How do I insert a six-week delay in a project across all tasks?

[MntnrMark]

I have a 300 or so tasks schedule for a project. The client has told us they
want to insert a six-week delay in the middle of the project and want to see
the effect on all of the tasks. Basically, what I want to do is show that
six-week gap across all tasks at once without having to go into each
individual task, split each task, adjust the dates for each task and have to
manually figure how much time would be remaining on each task (as I'm hoping
the software can do that for me). For example, task 40 would be, say, two
weeks into a total six week duration when the delay takes effect, making the
total duration now two weeks of the task already completed plus the six week
delay plus the remaining four weeks of activity that would remain after the
delay ends, for a total duration now of twelve weeks. Is there a simpler way
to show this on the project as a whole rather than have to split each
individual task? Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

 

[salgud]

I have a 300 or so tasks schedule for a project. The client has told us they
want to insert a six-week delay in the middle of the project and want to see
the effect on all of the tasks. Basically, what I want to do is show that
six-week gap across all tasks at once without having to go into each
individual task, split each task, adjust the dates for each task and have to
manually figure how much time would be remaining on each task (as I'm hoping
the software can do that for me). For example, task 40 would be, say, two
weeks into a total six week duration when the delay takes effect, making the
total duration now two weeks of the task already completed plus the six week
delay plus the remaining four weeks of activity that would remain after the
delay ends, for a total duration now of twelve weeks. Is there a simpler way
to show this on the project as a whole rather than have to split each
individual task? Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

The answer is yes, Project can do that, and no, not realistically, without
some tweaking.

To insert the 6 wk delay, simply go the the base calendar and make those 6
wks non-working days. That's it.

Except it's not. This ignores demobilization/mobilization time. When you
stop work longer than a few days, you have to make adjustments. If there's
heavy equipment involved, do you just park it and walk away for 6 weeks?
Most any equipment or process that's going on will have to be shut down
properly, then restarted properly. What about the people? Unless they're
already full time employees who you're going to keep during the 6 wks,
you're going to lose some during the time off and you'll have to find and
re-hire or hire new ones when you start up again. Like pretty much
everything else in life, it even costs money to stop working for a while.

Hope this helps.

 

[Projectability]

A straightforward way to achieve the 6 week interruption is to do the
following.

1: Ensure you are filtering for All Tasks - press F3 button to apply this
filter.
2: Ensure you are showing All SubTasks
3: In the Tools Menu select the Tracking option and then chose the Update
Project Option
4: In the Update Project dialog box select the "Reschedule uncompleted work
to start after .. and then enter the date at which the 6 week interruption
will end - to avoid the work being re-scheduled to the start of the day
after the selected date enter the start time after the date - for example
assuming US Date format 2/25/10 08 with 08 being 8AM start time.

This should split any in progress tasks, apply a constraint to any unstarted
tasks that do not have predecessors and cause successor tasks to tasks that
have been either interrupted or constrained to be rescheduled using the
established dependency.

I hope this helps you.

Happy Planning
--
Dominic Moss

Projectability - Helping People achieve more with Microsoft Project

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[TNCAdams]

Perhaps you could schedule a 6 week vacation in teh master calendar at the
middle of the project?