SSI Offered Training Courses

Become a Microsoft Project pro by learning essential MS Project competencies, including: calendar development, task management, dependency analysis, resource loading, baseline establishment, statusing and much more.

Please note this is approximately a 3 day course with 12 modules included.

Understand Earned Value concepts and metrics to measure project cost & schedule performance, analyze variances, forecast Estimates at Complete (EACs), and more. This training will teach your team how to become compliant with the guidelines for EVM in the EIA-748 standard.

Please note this is approximately a 3 day course with 12 modules included.

Course Description

Master schedule analysis with SSI Dependency Analysis Tools. This course teaches how to trace driving/driven paths, identify root causes of variances, and analyze task dependencies using SSI’s Directional Path, Connecting Path, and Dependency Tracer tools—all designed to help you quickly visualize and
resolve critical schedule impacts.

SSI Tools Used

SSI Directional Path, Connecting Path, and Dependency Tracer tools

Course Description

Having a resource loaded schedule opens a whole new dimension of data you can get from your project schedule. However, assigning resources to tasks in a project schedule can be a difficult and time-consuming process. In this course you’ll learn how make the process of resource loading as efficient as possible. First, we’ll learn all about resources in Microsoft Project. Next, you’ll see how The Resource Loading workbook tool allows you to create and distribute “Resource Loading Worksheets” that can automatically import resource assignments to tasks in Microsoft Project. Once you have your schedule resource loaded, you’ll learn how to use the Time Scaled Values tool to analyze how those resources are used over your project’s period of performance. These are “must haves” for anyone working with a resource loaded schedule.

SSI Tools Used

SSI Resource Loading Workbook, Time Scaled Values Tool.

Course Description

1. A project schedule is more than a “to-do” list of project tasks. When working with a project schedule, there are several things you need to ensure are being done, or are NOT being done, so the dates being output are accurate, reliable and trustworthy. Checking for all of these things manually can be difficult, time consuming and prone to user error.  In the course, you will learn how to ensure your project schedule is accurate, compliant, and trustworthy using SSI’s Schedule Health/Audit Tools. This course covers automated checks for DCMA’s 14-Point Assessment, and many other critical scheduling checks- plus how to create custom audits tailored to your organization.

SSI Tools Used

SSI Integrity Audits, 14 Point Assessment and DECM Audit Tools

Course Description

1. When collecting status updates from the task owners of a project, we, as project schedulers, can become the bottleneck. That’s not good for us or the project team. In this course, we will guide you through how to correctly status Microsoft Project tasks and how to use SSI’s Project Statusing Tools to streamline the process. Using SSI Status Workbook tool, we’ll extract tasks from the project schedule into Excel to provide “heads up” or “to-do lists” to CAMs and task owners at the beginning of each reporting period. Next, we’ll see how to quickly check for updates provided by the task owners and how to efficiently and correctly input those updates back into the project schedule using SSI Statusing Tools. By saving time at the beginning of each reporting period you will preserve time at the end of the period for analysis and variance recovery.

SSI Tools Used

SSI Post Task Status, Watchlist Tool, Adjust Task End Date, Status Workbook Tool.

Course Description

1. In every project there are risks. It is valuable to identify those risks early on in a project to know where to focus on mitigation efforts as well as provide probabilities of when a project will achieve key deliveries or milestones. This course teaches how to run Schedule Risk Assessments and Sensitivity Analyses using Monte Carlo simulations, evaluate best- and worst-case task durations, and analyze results to focus mitigation efforts on the tasks that matter most.
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SSI Tools Used

SSI Schedule Risk Assessment (SRA) and Sensitivity Analysis Tools

Course Description

A “Program” is often a collection of Projects and Subprojects.  Often, these projects and subprojects are owned and maintained by separate teams or organizations within a company or even by different companies.

For the most part Projects and Subprojects have Internal Dependencies between their own tasks and milestones.  In many cases, however, an External Dependency exists where the predecessor or successor is part of another project or subproject.  Common names External Dependencies include “Givers” and “Receivers”, “Inputs” and “Outputs” or just “Cross Project Dependencies”.

Managing a Program having External Dependencies requires explicit identification of these dependencies which may include a Unique Identification Code or number and Tags to show which project Provides (the “Giver” or “Provider”) the external dependency and who Receives (the “Receiver” or “User”) the external dependency.

SSI Tools support this environment with tools that can:

• Identify, code and flag dependencies that are incoming or outgoing a range of task IDs in a project.
• Recognize Outputs in a project and link them to their corresponding Inputs based on codes and flags.

Push and pull input/output dates from external projects to keep them synchronized.

SSI Tools Used

SSI Multi-Project Tools

Course Description

In this course, we will show you how to generate industry standard performance analysis, metrics and indices using SSI Tools including:
• “Earned Schedule” Reports
• Baseline vs. Actual & Projected Performance Rate
• Baseline Execution Index (BEI) and Current Execution Index (CEI)
• Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and Cost (in time) Performance Index (CPI) – where cost is a measure of days or time rather than dollars.
• Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and Cost (in time) Performance Index (CPI) – where cost is a measure of days or time rather than dollars.

SSI Tools Used

SSI Performance Reporting Tool (Excel), Baseline Execution & EV Express (MS Project)  

Course Description

2. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to get Earned Value Management metrics directly from your Microsoft Project schedule, even if you didn’t have resources assigned to tasks? With SSI’s EV Performance Reports tools that is a reality! In this course youll learn about the fundamentals of EVM like BCWS, BCWP and ACWP and metrics like SPI and CPI. Youll learn how to generate reports that match the data from the IMPMR Formats 1 and 2. The best part is, you’ll be able to get this data using Task Days, Task Work or Task Cost as your Earned Value Unit of Measure so you can get this data whether or not your schedule is resource loaded. For those needing to use a formal Earned Value Management System, SSI Tools includes data generators for Deltek MPM and Cobra.

SSI Tools Used

SSI Performance And Earned Value Group

Course Description

1. The SSI Tool Box is a collection of tools that will improve your efficiency and generally improve your quality of life as a project scheduler. These tools are all simple to understand, but extremely powerful. In this course you will learn how to add a common Predecessor or Successor OR a common Prefix or Suffix to a group of tasks. You will learn how to quickly and easily navigate between a common list in Excel and MS Project. Youll be able to instantly make all of your task names proper case with just the click of a button. This is just a few of the tools available in the SSI Toolbox. Not only will these tools make you more efficient but your project schedules will look more professional as well!

SSI Tools Used

SSI Toolbox Tools

Course Description

1. In this course, you’ll learn how to use SSI’s PWA tools to seamlessly integrate enterprise fields with other SSI Tools. You’ll also learn about a critical bug that can corrupt enterprise project schedules and how SSI Tools can help prevent this issue.
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SSI Tools Used

SSI Project Web App (PWA) Tools

Course Description

1. Microsoft Project has a limitation that only one person can edit a project schedule at a time. So if you are part of a team of schedulers working on one large project file, you are forced to wait until the “live” file becomes available or work in an offline copy and then recreate your changes back into the live file at a later time. However, with the SSI Change Tracking Tool you can record the changes you make to a MS Project schedule, just like you would record a Macro, and simply import those changes when the “live” schedule is available. This can be used to effectively allow multiple people to access the project schedule at the same time! In this course youll learn all of the setup options for both recording and importing Youll even learn how this tool can be used in a multi-project environment.
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SSI Tools Used

SSI Change Tracking Tool

Course Description

1. Structured Solutions Inc.’s Presentation Professional enables users to create Microsoft PowerPoint presentations containing objects (shapes) that are linked to Microsoft Project schedule items (Summaries, Tasks and Milestones). The purpose of this tool is to enable rapid production and efficient maintenance of “to-the-point”, executive level PowerPoint presentations that convey the status and performance of key and critical schedule events and life cycle phases. Please note this course is up to 4 courses.
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3. Topics Include:
   • Getting Started with Presentation Professional 
   • Swimlanes and Display Styles 
   • Manipulating Text on Charts 
   • Using Legends 
   • Creating Reference Shapes
   • Showing Progress on Charts
   • Creating Charts from Multiple Schedules 
   • Adjusting Default Settings
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SSI Tools Used

SSI Presentation Professional

Course Description

1. In this course, you’ll learn how to use SSI’s Schedule Sanitizer tool to instantly remove unnecessary or sensitive/proprietary information from your project schedule before sending to an outside organization. The SSI Schedule Sanitizer makes the process of removing this data quick and easy. The tool allows users to save and distribute sanitization configurations which can be easily applied at any time.
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SSI Tools Used

SSI Schedule Sanitizer

Course Description

1. Many data elements in an Earned Value Management Systems (EVMS) like Deltek Cobra and MPM can be derived from the MS Project schedule. However, the Project file cannot be uploaded directly to these systems. With SSI’s Bridge Tools you can create .csv files containing these data elements and know you have exact traceability between your project schedule and the EVMS. 
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SSI Tools Used

SSI Bridge tools for Deltek Cobra and MPM 

Course Description

1. Quantifiable Backup Data (QBD) provides the objective evidence to support a task’s performance assessment. In an Earned Value Management System, QBD is required on % Complete EVTs. Since MS Project does not have a QBD feature out of the box, SSI’s QBD Tools provide a way to manage and ensure QBD are implemented properly and accurately. You can even create templates to apply QBD to like tasks and import and export QBD information to share with team members. 
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SSI Tools Used

SSI QBD Tools