Trouble Spots
As with any exam, it will vary from person to person as to what is deemed to be difficult. Be sure you are familiar with each of the topics in the exam objectives listed below.
There are many of out-of-the-box templates in Project 2007 to help accelerate the project creation process. A Project template allows you to pre-populate task and resource information, and apply formatting, macros, and other project-specific settings. These templates make Project 2007 a highly effective tool soon after it is put into use by applying consistency across the project portfolio.
You can experiment with what-if scenarios in Project 2007 to optimize plans by understanding the effects of each possible choice or change. The new Multiple-Level Undo feature enables users to undo and redo changes to views, data, and options. Users can test several what-if scenarios in order to fully understand the implications of each choice while making scope changes.
Microsoft Project allows you to monitor project financials to forecast and manage project costs and track variances against the budget. You can assign costs to project tasks, providing a clearer picture of the project’s total cost.
The new Cost Resources feature enables users to assign costs to tasks and provides new fields for cost information that enable better project accounting, resulting in precise project cost estimates. This feature also supports integration of Project 2007 with many popular accounting systems.
You can allocate funds and track costs to keep projects on budget. The new Budget Tracking feature provides users with an efficient way to assign budgets to projects and programs, and to allocate funds and track costs, work, and materials against the budget quickly and easily. These capabilities help to ensure that project time and money are used effectively.
The new Task Driver pane helps users determine the factors driving the start date of the task such as task dependency, calendar constraints, schedule dates, or non-working time. This makes it possible to follow a chain of factors to find the root cause of a particular issue.
The new Change Highlighting feature allows users can determine the impact of changes on dependent tasks and automatically highlights all items that shift as a result of the most recent changes made, enabling project managers to understand how changes will affect project dependencies.
The Visual Reports feature uses Microsoft Office Excel to produce PivotTable views, charts, graphs, and professional-looking reports based on project data. Users can easily build work breakdown structures (WBS) or resource diagrams in Microsoft Office Visio Professional. With data-driven diagrams, users can show progress bars, flag important tasks, color-code on cost, or create custom diagrams to match their project needs, resulting in improved stakeholder satisfaction and team coordination.
The Project Web Access home page is the primary entry point for users who work with data saved to the Project Server 2007 database. When you log on to Project Web Access, pending items that might require action (such as task updates that must be approved) and items that have changed since the last time that you logged on are displayed. From the home page, you can access Project Web Access features, including the Tasks, Project Center, Resource Center, Updates, Status Reports, Documents, Issues, and Risks pages.