# Four Steps to Project Management Prowess

There’s no single correct way to manage a project. In fact, if you ask 10 project management experts to explain the best way to manage projects, you’ll probably get 10 different answers (all of them, of course, true).

To help you manage projects effectively, we’ve distilled the essence of project management wisdom down to these four major steps.

You can use Microsoft Project for steps 2 and 3, creating a project plan and tracking and managing a project. But no project management program can give you much help with steps 1 and 4. For step 1, defining a project, you’ll need to write down your goals and limits, such as the number of available resources or the project budget. And although you can use Microsoft Project to help you evaluate and store a project at its close, most of what you need to do in step 4, closing a project, doesn’t require the use of a project management program.

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