DeadLine troubles

[iLDC]

Hi

Everywhere I look there is stated that the deadline field has no impact on the task whatsoever. Now, when you put a deadline on a task and then for one reason or another you also use the ALAP constraint on the task, you'll remark that the task will never pass the deadline date

Anyone any explanation about that

Kind Regards
iLDC

 

[David Hunsberger]

Nice discovery! In my experience very few people use ALAP tasks because they are tricky to manage, and don't always do what people expect. I'll bet even fewer people knew that an ALAP task will not go later than its deadline once you assign a deadline. But it makes sense, based on the following..

A deadline DOES affect a task in at least one way, even with the normal ASAP constraint, so your sources that said there is no effect were not quite right. The main effect has to do with slack and criticality. Microsoft lets the deadline override the normal definition of total slack and the critical path. If you have a task that is just meeting its deadline with no time to spare, you will see that the total slack is 0 and the task is critical, even if it is would not normally be critical, that is, even if it's chain is not pushing directly on the end of the project

When Microsoft first introduced this feature in MSProject 2000 I talked with one of the Microsoft programmers who designed this feature, and he said he assumed people would want any task missing a deadline to become critical. I complained that this violated the classic definition of what tasks are critical (the "long path" of tasks pushing on the end of the project) and I was disappointed that there was no check box to turn off this criticality change when a deadline is assigned

However, you can use this fact to do something very useful. Set a deadline on a task for, say 10 days *before* the task is expected to finish, with normal ASAP constraints in place, and you will see total slack goes negative. Now create a filter that searches for all tasks with total slack less than 0, and you have a nifty tool to trace the predecessors of a task, since most predecessors of the task in question will typically have negative slack as well. This ability to trace back all predecessors to a given task is a feature that Microsoft needs to add to Project, and hopefully will do some day. [As an aside, Jack Dahlgren, one of the MVPs who regularly contributes to this newsgroup, has created a VBA macro that will do the same thing even more reliably. See www.masamiki.com]

Regards, David Hunsberger, MS Project Instructor, www.it7.com

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi idlc,

None whatsoever is definitely not the case.
Other than the ALAP fact, there is also the fact that as Deadline may change
Total Slack, which in itself heavily influences standard leveling priority,
it also influences leveling.

HTH

--
Jan De Messemaeker
Microsoft Project Most Valuable Professional
Project Management Consultancy
Prom+ade BVBA
32-495-300 620

Hi,

Everywhere I look there is stated that the deadline field has no impact on

the task whatsoever. Now, when you put a deadline on a task and then for one
reason or another you also use the ALAP constraint on the task, you'll
remark that the task will never pass the deadline date.