Projects Limitations

[Neil]

Here are some issues that I have found in using MS
Projects for many years. That maybe somebody has a better
work around solution, addin or just a better way of doing
it.
1)Critical Path as an item slack is zero is becomes
critical which is good to know but if I have many of them
finding the true critical path can sometimes be difficult
It would be nice to turn off that feature and just see the
longest items pushing the schedule out. I use it on R&D
type projects that has many lines (2500 to 5000 in some
cases)in the project.

2)Baseline cost and schedule- it would be nice to able to
change either one independantly of each other, meaning
sometimes you need to change the cost of an item but yet
keep the scedule variance that has occured without setting
it to its original date and rebaseline and move it back to
its current postion

3)I find the Earned Value that projeccts generate to be
below par at best I usually pull the original baseline out
and use Excel going forward.There are too many
inconsistencies of the data that gets generated from
Projects. Like (LOE)Level of effort tasks, the data never
seems to timephase correctly, BCWP is different in the
Gant chart from the Task Usage view how they roll-up

If someone has a better way of looking at, generating or
producing the data from MS Projects I would welcome any
input.
Thanks
Neil

 

[JackD]

All good points. For #1 you do have some options. The first is to force some
negative slack by imposing a must finish on constraint on your final
milestone which is a few days earlier than it calculates to be. Then you can
filter for all tasks which have negative slack. The second is to use my
trace macro which you can download at my website
http://masamiki.com/project/macros.htm

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Neil,

I'm concerned about your #1. The critical path does, in fact, show the
longest path provided it is only measuring the default state of slack=0.
However many tasks you have with zero slack, they are all on the critical
path by definition. I don't see what else Project can show other than the
correctly calculated critical path.

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Guest]

Jack Thank you for that Marco it does a great job!!!!
I haven't tried the negative slack but will.
Thanks again
Neil