How do I keep a short task from being broken across 2 days?

[Brian Freeman]

I'm doing a systems roll-out and need to schedule 2 hour long systems outages
after business hours. Putting them on a custom calendar got them in the
right time windows but Project is starting many of these outages on one day
and finishing them on another.

How do I keep these 2 hour long tasks each together on the same day?

 

[Wiley]

Brian,

Proejct is seeing some form of predecessor to that task or its resources.
You can do noe of two things:

1. Determine and adjust the constraint that is preceding the task
or
2. Use the Task Usage or Resoruce Usage view, where you cansee the grid on
the right side pane. Adjust your time scale to show days. My guess is that
part of the task is showing as starting on Day 1, but there is not 2 hours
left in the schedule fromt he time it starts, with the remainder going to the
beginning of Day 2. (To see this, you could change your timescale to show
hours). You can manually override this by changing the hours to 2 on Day 1
(if you have days shown in the timescale) or enter 1 in each of the correct
horus fields ( if you have the hours timescale shown).

Hope this helps.

 

[Brian Freeman]

Thank you for the reply Wiley.

There are tasks in front that are constraining the problem task. The
predecessors are there because they need to be done first.

I can manually move the task to the next day but that kind of defeats the
purpose of having a scheduling program. I guess this would be no big deal if
there was just one case where this was a problem but I'm working on dozens of
short tasks (they are coordinating phone calls) each of which must be done in
specific time of day windows without spanning days. They each have
predecessors, successors, limited calendars and priorities to get them into
the right spot during the day and in the best sequence. Just to make things
more complicated, this is a 3 week long trip on-site to 1/2 a dozen locations
across the country and each have multiple groups of interrelated and multiple
unrelated tasks, many with different restricted working hours on 6 different
work calendars. Moving just one task impacts at least several others and
could ripple through to the end of the trip. Because of possible external
conflicts, I'm also creating 4 different work plans to allow others to select
the one with the least impact on them. Before getting Project, I tried to do
the whole thing manually in a spreadsheet and discovered just how much work
it is to optimize the schedule.

Is there a setting that I can set on a task will keep that task from being
split across days and auomatically move it to another day if it can't be done
on the current day without manually constraining it to a specific start
time/date?

Thanks
Brian

 

[Wiley]

Brian,

I still would like you to look at an hour timescale to see how Project is
scheduling the tasks. You mentioned that you are using several custom
calendars. Did you apply the custom calendars to the resources (on the
Resource Sheet view)? If not chances are your resources are still using the
Standard Calendar. Project calculates Duration using the project calendar
(Tools > Options >Change Working Time ). However, it schedules work based
upon the Resource Calendar.

To see a good example of this, Create a new project. Set the project
calendar to use a 24 hour per day working time calendar. I will make the
assumption that your Standard Calendar is set to 8 hours per day, and your
resources will default to this calendar. Now enter a task for 12 hours,
assigned to a single resource. You will note that Duration will show .5d,
but the Start and Finish will show 2 days. Project will assign 8 hours to
the resource for the first day and the remaining 4 at the start of the next
day. Using the Task Usage view set to Hours timescale will make this very
clear.

Let us know if this helps.