Hammock tasks hide critical path (PS 2003)

[Martin M]

Hi,

I am working with Ms Project 2003.
I have two questions regarding hammock task.

1/ I noticed when I create hammock task with dependency on the start and
finish date of a phase represented by a summary task (as describe in the
support process), the duration of the hammock task do not update when the
phase duration descrease.
So I have only create a dependency with the start date and the project
leader enters manually the duration.
Question : Is this reaction of Ms Project is normal ?

2/ When I use hammoc task as describe in 1/ the critical path does not
appear anymore either in Ms Project Pro and PWA. I suppose it is because I
have two critical path, the true one and the one with all the hammock task.
Am I correct ?
How to prevent this ?

Thanks for your answer.
Best regards
Martin

 

[milrock]

Hi Martin,

With what you've described you are not creating a hammock task, you
are only creating a task that has dependencies on the first and last
task in a project phase.

To correctly create a hammock task copy the start date of the first
task in the phase, then highlight the Start Date cell of your hammock
task, click Edit>Paste Special>Pastelink. Do the same thing for the
last task in the phase and the Finish Date of your hammock task.

For question 2, add the Critical column and for the Hammock tasks
select No. This will remove them from the critical path.

S

 

[Martin M]

Thanks for your answer milrock

I have tried it and it does not work. I can not modifty the field of the
critical column. It seems that it is automatically updated when the task is
on the critical path or not.

the problem with hammock task is that they do not update when the phase
duration decrease. That is why we do not use the method you describe.

Thanks for your answers.
regards
Martin