Duration of task is percentage of overall project

[briwood]

I've got a "The Project" summary task for the project showing 30
days. I'd like to add a task called "Project Management" which
calculates a percentage of The Project's duration as it's duration.
What is the best way to do something like this.

Thanks for any quick pointers!

 

[Jim Aksel]

Your question seems a bit confusing to me. Please clarify if my comments
below do not answer your question.

Assumption: On any specific day in the 30 day project, you want to calculate
how much of your project duration is behidnd you. So, on the third work day
you are 3/30=10% Duration Complete.

How to: Insert a task of 30 days duration. Set a status date
(Project/Project Information....). Now status the single task,
Tools/Tracking/Update Project... and set it to only update the one task.
Update the status to the current date (it is an obvious choice).

Why this is a bad idea: Adding tasks to the scheudle for this purpose only
will pollute the overall %Complete of the project. You should only have
measurable tasks (not book keeping tasks) in you schedule.

To consider: Read about Hammock tasks , see FAQ#19. This will let you tie
the "Program Managment Task" to the first and last milestones of the program.
This way, the task will automatically change duration (and %Complete) as the
program duration changes.

Why not use a hand held calculator?


--
If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.

Jim

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

 

[briwood]

Thank you very much for your reply.

Sorry I was not more clear. Here's an example of what I was trying to
do:

Summary task C currently has a duration of 30 days.

Task B is an ongoing task "general project management" that is assumed
to take 20% of C's duration. As the length of C changes, B should be
recalculated.

Task A is a summary task parent of B and C. Task A would should use
the total duration of project.

Why am I doing this? Where I work programmers are asked to be project
managers. (An unfortunate, but common situation.) Therefore I wanted
to assign myself as the resource for Task B and some of the child
tasks of Task C. My goal is to show that project management will not
happen simultaneously with the other work which means 1) the project
will take longer and 2) less development work (the C child tasks) will
happen each day.

Now that I think about #2, I realize that what I really need is a
daily repeating task to show project management. Maybe that daily
repeating task doesn't need a dynamically calculated duration... I'll
go see what I can find about repeating tasks.

You should only have
measurable tasks (not book keeping tasks) in you schedule.

I was wondering about that. Maybe I'm getting too zealous here.

 

[briwood]

Here's a screenshot of my latest attempt: http://tinyurl.com/5jgwh7

I tried to use the "hammock" approach of Copy/PasteSpecial to like the
begin/end dates of the Project Management task to the Entire Project
summary task. I see that that is not allowed with a repeating task.
Project says you can't link into a calculated field. So this means
that if Entire Project's end date get's pushed out I will have to
manually adjust the Project Mangement end date. Any way to make that
automatic?

All the Project Management child tasks are assigned to the dummy
resource "Unassigned 100%". After assigning these I did Tools > Level
Resources and the duration of Entire Project was increased. It looks
like it was increased correctly. The work time of Project Management
((35 * 30) / 60) / 8 - about 2 days.

Comments welcome. Am I violating golden rules with this approach?

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi briwood,

You might try inserting a couple of milestones to hang the hammock from,
then put the logic links from/to the milestones to where you want them to
be.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials

 

[briwood]

Thanks for the idea Mike.

The problem seems to be that you can't paste any kind of link into a
recurring task. It doesn't seem to matter where the link is copied
from. Project complains if you try to paste a link into a date field
of a recurring task. It says something like "Can't paste into a
calculated field."

 

[Mike Glen]

I think you're in danger of micro-managing. In an earlier post you said: "I
tried to use the "hammock" approach of Copy/PasteSpecial to like the
begin/end dates of the Project Management task to the Entire Project summary
task. I see that that is not allowed with a repeating task." So, if you
use milestones for the project start and project end and link accordingly to
a hammock, your PM task will effectively link to the entire project summary
task. I don't see where the repeating task comes in.

Mike Glen
Project MVP