Recurring Task within a Recurring task

[Terry]

I am trying to schedule a task that occurs one day a week for five
weeks, every other month.

For example: This task would occur every Monday for the first 5 weeks
of the year starting Jan. 1st, then it would occur again starting on
March 1st (or whatever is the first Monday of March) for every Monday
for 5 weeks. Then it would occur in May, etc.

Is there anyway for MSP to produce these recurring tasks automatically?
I am currently manually putting each incident of this task as a
recurring task. The first "incident" of one day a week for 5 weeks in
Jan. is one recurring task. The second incident in March would be a
second recurring task.

I would like to schedule these out several years, plus I have multiple
sets of these types of tasks. Therefore I was hoping there was a
quicker & easier way of doing this. any advice/suggestions anyone can
give would be greatly appreciated!

thanks!

 

[JackD]

Terry,

You may find this hard to believe, but in a decade of project scheduling.
I've never used a recurring task in the plan.
I've set recurring meetings in tools like Outlook, but generally that sort
of recurring stuff is usually only tangential to the actual project. If a
meeting or other sort of recurring activity is skipped, it usually does not
affect the project completion.

What you want to do is not possible to do automatically.
I suggest perhaps you use a different application to track and plan these
sorts of activities.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

You're presently doing it the only way possible that I'm aware of. I wonder
a bit at the kind of plan that would lead to this behavior of the tasks
though. Task breakdowns in the task list should not be broken out by time
period like it sounds like you're doing. When you enter the tasks you may
not even have any idea what the time frame should be. The task list list
should describe the process, the work activity required to produce the list
of deliverables, that must be followed to successfully create the project
deliverables.

Your recurring series of tasks that you're trying to schedule in March will
actually start whenever that phase of the project will start. Lets say they
are a series of meetings evaluating the progress of the design of a new
widget. Those meetings should start when you start designing the widget and
end when the design has been finalized. If that design phase starts in
March, fine. But suppose the previous step in the project runs late and you
can't start designing until April? What should happen to the set of
meetings? I'd say they should shift to April as well.

In my training classes I try to emphasize that the anticipated timeframe,
the project's temporal structure, does not *create* the task breakdown and
linking, the project's task structure, but rather it works the other way
around, with the project's temporal structure being a *consequence* of the
task structure that achieves the project's goals. The flowchart outlining
to process of creating the project's deliverable is what drives the actual
task breakdown and initially you should completely ignore the time periods
during which you think the tasks should, or you wish them them to, occur.
(You do eventually align the tasks to time requirements imposed by contracts
with your clients, etc, but that comes a bit later in the planning process.)

HTH

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Terry,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

Recurring tasks are funny things and Project does some inexplicable things
with them. Try inserting the first series of tasks starting 1 Jan. Now
click the ID of the task to highlight the whole row, and then hold the Ctrl
key and click and drag downwards to the next row. Double click the copied
task and change the Start Date to 1 Mar. You will see that the new
recurring task also includes the dates of the original (don't ask me why!).
You can now delete the original and you have a recurring task spanning the 4
months. You can repeat this, gradually building up the series you want.

Alternatively, you could make a recurring task for the whole period, click
on the + sign to reveal all the individual tasks. Then Ctrl click on the
IDs of the tasks you don't want and press the Del key.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on )

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Terry]

Thanks for all of your advice! I just recently found this group and
have been using it a lot!I know this is a strange thing to want to do,
however I think it should be within Project's functionality.

I am working on a project plan for a training school. The same people
design the courses as well as give teach them. We have several courses
that we are working on designing and deploying over the next couple of
years. I wanted to make sure that we were not overlapping resources
between design and deployment. The two phases need to be linked so
that if design finishes late, so does deployment. However, the classes
are deployed on a very specific schedule: once a day for 5 weeks every
other month.

I need to be able to put this class schedule into the project plan, in
order to determine the availability of these resources. When they're
not teaching, they're available to design the next course. Plus, by
linking the two phases I can figure out the time frame of deployment
based on when the design phase finishes.

I thought the easiest way to show the course load was as a recurring
task (8hr task, once a week, 5 occurences). Is there a better way to
show this task? I could make 5 separate tasks, but when I link
them...Project wants to put all 5 tasks in one week, instead of one day
a week.

Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks!

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

I think you're on the right track. I'd watch how you set up the task
workflow and the links though. If you have the design linked to deployment,
it's not a generic thing. Rather it is that the design of the "Advanced
Widget Whacking" course is linked as a predecessor to the delivery of that
specific course but not a predecessor to the delivery of any other course.
Hope I'm making sense here.

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Terry,

Why not create a calendar which only shows working time for Mondays and
assign this calendar to the tasks - they will then only occur on Mondays.

Mike Glen
Project MVP

 

[Terry]

That's an interesting idea, especially since I've been having problems
getting the recurring tasks to link to other tasks. Can you create a
special calendar for specific tasks? How do you do that?

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Terry,

Tools/Change working time.../New/give it a name/OK/OK. That's your task
calendar. Then, select all the tasks and Project/Task Information/Advance
tab/Calendar and select the new task calendar/OK.


Mike Glen
Project MVP