Blocking a set amount of time each day for a resource Microsoft Project |
- Blocking a set amount of time each day for a resource
- How can I enforce zero lag time when levelling?
- Fixing Dates Absolutely - Lock Possible?
- general newbie questions about MSP concepts
- Working from "End Date"
- How to I print to a file from MS Project 2003 Professional? No "p.
- Baselines and Actual Starts/Finishes
- Progress Lines - Right or Left Peak?
- Master Project size
- How are date links identified?
- Custom field content is not populated in peer sub-project
- Risk/Issue Management
- Help requested to display working time only - Project 2000
- Upgrading Project 98 to 2003 from SQL 7 DB to SQL 2000 DB?
- MS Project queries
- late dates
| 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... |
| 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: |
| 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$phx.gbl... |
| Custom field content is not populated in peer sub-project Posted: 16 Jan 2005 01:47 PM PST No problem. I ran into this problem in the past. -- -Jack ... For project information and macro examples visit http://masamiki.com/project .. "Joel A Feldman" <microsoft.com> wrote in message news:com... task all project you about task. dummy a message Project identical the whole |
| Posted: 16 Jan 2005 08:15 AM PST Hi Django, I've done this by using a series of 'customiseable fields' to store risk/issue information. First define the fields you need, then define a new view (table) to show these fields, and finally create a custom report. Cheers, Peter. Standard to manage Risks and version. But I am using this as you have larger product and function of to manage risks |
| Help requested to display working time only - Project 2000 Posted: 16 Jan 2005 03:37 AM PST I understood Sparky to want to have non-working days completely omitted from the timescale. You method does in fact only schedule tasks on Saturday and Sunday but it doesn't actually remove M-F from the display alltogether. By the way. instead of chagin the colours for the weekend dates, a better way is to use the newly created weekend work calendar to also control the display on non-working days in the timesscale, set on the same page where you change the colour of non-working days. Now it would show Sat and Sun as normal work days and Mon-Fri with the grey, non-working background colour. Steve House[MVP] "Colin D." <com> wrote in message news:rbDGd.8809$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... |
| 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 |
| 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 of do For this early useful The is baseline |
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