Re: fixed duration projects

Steve,

I'm months behind reading the newsgroup, sorry. I disagree that "the best
feature of Project is its ability to predict the impact of management
decisions on the outcome of your project." I think the best feature of
Project is its ability to predict the outcome of MY decisions on how I
choose to run the project. PM's are not always the victims of poor
management decisions. Certainly if Fixed Work were the best option Eric
Uyttewall's book would have been much, much shorter. Removing tasks, effort
driven or not, that are in the critical path will always shorten the
project. Adding resources will not always shorten the duration - pregnancy
still takes nine-months and, as modern science has shown, you can now
generate as many as eight children with the same amount of Work.

FWIW, I always work in a two pane view with the Gantt Chart on top and Task
Details Form in the bottom. The latter allows me to see and edit almost
every aspect of the selected task on the Gantt Chart. Besides the ability to
see and enter all three pairs of MS Project dates, I have quick access to
the task type, predecessors and resource allocation. Depending upon the
need, I find that I often change the task type. Most of the projects I run
are research-like. You have a fixed amount of time to spend a fixed amount
of money and the results are variable. Fixed duration works well for this
case.

Norm

"Steve House [MVP]" <sjhouse at hotmail dot com> wrote in message
news:u7dVc%232cJHA.1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
You can do it as Sean described but are you absolutely sure you really
want to? Project's best feature is its ability to predict the impact of
managment decisions on the outcome of your project. That means that for
other than tasks like staff meetings and the like, as you adjust the
number of resources on them they should get longer or shorter depending on
whther you're adding or taking away workers. And how could a project have
a fixed duration when you add or remove tasks? The more tasks you have,
the more work you have to do. And the more work you have to do, the
longer it will take you to do it (unless you have infinite resources to
throw at the work as needed). Project is not just there to document your
deadlines - it's to give you a "what-if" model to help you figure out the
optimum workflow and resource assignments required to meet those
deadlines. For it to do that, it needs to change durations in response to
the various strategies you are considering so you can predict if a
possible plan is actually going to work to meet the project's
requirements. Yes, of course the final plan has to fit into a certain
timeframe most of the time. The reason to use scheduling software is to
help you come up with one that actually will do it.
--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm for the FAQs



"r2e2s" <r2e2s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:84F5D70C-966D-41B1-8A15-848E255ED7C4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Is there a way to globally make my schedules and any new tasks that get
added
Fixed Duration, and NOT Effort Driven? Neither come as default settings.

I have to manually change both settings on all new projects, and each
time I
add a new task, by clicking on the propreties icon.

Thanks for any wisdom.
--
r2e2s



.

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