force task to be completed within one day

[Paul Bartlett]

I have several tasks that can only be done on Sundays but have to be
completed on the day that they are started.

Thanks to help from this forum I have managed to get the tasks to only start
on Sundays, but if there are too many of these tasks on one day then the last
task of the day is started on one sunday and carried over to the next sunday
for completion.

Can I force a task to be started and finished in one day and if this cannot
be done the whole task is to be carried over to the next calendar day?

 

[JackD]

I think that you would need to use some visual basic to achieve this.
What do you do if the task is more than 8 hours long?

Use the same technique for only starting on sundays, but constrain the
working time on sunday to the first few minutes of the day.

 

[Paul Bartlett]

In my case the tasks that need to be completed within one day are less than 8
hours. In fact the longest is 2 hours.

If I constrain the working time on sundays to be only a few minutes, would
this not result in "sunday only" tasks being spread over a large number of
sundays (given that the task is longer than a few minutes)?

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

It's a little kludgy but a method that works is to create 2 calendars to
control the task. For discussion let's say the hours of work are 0800-1700.
The first calendar is the Sunday Only calendar that shows Sunday as the only
workday and 0800-1700 as the hours of work. Then there's another calendar -
it also shows Sunday as the only workday but its hours of work are
0759-1459. When you enter your tasks you assign the Sunday Only calendar to
them as the task calendar. For each of those tasks you create a ficitious
task as its immediate predecessor linked to is with a FS link. The
predecessor gets a duration of 1 minute and is assigned the second Sunday
calendar as its task calendar.

The logic is this. The latest a 2 hour task can start on Sunday and still
finish by the end of the day is 3pm. The link says the task can't start
until until it's predecessor is finished. But the second calendar says that
the latest the predecessor can start is 14:59. If it's pushed any later, it
jumps to the next Sunday and pushes its successor real task along with it.
You can even avoid it being a psuedo-task by making it the first minute of
the real task in question, so instead of 1 2-hour task you'd have 2 tasks
together - a 1-minute "Task X Start" and a 1-hr 59-minute "Task X Balance."

 

[JackD]

That is what I would have said. The process is to have a start task that has
the tightly constrained calendar and which is a predecessor to your long
task (which has a sunday only calendar)

 

[Maurice Birchler]

This is not easy. I have developed this feature in my Preventive Maintenance
Manager application (ref: http://www.preventive.co.nz )
This application can schedule maintenance activites to comply with their
calendars, as with resources etc. The trick is to create the task as "fixed
work" and assign all the resources, including the Activity resource with the
Sunday only calendar, in one go. Then MS-Project will schedule the task for
the first available start that complies with all the calendars. Next you need
to check that the task duration is not longer than the work duration. If it
is, then at least one of the resources has split it, perhaps a lunch break.
So you then need to move out the Cannot Start Before constraint to match the
split start, drop and reapply the resources and iterate this process until
you get a valid (unsplit) task scheduled.