Best Strucuture for a Project

[tom]

I am creating a strucutre in Project and want to track the following

task
planned and actual start date
planned and actual finish date
total work effort (not duration) - although I will show the duration based
on the plan start and finish dates
work remaining in hours
% complete
resources and predecesors and other misc info.

I would like to manually ENTER all of the DATES and would like to be able to
adjust the work remaining or % complete fields without having any dates
change. What are the best fields to use and other setup options to make this
happen?

Currently, I am using START and FINISH as my Plan dates, WORK as my total
work estimate (in hours), REMAINING WORK as my remaining hours or estimate to
complete and ACTUAL START and ACTUAL FINISH to capture when the tasks do in
fact start or finish. However, I seem to have issues with dates when I
adjust % complete. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[John]

I am creating a strucutre in Project and want to track the following

task
planned and actual start date
planned and actual finish date
total work effort (not duration) - although I will show the duration based
on the plan start and finish dates
work remaining in hours
% complete
resources and predecesors and other misc info.

I would like to manually ENTER all of the DATES and would like to be able to
adjust the work remaining or % complete fields without having any dates
change. What are the best fields to use and other setup options to make this
happen?

Currently, I am using START and FINISH as my Plan dates, WORK as my total
work estimate (in hours), REMAINING WORK as my remaining hours or estimate to
complete and ACTUAL START and ACTUAL FINISH to capture when the tasks do in
fact start or finish. However, I seem to have issues with dates when I
adjust % complete. Any help would be appreciated.

Tom,
Well to honest with you, what you need is Excel, not Project. The whole
purpose of Project is to help plan and maintain a live working schedule.
In order to do that it needs the flexibility to work with a linked
network of tasks. The user provides some basic data (i.e. Task Name,
Duration, links, and resource assignments) and Project then schedules
the work and helps track its progress. The minute a user decides to
usurp Project's ability to schedule (by manually entering all dates),
the application then becomes nothing more than an expensive spreadsheet.

No wonder you have issues. Project is trying to do its job of scheduling
and tracking but you are preventing it from doing so.

May I suggest you take a look at fellow MVP, Mike Glen's series on
Project lessons and techniques. You can find Mike's link at:
http://www.mvps.org/project/links.htm

Learn how to use Project properly. It will be to your advantage.

John
Project MVP

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Adding to John's outstanding reply - you say you have issues with dates when
you post in completion information. You're overlooking another set of
fields - the Baseline Start and Baseline Finish. Start and Finish are the
dates Project has determined where the tasks SHOULD be scheduled - it cannot
be emphasixed too strongly that you should NOT be supplying them, they are
not there to merely document a schedule you have determined elsewhere.
Projects job is to compute and tell you when you CAN do tasks, not merely
record when you WANT to do tasks. You don't tell it the schedule, it tells
you! Once it has developed the schedule for you, you save a snapshot of
that plan into the Baseline and proceed to start work. Considering just the
start fields, for a task starting 01 March (just for example) we have 3
fields - start Mar 01, baseline start Mar 01, actual start 00. Once work
begins the project plan displays a:history of what has happened, and b:new
forecast of things to come witrh the schedule changed as driven by the
deviations from plan recorded in the posted history. Your task actually
begins March 3 and so you enter that into Actual Start. Project will also
change plain Start to also reflect 03/03 since the plan must always model
reality and yet it leaves baseline start as Mar 01 so you also always have
the original planned date to refer back to. By doing it that way it
immediately shows you that a follow-on task that should start immediately
after the first one finishes will also be delayed by a couple of days as a
consequence of the delay in the first task's start. If the follow-on task
was originaly scheduled for 8 Mar, its Baseline Start wll still read 08 Mar
but its Start will now read 10 Mar, driven there by the delay in the first
task (and this delay ripples down through the entire plan as well, showing
you the impact of that late start of task 1 on the projected finish of the
project itself, perhaps hundreds of tasks down the line.) Once you post the
Actual Start of task 2, its Start gets updated as well and the process
repeats again, again rippling down through the entire project potentially
changing all the future dates and yet with the baseline always preserving
the original plan for reference.

HTH