Re: newby question - project hours dramatically increasing on thei

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Hi Dave,

Thanks, a few people have pointed out that this is Project's big strength.
It doesn't seem that adapted for my project, which is a consulting project
with a series of deadlines driven by the client, that are not up for
negotiation. All I want to do is produce a Gantt chart with many task dates
fixed by me, and see where this creates large resource demands so I can bring
in more people/plan to camp at the office. The problem I keep running into
is that Project will reassign dates of other tasks when I try to fix a task
timeline with constraints, or it will simply refuse my constraints.
Project's ability to schedule is actually getting in my way at this point,
unless there is some other way to get around it. Meanwhile, my client has
asked that we produce all project plans in Project, so I am stuck with it for
now.

Thanks again,

Jeff

"davegb" wrote:

On Nov 26, 12:19 pm, Jeff <J...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks very much, appreciate your time.
one thing that is a little unclear to me is how to finesse durations. right
now i have many tasks that are not where I want them to be in the overall
timeline - how can I move them to the weeks I want without limiting MSP's
ability to level, etc.?

jeff

That's the whole point. Project doesn't schedule tasks to suit our
preconceived notions of when they need to happen. If properly used, it
schedules them to be done at the earliest possible date to take
maxmimum advantage of any availble slack. Of course, you can
reschedule them to later dates to put tasks where you want them in
time, but why? If there is a complelling reason they can't occur until
some date later than their dependencies would dictate, that's what
Constraints are for. But most of us here advise against doing so
arbitralily. It just decreases your odds of completing your project on
schedule and within budget.

Hope this helps in your world.



"Jim Aksel" wrote:
A few things. First, make sure you are not assigning resources to summary
tasks. Second, hand key a date only as a last resort since it creates
constraints. Instead, finese durations to get things where you need them.

Fixed work tasks. Key in a value in the [Work] column (work is not the same
as duration). That value should not change regardless of duration. What
will change is the %Units (the allocation of resources assigned to the task).

See if any of that helps.
--
If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.

Jim

Visithttp://project.mvps.org/for FAQs and more information
about Microsoft Project

"Jeff" wrote:

Hello all - thanks for any help on a probably obvious question. I am making
all of my tasks 'fixed work' to reflect the fact that our organization is
assigning specific amounts of hours to each resource for a given task. This
was working fine, but I now find that many of my summary tasks have total
hours that are much, much higher than the total of the hours assigned to
subtasks - for example, 3 subtasks worth 22 hours for resource A and 10 hours
for resource B have a total summary task of 226.88 hours!
I assume that Project is somehow extrapolating from task timelines (which I
also sometimes assign, i.e. I manually put in start and finish dates) and/or
resource availability, but how to I stop it from doing this?
Thanks,
Jeff- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -


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