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Blocking a set amount of time each day for a resource Microsoft Project

Blocking a set amount of time each day for a resource Microsoft Project

Blocking a set amount of time each day for a resource

Posted: 18 Jan 2005 01:33 PM PST

Ahhhh - that's what maximum availability is all about. Try this - let's say
he works 8 hours a day. The 4 hours a day he's on troubleshooting isn't part
of his project work at all, really, so as far as the microcosm of the
project is concerned the only thing that counts is how much time he *could*
devote to project related work. From a project management perspective we
really don't care what else it is he's doing, only that the time it requires
is time not available to the projects and so as far as we're concerned that
time simply doesn't exist. In other words, he's only available for
assignment to projects for 50% of his workday and if his calendar represents
his full workday (as it should, IMO) that can be represented in Project as a
maximum availability entry in the resource sheet of 50%. He's available to
the project 50% of his time and not available (because he's doing who cares
what, let his boss worry about that) the other 50%.

Some people think I'm a broken record but MS Project is not the end all and
be all for business management, even in project oriented industries. It's
an extremely valuable tool for doing what it is designed to do - help manage
projects - and marginal for the other activities people sometimes try to
adapt it to. It's not intended to help you manage staffing and/or
production, only to help you schedule the work on, and specific to, your
projects.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs



"nopcworries" <microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:com... 

How can I enforce zero lag time when levelling?

Posted: 18 Jan 2005 11:25 AM PST

Jan,

Thanks. I had been playing around with Priority; I was wondering if
there was a more "correct" way to solve this one.

- Mike

Fixing Dates Absolutely - Lock Possible?

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 10:51 PM PST

Step back and think about it a minute. You're asking how to lock start and
finish dates and then you say you want to revise the duration. The duration
is defined as the time between the start and finish. How could it possibly
change without at least one of either the start or the finish changing? If
a task starts Mon 8am and finishes Thu 5pm, its duration is 4 days - it
can't be 3 and it can't be 5 - because there are 4 working days, no more and
no less, between the start and the finish. If you change the duration to 5
days the finish HAS to change to Fri evening because Fri is 5 days after
Mon. It's simple arithmetic - 5+2=7, never 6 and never 8.

The same thing happens when you assign resources. Joe works 8 hours a day
and has certain days off. Work only takes place on a task when the
resources assigned to it are there to work on it. So if I have task that
requires 40 hours of work, scheduled to start on Monday and finish on
Friday, and I assign Joe to do it. BUT Joe is happens to have Tuesday and
Wednesday off and is taking a vacation day on Thursday. That task still
requires 40 hours of work to be done, but Joe is only going to be there on
Mon and Fri, a total of 16 hours. When could he do that additional 24 hours
worth of work? The only time possible is sometime after Friday and so the
projected finish date of the task must change to accomodate the time off.

Now, if you want to lock those dates because you need to preserve the plan
as it was originally devised before starting to track progress while
retaining the original start/finish dates so you can compare actuals with
intended, that's another matter. That's the purpose of the baseline and
saving a baseline does exactly that - gives you a copy of the plan "locked"
so that when you edit the durations etc in the working plan to enter in what
actually happened so that you have a record of both planned and actual. But
you said in your question "...shouldn't be moved when I assign resources
...." and you should be assigning the resources long before you save the
baseline to lock things down. You lock down the baseline as the very last
step in developing the plan before you begin work but all the duration
estimates entered and the resources are assigned, etc, well before that
point. While you're building the plan, editing duration estimates and
assigning resources, it really must recalculate those dates in order for the
plan to be valid.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs


"Lambs" <microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:com... 

general newbie questions about MSP concepts

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 07:05 PM PST

Adding a comment to Rod's answer. A Finish No Later Than constraint is NOT
how you indicate the desired deadline finish, IMHO. You know deadlines -
while you need to hit them, sometimes things conspire that make it
impossible, right? Well, a FNLT constraint tells Project never to place
that task in the timeline later than the indicated date, EVEN IF IT IS
TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR IT TO HAPPEN ON OR BEFORE THAT DATE! There is a
deadline entry in Project that allows you to flag where your task should hit
and if it turns out you're going to be late, it'll red flag it for you to
let you know you have to do something to fix it. But by avoiding the
constraint Project shows you where it really *is* going to land according to
the current plan and by comparing that to where it should be landing, you
have a chance to revise the plan so as to meet your objectives before its
too late to do anything about it except apologize to the client/boss for
missing the deadline.

IMO, predicting where you *will* end up IF you structure the plan in a
certain way is even more important than recording where you should be ending
up. You already know what you need to achieve - the hard part is figuring
out exactly how to get there and MS Project's greatest value is as a
calculator to help you do just that. Constraints of any sort applied
anywhere except the few specific places they're needed for the model to be
valid cripple Project's ability to do that for you because they limit its
ability to calculate the effects when you change the causes.
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs


"Mike Project User" <microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:com... 

Working from "End Date"

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 04:45 PM PST

Jack has told you how but there're a couple of things you should be aware of
before actually doing it the way you propose. The most important is that
scheduling from a required finish date backwards puts all the tasks as late
as possible in the schedule. That's fine as long as nothing ever gets
delayed but in the real world how often does that actually happen? Since
the tasks are already scheduled as late as they possibly could be to finish
up before the required date, ANY delay in completion of any one of them will
blow the schedule and you won't meet the required deadline date. While
scheduling backwards is ok as an academic exercise in the initial part of
the planning to help you figure out the minimum time that might be required,
you're far better off picking a date ahead of the last possible start date
and creating the actual work schedule from that date forward so that you
have a "cushion" at the end to absorb the inevitable glitches and delays
without blowing past the required class start date. As an instructor myself
I can attest it is extremely embarassing to have to explain to a classroom
full of students that the courseware didn't make it in on time and we'll
have to mail it to them when it arrives.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs



"Maxime Maugeais" <microsoft.com> wrote in
message news:com... 

How to I print to a file from MS Project 2003 Professional? No "p.

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 02:11 PM PST

If you're trying to do this so you can send readable files to other users,
your best bet is to print to a PDF generator like Adobe Acrobat or one of
the freeware/shareware PDF writers.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

"golfr8999" <microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:com... 

Baselines and Actual Starts/Finishes

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 02:01 PM PST

Thanks guys. My company is not using MS Project as it was designed. They are
using it as an on-going scheduling tool which makes my job very difficult.
Thank you both for your comments.

Regards,
Brad

"Steve House [MVP]" wrote:
 

Progress Lines - Right or Left Peak?

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 12:43 PM PST

Thanks Steve. I probably should have added in my post that the status date
was retroactive and not the current date. A better term might have been the
'progress line date'.

I get this now. Many thanks to you and Gerard.

"Steve House [MVP]" wrote:
 

Master Project size

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 08:59 AM PST

Your master file can contain 998 consolidated project files, each of which
can have a maximum of 1 million tasks.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs


"Lonie" <microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:com... 

How are date links identified?

Posted: 17 Jan 2005 02:29 AM PST

Yep I see that too - I tried it with only one link and it must have been the
luck of the draw that mine said "Project1!LINK_3" and the task that supplied
the date just happened to be Unique ID #3.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs

"Roy" <fr> wrote in message
news:eT0YfnJ$phx.gbl... 

Custom field content is not populated in peer sub-project

Posted: 16 Jan 2005 01:47 PM PST

No problem. I ran into this problem in the past.

--
-Jack ... For project information and macro examples visit
http://masamiki.com/project

..
"Joel A Feldman" <microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:com... 
task 
all 
project 
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message 
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Risk/Issue Management

Posted: 16 Jan 2005 08:15 AM PST

Hi Django,
I've done this by using a series of 'customiseable
fields' to store risk/issue information. First define the
fields you need, then define a new view (table) to show
these fields, and finally create a custom report.
Cheers,
Peter. 
Standard to manage Risks and 
version. But I am using 
this as you have 
larger product and 
function of 
to manage risks 

Help requested to display working time only - Project 2000

Posted: 16 Jan 2005 03:37 AM PST

I understood Sparky to want to have non-working days completely omitted from
the timescale. You method does in fact only schedule tasks on Saturday and
Sunday but it doesn't actually remove M-F from the display alltogether. By
the way. instead of chagin the colours for the weekend dates, a better way
is to use the newly created weekend work calendar to also control the
display on non-working days in the timesscale, set on the same page where
you change the colour of non-working days. Now it would show Sat and Sun as
normal work days and Mon-Fri with the grey, non-working background colour.

Steve House[MVP]


"Colin D." <com> wrote in message
news:rbDGd.8809$bellglobal.com... 

Upgrading Project 98 to 2003 from SQL 7 DB to SQL 2000 DB?

Posted: 15 Jan 2005 03:21 PM PST

I think you're dealing with several independent issues here. I'm not
experienced using SQL Server to store the project data but I understand the
Database Upgrade utility you're referring to updates the database tables,
procedures etc, in SQL Database so they include the new fields, field sizes,
etc, found in P2003 that are different from those in the P98 database
tables. It deals with the differences between P98 files and P2003 files,
not the differences between SQL Server 7 and SQL Server 2003.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs


"ABW" <microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:com... 

MS Project queries

Posted: 15 Jan 2005 01:31 PM PST

In my opinion Project is superior to Ace Project because of VBA (Visual
Basic Algorithmics) which lets Project interact with other microsoft
applications seamlessly.

Using VBA you can easily embed project files in an application such as
powerpoint so that the user doesn't even know they are using project.

It also serves as a visual editor (WYSIWYG) for reports of all kinds from
both project files and project databases.

--
-Jack ... For project information and macro examples visit
http://masamiki.com/project

..
"Steve House [MVP]" <send.hotmail.com> wrote in
message news:%2303Itw8%phx.gbl... 
case 
i 
the 

late dates

Posted: 14 Jan 2005 12:31 PM PST

Typically one wouldn't schedule as late as possible except to get an idea of
what the latest possible schedule would look like.
If I want the "need" date, I just look at late finish. There is no need to
put it in the baseline. In fact it may screw up the baseline. Personally, I
wouldn't do it, but I know less about your situation than you do.
If you have to paste it somewhere why not paste late finish into deadline or
one of the date fields?



--
-Jack ... For project information and macro examples visit
http://masamiki.com/project

..
"lorraine" <microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:com... 
fields. 
late 
did 
opposed 
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useful 
The 
is 
baseline