One of the duties of a project manager is to find out from team members where they are at on their project tasks. This can be done in a lot of different ways including automated or email-based solutions. I have found that these type of solutions generally do not work very well because team members are people and progress is not just a matter of percent complete…
Uh-oh. This is a show-stopper. We can’t complete the project on time because the part that we need won’t be available for another 3 months! What will we do?
“A plan never survives contact with the enemy.” If you are using Microsoft Project and things do not go as planned, your project has “issues”. 
You can track these issues as tasks in the project schedule. How do you do this in MS Project?
A work breakdown structure (WBS) is often done incorrectly and even the PMBOK has a bad example of it. This is how to make it useful and do it correctly.