Successors: Filtering succeeding tasks and knowing impact of chan

[Michael Gwin]

Find myself wondering lateley (or maybe wishing) that when I look at a task
that has several successors (like a key project item that many subprojects
are waiting for) why MS Project doesnt do a better job of highlighting the
impact of delaying that key project item.

For example, Im implementing several projects and many of them require the
buildout of a host server that it will have guests built onto. Say I have 5
of these projects. Im in a meeting faced with a delay in the buildout of the
host server. Im always nervous to push out that date knowing its also
pushing out 5 tasks lower in the plan. I normally have to look at the
successor numbers one by one, scroll to those tasks, analyze the impact, etc.
I find it very hard to be able to provide the impact "on the spot" to
challenge the delay...

So my questions are,
Does MS Project have some built in "what if" type functions?
Is there a way to filter one task and show all succeeding tasks?
Is there any way that MS Project shows the "ripple effect" of doing this.

Please help.
Mike

 

[Rod Gill]

Project 2007 automatically highlights every cell that changes as a
consequence of the last edit. So, you can put back a milestone and see
highlighted the date cells of every task that moved because of the change.

--

Rod Gill
Microsoft MVP for Project

Author of the only book on Project VBA, see:
http://www.projectvbabook.com

 

[Jack Dahlgren]

To easily see the impact of a change on a project, do this:

Before you start, save a baseline or interim plan.
Go to the format menu, select barstyles and create a barstyle which will
display the interim plan or baseline. If necessary modify the regular task
style so it does not completely overlap that baseline bar.

Now make changes. You should be able to see what impact your changes have on
all successors as the bars will no longer be aligned.

I go a bit further and make formats so positive changes show a green bar and
negative ones show a red bar.

-Jack Dahlgren