The Real Start Date

[Terry Montgomery]

Greetings,

I have been asked to include several "preliminary" tasks in our project plan
templates that are predecessors to the actual start date of our installation
projects. These would be sales and contract signing tasks. I establish the
install Kickoff date as the offical start date for MS Project. I then insert
a new task as the first task in the Gantt view as a predecessor task to the
Kickoff task. I assign it a "Finish to Start" relationship to the Kickoff
task and give it a negative lag time to set the date prior to the Kickoff
project start date. The question is, when I open the Project Information
dialog box it shows the correct date I want in the "Start Date" field but if
I click on the Statistics button the Start Date in that window shows the date
of the predecessor task. So which one is MS Project actually using to
calculate the project timeline?

Thanks,
Terry Montgomery

 

[Rod Gill]

The project start date is always the start of the earliest task.

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

It's using whatever date you have entered into the Project Startdate field
in Project Information. IMHO, you should set the Project start date to
whatever the very first activity in the project commences. If I undertand
your example correctly, Contract Signed is the task that comes before the
Project Kickoff, the project kickoff being the date work actually commences.
I would say, then, that the first task in the project proper is the contract
signing. If the first thing in the project is the contract signing, I'd
make the very first task a "Contract Signed" milestone and the expected date
of the signing would be the Project Startdate. Then following it FS would
be other preparatory tasks, perhaps call this group of tasks the planning
phase or ramp-up phase, then what you are calling "kickoff" would be another
milestone "Work Begins" or some such thing following the ramp up and
preceeding the rest of the work on the project.

HTH

 

[Terry Montgomery]

Steve,

First, thanks for the quick reply. I like your idea but I am not real clear
on how to implement your suggestion. Do I understand you to say that the
first task in the project (on the very first task line in Gantt) would be the
"Contract Signed" as a milestone with subtasks under it that would all be
predecessor tasks with FS dates prior to the project "Start Date"? That would
require negative lag time for all those predecessor tasks correct? Then what
would follow that is the "Kickoff" milestone with all the subtasks that
involved the actual implementation of the project.
I lost the battle on having all the sales and contract tasks removed from
the project plan all together. Please keep in mind the reason for this
exercise is to build the template in such a way that when we plug in the
"Start Date" MS Project calculates all the tasks in the proper order to give
a projected "go live" date we can pass on to the client..

Thanks,
TM

It's using whatever date you have entered into the Project Startdate field
in Project Information. IMHO, you should set the Project start date to
whatever the very first activity in the project commences. If I undertand
your example correctly, Contract Signed is the task that comes before the
Project Kickoff, the project kickoff being the date work actually commences.
I would say, then, that the first task in the project proper is the contract
signing. If the first thing in the project is the contract signing, I'd
make the very first task a "Contract Signed" milestone and the expected date
of the signing would be the Project Startdate. Then following it FS would
be other preparatory tasks, perhaps call this group of tasks the planning
phase or ramp-up phase, then what you are calling "kickoff" would be another
milestone "Work Begins" or some such thing following the ramp up and
preceeding the rest of the work on the project.

HTH

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

The very first task in the project would be whatever is the first thing that
happens that is associated with this project

1.0 Contract Signed - milestone
2.0 Develop Schedule - xx days - FS1
3.0 Identify Resources - xx days - FS2
4.0 Develop Budget - xx days - FS3
5.0 Kickoff - milestone - FS4
6.0 First Phase - summary (calculated)
6.1 first work activity - xx days - FS5
6.2 second work activity - yy days - FS 6.1

 

[Terry Montgomery]

Steve,

Here's how it lines up.
First task: Initial agreement with client
2. Goals & Objectives agreement
3. Contract parameter creation.
4. Executive Review
5. Executive Approval
6. Financial Audit
7. Financial Approval
8. Contract Signing
9. Assign Resources
10. Statement of work documentation.
11. Kickoff meeting with client.
12. Internal Kickoff meeting of project.

The actual "Start Date" of the implementation for the project plan is task
#12. the internal kickoff meeting. That's when the work begins so the theory
is that is when we want to start counting the duration days until "go live".
The first 11 tasks are all sales processes that must happen as predecessors
but is not part of the implementation project. However, they want those tasks
reflected in the MS project plan. The question is setting up those
predecessor sales tasks but not allowing MS Project to count those tasks and
their duration as part of the "Start Date" to "Go Live" calculation of
project days. Does that help?

Thanks,
TM

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

I'd still say the Project Start, as far as the Gantt chart is concerned,
would be the date of Task 1, the initial agreement signed. To achieve what
you want, I'd insert a summary task, maybe call it "All the hard stuff"
<grin> between your tasks 11 and 12 and indent all of the rest of the
project work as subtasks underneath it. If you're using MSP 2002/2003 you
have 65 thousand levels of indent to play with so what the heck. The
project actually isn't over when you hand it off to the client and they "go
live." There's all sorts of post delivery things that might happen, plus
all of the project closeout stuff itself. So the inserted summary task
might end at the "Go Live" milestone, then there would be an outdent back to
the outermost level (same as your tasks 1-10) for all the closeout activity.
Going a bit further ...

Under the Project Summary there would be three main phases, represented by
top level summary tasks - Planning, Implementation, Closeout. Planning
would be your first 10 or 11 tasks, Implementation would be everything from
task 12 to Go Live, and Closeout everything after Go Live.

--
Steve House [MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs