Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project (or MSP) is a project management software program developed and sold by Microsoft which is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analyzing workloads. Project creates budgets based on assignment work and resource rates. As resources are assigned to tasks and assignment work estimated, the program calculates the cost equals the work times the rate, which rolls up to the task level and then to any summary tasks and finally to the project level. Resource definitions (people, equipment and materials) can be shared between projects using a shared resource pool. Each resource can have its own calendar, which defines what days and shifts a resource is available. Resource rates are used to calculate resource assignment costs which are rolled up and summarized at the resource level. Each resource can be assigned to multiple tasks in multiple plans and each task can be assigned multiple resources, and the application schedules task work based on the resource availability as defined in the resource calendars. All resources can be defined in an enterprise-wide resource pool. MS Project presumes additional physical raw materials are always available without limit. Therefore it cannot determine how many finished products (x) can be produced with a given amount (y) of raw materials. This makes MS Project unsuitable for solving problems of available materials constrained production. Presumably, MS Project was originally intended to manage the production of software products which can be duplicated digitally without a relevant raw materials limitation. Additional software is necessary to manage a complex facility that produces physical goods.