preserve my dates

[Kevin]

Hi,

hope someone can help, the nature of my project and the groundwork done
means that I know all my tasks and start and finish dates, I am working to an
end date that cannot move. I have a lot of tasks that must occur
simulataneously and no matter what resources are required they will finish on
a certain date.

I have enetered tasks into Project 2003 and the start & finish dates for
each. The purpose being to make it easier to share and relay milestones +
highlight reports on activities and progress.

I now need to join them (the tasks) up to give me critical path etc and
demonstrate dependencies but whenever I do this Project auto finish starts
the tasks. This then impact the whole project.

They are not all FF, SF, SS or FS, some just overlap and simultaneous items.

I don't want to have to lag and lead each line to fit MS Project approach to
handling dependencies, it would take ages. Is there a way to make project
respect the dates for start and finish that I have enetered and not be too
clever, auto lagging or lead where necc but at all times preserve the dates
that I have enetered.

Many thanks,

 

[Haris Rashid]

hi Kevin,

Turn off automatic resource levelling as follows:

Tools > Level Resources > Select Manual

Also turn off automatic calculations as follows:

Tools > Options > Calculations > Select Manual

Kind regards,

 

[Kevin]

Thank you Haris, turning off automatic calculations solved this problem.

appreciate your taking the time to assist with this as it has been causing
me a lot of problems,
Kevin

 

[Catfish Hunter]

It sounds like you have put constrant dates on all task. If this is what you
did you do not have a CPM schedule. Instead you have a picture. I suggest you
logically tie all task. You may need to add some milestone tast (O duration)
to start task that will start at the same time or finish together. Without
logic ties you'll never see the critical path. All schedules have an end date
that shouldn't move. But the schedule tells you if it's moving.
After the schedule is complete I would set a baseline and show the baseline
bars to track against. Hope this helps.

 

[davegb]

It sounds like you have put constrant dates on all task. If this is what you
did you do not have a CPM schedule. Instead you have a picture. I suggest you
logically tie all task. You may need to add some milestone tast (O duration)
to start task that will start at the same time or finish together. Without
logic ties you'll never see the critical path. All schedules have an end date
that shouldn't move. But the schedule tells you if it's moving.
After the schedule is complete I would set a baseline and show the baseline
bars to track against. Hope this helps.

Just wanted to underscore what Catfish said. If you've set all your
start and finish dates, you can't possibly have a critical path
schedule. In such a case, since no dates can change, entering
dependencies is meaningless. It will just frustrate you, as it already
is. Just enter your dates and turn off calculation.
Since you've already purchased Project, it may not matter to you
anymore. But if you're not doing CPM, there are software packages for a
fraction of what Project costs that will do what you want just fine.

 

[Kevin]

know it isn't perfect but it meets the needs of now, the real aim is to make
it easier to share and relay milestones + highlight reports on activities and
progress.

with this one everything is critical so nothing can slip.

and it won't...

Thanks again.

 

[davegb]

know it isn't perfect but it meets the needs of now, the real aim is to make
it easier to share and relay milestones + highlight reports on activities and
progress.

with this one everything is critical so nothing can slip.

and it won't...

Thanks again.

"with this one everything is critical so nothing can slip."

I probably should bite my tongue here, but....

This particular phrase is one of my pet peeves. It tells me that the
project is out of control already. The odds of success are slim at
best. When everything is critical, nothing is critical. When you don't
know where to focus your efforts, you usually focus them in the most
obvious places, which may or may not be the crucial areas. This is, in
my experience, a recipe for disaster.
If the project is pretty small, and you have direct control of all your
resources, you might have a chance. I wish you the best of luck!

 

[Kevin]

ouch..

I guarantee it will not fail, I built Liquidated Damages into the spec.

 

[Catfish Hunter]

My schedules are usually around 2,000 task. It does take time up front to
build a good detailed CPM schedule, but the benifits through out the project
are well worth the effort.
Building liquidated damages into a spec guarantees you nothing. Perhaps
instead of buying MS Projects you should have purchased a Big Chief pad and
pencil to track your milestones. I never bite my tongue, sorry.

 

[davegb]

My schedules are usually around 2,000 task. It does take time up front to
build a good detailed CPM schedule, but the benifits through out the project
are well worth the effort.
Building liquidated damages into a spec guarantees you nothing. Perhaps
instead of buying MS Projects you should have purchased a Big Chief pad and
pencil to track your milestones. I never bite my tongue, sorry.

With a name like "Catfish", I guess one should not expect subtlety! You
hit pretty hard!
I did bite my tongue when Kevin wrote about the Liquidated Damages. I
agree with you, Catfish, that mostly what that assures is a contracted
legal battle after the project runs into trouble. An LD clause on a
well thought out plan can be pretty effective, but in an instance such
as this, more often than not, will only add legal problems to the
others.
For your sake, Kevin, I hope I'm wrong. You sound like you're
reasonably intelligent and you mean well. You just are new to Project
Management, and are making some of the classic mistakes most of us made
in our early years. One if which is not "wasting money on some high
priced consultant"!
Maybe you'll get lucky! Would really like to hear from you when the
project closes, however it turns out!

 

[Kevin]

will let you know Dave, has taken several months of careful planning and some
hard decisions to get this project back on track as it was haemorraging cash
and out of time tolerance before I took the helm but I am quite confident
that it is ok now. Never had a project fail yet but it is nice to know that
people like catfish are waiting in the wings to feed on the scraps - keeps
the rest of us on top of our game

This has all gone a bit off topic now, the original question/problem that I
had has been answered and for the purposes of what I needed to do with
Project it now meets my interim needs.

By the way LD are worthwhile depending on how you apply them. There is a
mindset of it being a major legal hassle and achieving nothing, it doesn't
have to be and it annoys me that it is accepted as "the way it is".

I built it into a new ITT with the payment schedule for stage payments, each
stage payment amount being 85% of the full amount. This then accrues to the
end of the project, if contractors fail to meet specific targets we have
enough held back at the end to pay someone else. If the spec is concise
enough everyone knows the boundaries and PI. This is not applicable in all
cases and I have known of some difficult cases but was the perfect solution
to my set of problems. Well worth considering when drawing up ITT specs
depending on how much damages you can demonstrate (mine could run into
millions so there was a strong case for this)

Thanks again to everyone for your support on the forum.

 

[davegb]

will let you know Dave, has taken several months of careful planning and some
hard decisions to get this project back on track as it was haemorraging cash
and out of time tolerance before I took the helm but I am quite confident
that it is ok now. Never had a project fail yet but it is nice to know that
people like catfish are waiting in the wings to feed on the scraps - keeps
the rest of us on top of our game

This has all gone a bit off topic now, the original question/problem that I
had has been answered and for the purposes of what I needed to do with
Project it now meets my interim needs.

By the way LD are worthwhile depending on how you apply them. There is a
mindset of it being a major legal hassle and achieving nothing, it doesn't
have to be and it annoys me that it is accepted as "the way it is".

I built it into a new ITT with the payment schedule for stage payments, each
stage payment amount being 85% of the full amount. This then accrues to the
end of the project, if contractors fail to meet specific targets we have
enough held back at the end to pay someone else. If the spec is concise
enough everyone knows the boundaries and PI. This is not applicable in all
cases and I have known of some difficult cases but was the perfect solution
to my set of problems. Well worth considering when drawing up ITT specs
depending on how much damages you can demonstrate (mine could run into
millions so there was a strong case for this)

Thanks again to everyone for your support on the forum.

Kevin,
I didn't say LD's can't be effective. They can be very effective. The
problem is that they can lead to considerable amounts of money, in fact
should be to be effective. But if there's enough money at stake, it's
worth going to court over rather than just paying. Then it becomes
whose expert witness is more convincing to a judge who knows absolutely
nothing about your business. I know it's not supposed to work this way,
but I believe judges are human. With no knowledge of the subjective
factors, they rule based on who has the most convincing lawyer or SME.
Case in point: the genius judge somewhere who ruled that Amazon could
patent/copyright one click ordering! Under any law I'm familiar with,
that's not patentable/copyrightable. I doubt the judge ever saw a web
page, much less ordered something online, before he got that case.
When you apply LD's, you better be sure you have all your ducks in a
row. If your adversary's attorney can find fault for the delays on your
side, and they almost always can, you end up in either protracted
litigation or an out-of-court settlement. Neither one of which gets you
what you wanted when you signed the original contract, which is to be
indemnified from the consequences of project delays.
I don't want to tell you you've mis-managed your project. It sounds
like you've done your best to get it done on time. I do think there are
better, more likely-to-succeed ways to get it done. Then again, I don't
know all the factors which put you where you are. Maybe my approach
wouldn't have worked in your situation. Project Management is tough! I
wish you the best. Keep me posted!

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi All,

Please don't lose sight of the fact that the PM's job it to get the project
finished. LD can at best only compensate for failure.

Mike Glen
Project MVP

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

Logically how is it possible for tasks to behave as you describe? What you
are saying is that if you have 100 widgets to fidget, it will take the SAME
length of time regardless of whether you put one worker or a hundred on the
job. And further, that fidgeting those widgets will start on a specified
date no matter what, even if something has gone horribly wrong and the
widgets haven't even been delivered to the fidgeters yet. How can that
possibly be accurate? I can appreciate that you have very specific
deadlines that must be met but those are the objectives of the plan, not the
plan itself. The utility of MSP is to serve as a reality check to assist
you in figuring out just how to go about it, independently calculating the
dates in your plan so you can see if it is workable or not. To do that, the
model of the plan in MSP must be free to shift around to predict what you're
going to get if the work is performed the way you've assigned it, whether or
not it meets your objectives. If the calculated plan does NOT meet your
objectives, you must do something concrete to change it, not just turn off
the calculations so you can see a Gantt chart that lies about whether it's
going to work the way you want it to. If the plan Project comes up with has
different dates from those you've determined that you need, you shouldn't
just force it to display the plan the way you want it - it's telling you
that if you try to work the plan the way you've input it into project, it
will fail. To prevent that, you need to change the plan, not Project's
picture of the plan.