You might want to re-think how you're using Project. It's really not
designed to document a plan you have already worked out and that's sort of
what it sounds like you're doing. Try to reverse the process - instead of
thinking in terms of broad spans of time, start at the lowest level and plan
from the ground up. A project that last a year or two is going to involve
hundreds if not thousands of detail level tasks. But when you start to pump
this into Project you don't have a clue that it will take 15 months with the
first phase lasting 3 1/2 months etc, much less know that you should start
Phase 2 on September 1st. What you know is that it takes a plumber 2 days
to install a toilet and during Phase 3 of the project you'll need to install
27 toilets. You input that into MS Project and it tells you what date you
can do it.
As a general process, you decompose the work from the top down, from the
broad level scope statement of what needs to be accomplished down to the
level of the detailed list of specific activities that will accomplish it.
Then you schedule from the bottom level up, plugging in the estimates of how
long each lowest level detail activity will take and letting Project
determine the start and finish dates for each level going up until you see
the start and finish of the overall project plan.
If we can, just for clarity of discussion lets call your over-all plan the
"project." What you're calling the several projects let's call
sub-projects. They in turn consist of several summary tasks describing
broad deliverables which are eventually further broken down into performance
tasks that describe real work actions done by real people.
Even for the highest level planning you don't input dates. You know when
you're going to kick-off the project, you know it will require 5 major
phases, and each phase is a sub-project will require about X number of
months to implement. You've said you don't know the duration of any of
sub-project to better than a month or even a quarter year yet you're worried
that MSP shows the start date of the next one in line as Sept 3 instead of
Sept 1!! The accuracy of your dates can NEVER be any better than the
accuracy of the duration estimates. If sub-project A is 1 year starting
March 1st and you know that duration to an accuracy of +/- 2 months (ie,
will be somewhere between 11 and 13 months), then the start date of
successor sub-project B simply cannot be determined with more accuracy than
range 01 Feb 07 to 01 Apr 07 anyway and any arbitrary start date for B close
to that range is just as good as any other. Worrying about whether it's
showing 15 Feb or 1 Mar or 15 Mar is simply maintaining an illusion of
precision since you really might as well be just putting slips of paper with
dates within the range written on them into a hat and drawing one at random
as far as predicting what's really going to happen a year or so down the
road.
Another thing you might find useful at this point are the PERT tools in MSP.
It allows you to input best case, likely case, and worst case duration
estimates and calcualtes a weighted average duration. The result allows you
to create a schedule that's sort of 3-in-one, displaying best, klikely, and
worst case Gantt charts. Setup your subprojects initially as tasks with the
appropriate links, detailing subtasks if known, and use the
best/likely/worst duration estimate to give you several alternative
schedules for high level planning purposes.
Since it sounds like you don't know detailed subtasks except most generally
at this time, why not simply use a business graphics tool like Visio to
illustrate the broad levels strategy you're following and save Project for
the detailed planning stages.
HTH
--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs
