Total float and free float
- Reading and interrogating the critical path
- Constraints and deadlines, and why hard constraints cause trouble
Module 4. Resources and cost
- Work, material and cost resources
- Assignment, units and the duration equation
- Spotting and resolving over-allocation
- Levelling, and what it does to your finish date
Module 5. Tracking and control
- Setting and protecting a baseline
- Recording actual progress
- Variance, earned value basics and forecasting
- Re-planning without losing the original story
Module 6. Reporting
- Formatting a Gantt chart somebody will read
- Built-in and custom reports
- Exporting to Excel and PDF for circulation
- Presenting a slipping schedule honestly
Tools and technologies you will use
- Microsoft Project
- Gantt and network diagram views
- Resource sheet and levelling tools
- Microsoft Excel
Projects you will build
Resource-levelled plan
Deliverable: The same schedule with resources assigned, every over-allocation identified and resolved, and a written note on what levelling cost in calendar time and why.
Tracked plan with variance report
Deliverable: A baselined plan updated with four weeks of actual progress, producing a variance report that shows what slipped, by how much, and what it did to the finish date.
Where this course can take you
- Planning Engineer
- Project Coordinator
- Site Engineer
- Project Management Office Executive
- Operations Executive
Duration, modes and fees
- Duration
- 6 weeks
- Delivery modes
- Classroom · Online live
- Fees
- Share your details for the current fee
- Fees vary by batch and delivery mode. Ask about the combined fee if you take this alongside a CAD course.
Placement assistance
Every student gets placement assistance — that is what 100% placement assistance means. It is support for all, not a job for all. We do not promise a specific salary, a specific number of interviews, or placement at any named company, and you should be wary of anyone who does.
What is included
- A place in the monthly placement drive, held every third Saturday
- The readiness programme every second Saturday — mock interviews and preparation
- CV review against the specific roles you are targeting
- Portfolio review, so your project work is presented the way a reviewer will read it
- Access to the vacancy pool employers send directly to the Samyak network
- Guidance on which roles realistically fit your background and which do not
- A place in the next drive, with coaching, if you are not selected in this one
What is not included
- Any guarantee of a job, an interview, or a particular salary
- Placement at a named or partner company
- Applying to jobs on your behalf
- Support before you have completed the course and its project work
- Visa, relocation or overseas placement assistance
The schedule is the thinking, not the file
It is possible to learn every menu in Microsoft Project and still produce a plan that is useless.
That happens when tasks are linked because they happen in that order rather than because one genuinely cannot start until another finishes, and when durations are whatever makes the end date acceptable. The software recalculates all of it faithfully, which is precisely the danger — the output looks authoritative either way.
So the first module has no software in it. Work breakdown, honest estimating and real dependencies come first, because everything the tool does afterwards is only as good as those.
Critical path by hand, once
You will do a forward and backward pass on paper before you let Project compute one.
It takes an afternoon and it is the difference between reading a critical path and trusting one. When a client asks why the finish date moved by three weeks after a two-day delay, the answer requires understanding float — and that understanding does not come from watching a bar turn red.
Levelling always costs something
Resource levelling is where most schedules quietly become fiction.
The tool will happily resolve every over-allocation and hand back a finish date months later than the one you promised. The useful skill is knowing what it did, which assumptions you can challenge, and how to explain the trade-off to somebody who only wants the original date. The second project is specified to force exactly that conversation.
Reporting a slip
Every real project slips, and the schedules that matter are the ones being tracked when it happens.
The tracking module covers baselines, variance and forecasting, and the last project is a plan four weeks into trouble. Presenting that honestly — what moved, by how much, what it means for the end date — is the part of the job that actually distinguishes a planner, and it is not a software skill.
Questions
MS Project — frequently asked questions
Do I need project management experience to start?
No. The first module covers work breakdown, estimating and dependencies as planning concepts before the software appears at all, because people who learn the buttons without the concepts build schedules that look right and mean nothing. Site and coordination experience helps but is not required.
How is MS Project different from Primavera?
Both do scheduling, critical path and resource management. Primavera is the standard on large infrastructure and EPC projects; MS Project is far more common in IT, manufacturing and mid-sized construction. The concepts transfer almost entirely, so learning one makes the other mostly a matter of finding the equivalent menu.
Can I use Excel instead?
For a short task list, yes. What Excel cannot do is recalculate a finish date when a dependency moves, find the critical path, or tell you a person is booked twice on the same day. Once a project has real dependencies and shared resources, a spreadsheet stops being a schedule and becomes a picture of one.
Will this help me get a planning engineer job?
It covers what those interviews ask about — critical path, float, levelling, baselines and variance — and the three projects give you schedules to talk through. Whether it converts depends on your sector experience as well, and we will be straight with you about that rather than implying the software alone is enough.
Enquire about MS Project
Three details is all we need. A course advisor will call you back.
Related courses
- Advanced Excel
The Excel that offices actually run on — lookup logic, PivotTables, Power Query pipelines, dashboards and enough VBA to automate the work you repeat every month.
- AutoCAD
CAD taught to drawing office standard rather than as a tour of commands, because employers judge a drawing on layers, dimensioning and whether it plots correctly.
- MS Office
The four applications every Indian office runs on, taught around the tasks you will actually be judged on rather than as a tour of every menu.
Next step
Talk to a course advisor
Tell us what you want to learn and we will help you pick the right course, batch and mode.