Flexible Duration

[Bill Easterbrook]

I have a Project Engineer who would like to do the following and its been a
while for me:

Assume:

Task A Duration 15 days
Task B
Task C Duration 5 days


They want Task B to be SS+5days to Task A and FF to Task C.

Essentially they want to capture Task B in the plan (which is a series of
Design Reviews that will happen frequently and for small durations over a
period of time) and Start this series of reviews 5 days after Prototyping
Evaluations begin, and end it when Test Reports are written, but they do not
want to create multiple entries at each "review" point. The way it comes
out is Task B ends up with 1 day duration and lots of slack, while the
Project Lead actually wants the duration to be flexible and reflect the
entire duration between Task A and C with slight lag, and change as A and C
do.



any suggestions?

 

[Jim Aksel]

See if a Hammock Task will help you.

http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm select FAQ #19

However, that may not be able to handle the initial lag. If it does not,
consider manually adusting the resource hours for those first days down to 0
hours.

 

[St Dilbert]

You could have a milestone "start with reviews" with Predecessor Task A
(SS+5d) and the same successor as task A (FS) - the successor is
important, otherwise it will make task A member of the critical path
even though it may not be otherwise.

Then set the "Review hammock" between the milestone for start and end
of task A.

For me, this isn't even adding too much to the screen clutter, since I
like to keep all my level of effort tasks (project management,
reviews...most of them are "hammocks") under a seperate outline
structure because LoE tends to dilute earned value and I keep it
seperate in EV reports.

Make sure you have some notes to the hammocks, saving with which "ends"
they were set up. In rough practice I've seen those links break
occasionally and I don't think Project stores the source of the pasted
link anywhere in case you need to restore.

 

[St Dilbert]

Mistake in my previous post: the hammock should extend to the end of
task C as described in the original post...