Negative Float & Planned finish time

[lemonstown]

When a milestone has been set and there are more days available than
required to finish a task it is possible to show those spare days as
float. When a milestone has passed and you have not completed a
particular tast as intended is it possible to show negative float in
your program to represent the number of days by which you have passed
the milestone?

Also, in a program I have start and finish columns which represent the
dates that were originally planned for the tasks to start and finish. I
also have columns showing actual start and actual finish. In the
tracking gantt I can enter an actual start date for a task that has
started but not yet finished. I cannot enter an actual finish because
the task is still in progress however is it possible to enter a new
planned finish date without the original planned finish date which would
affect my baseline.

 

[Steve House]

Milestones aren't "set." A milestone is an event, not a date. It may,
indeed usually does, have a deadline that may well be engraved in granite
but that's not the same thing as the milestone itself. Milestones indicate
a change of state within the project - ie, something that needs to be signed
changes state from being "not signed" to being "signed" - but that change
can happen before, on, or after the required date for it to happen,
depending on what is going on with the tasks that drive it. Thus it is
impossible for a milestone to pass without completing the tasks leading up
to it - you have missed your deadline, it's true, but the milestone and its
deadline are not synonymous and the milestone itself physically cannot be
passed until all the tasks leading up to it have completed.

Float is defined as the amount of time a task can be delayed without driving
it past its required finish time, delaying the start of a successor task, or
delaying the project completion. This is a different thing from the planned
finish time completely. IF you want, you could "lock down" a plan by
setting the deadlines on milestones to their planned completion dates and
force it to generate negative slack if they subsequently get delayed but
frankly I'm not sure that makes any sense. You're trying to redefine the
term "float" to mean something different from its standard definition. What
I think you're really trying to measure is schedule variance, ie, " We
originally planned that this would happen on the 20th but because of that
delay, it's now going to happen on the 25th ... we now have accumulated a 5
day variance against the plan." Save a baseline before starting work and
the variance table will show exactly what you're looking for, it just
doesn't call it "float" (which is correct, what you are describing you're
looking for is not even close to being float).

HTH