Microsoft Project is project management software that helps project managers develop schedules, assign resources to tasks, track progress, manage budgets, and analyze workloads. It creates budgets based on assigned work and resource rates, calculating costs by multiplying work by rates at the task, summary, and project levels. While MS Project can help create schedules factoring in constraints, it cannot plan the project itself - the project manager must determine tasks and dependencies, timelines, resource needs, costs, and risks through planning.