Tracking Tasks that can be Completed Out of Order

[tgr]

My question pertains to tracking schedules for tasks that can be worked on
out of order. Here’s the setup:

A person has several tasks assigned to him, all which must be completed by
the end of the project. I link them together in this order: A->B->C. Due to
the nature of the work, he might work first on task A for a day, then on task
B for a couple of days, then task A for a few more days, then task C for a
few days. Then, he’ll go back to task B and finish it, before going to
finish task A, etc. The point is the tasks can be worked on in an order
different than the way they are linked. They may be worked on before or
after they are scheduled. They are linked as A->B->C because that is the
“generally accepted order one could expect to followâ€, but our process is
very flexible on an individual basis. (This is software development as you
might guess.)

I’d like to be able to track progress of this project and understand if it
is on schedule. Any suggestions on how to do this correctly?

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi tgr,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

I think I would remove the links between them and use resource levelling to
spread the work load. Then, as work is done, reschedule the work and
re-level.

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

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

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP

 

[Steve House [Project MVP]]

You might remove the links and use the task priority setting in conjunction
with resource leveling to set the order they will likely be worked on.
Links should not be used to describe the order you *want* to work on tasks,
they should describe the order you MUST work on the tasks because of
something inherent in the process itself. When building a structure we link
"erect walls" as a predecessor to "install roof" not because we usually do
it that way but rather because the law of gravity says we cannot build the
roof in midair and later stuff the walls in underneath it <grin>. Linking
A->B says that A produces as its output something that is needed as an input
for B and as a result B cannot start until A is done. If that's not true,
remove the link and use something else to model the sequencing.