Event Description:
Discover why Microsoft Project’s summary tasks—while seemingly convenient—can undermine your project schedule’s integrity and violate industry best practices. Drawing from authoritative guidance including the GAO Schedule Assessment Guide, DCMA 14-Point Assessment, and NASA Procedural Requirements, this session reveals the hidden dangers of summary task dependencies, resource assignments, and nested hierarchies.
Led by Eric Christoph, former Corporate EVM Subject Matter Expert and contributor to key industry standards including the PMI Practice Standard for EVM and GAO-16-89G, you’ll learn practical alternatives using custom outline codes, strategic view configurations, and proper task-level logic that create more reliable, auditable, and maintainable schedules.
Whether you’re managing complex defense contracts or corporate initiatives, this session will transform how you structure your Microsoft Project schedules while maintaining visual clarity and professional presentation standards.
PMI PDUs: 0.75 Ways of Working, 0 Business Acumen, 0.25 Power Skills
Learning Objectives:
By the end of this lesson, attendees will be able to:
- Establish task-level dependencies and constraints that support reliable critical path analysis
- Identify the four critical risks introduced by summary tasks: data duplication, calculation instability, invalid resource assignments, and logic violations
- Apply custom outline codes to create hierarchical project structures without nested summary tasks
- Configure Microsoft Project views using Group By and Sort features to maintain visual organization while preserving flat task structures
- Implement industry-standard scheduling practices aligned with GAO, DCMA, NASA, and PASEG guidance
- Design resource assignment strategies that eliminate phantom work hours and maintain data integrity
