Weather Days for Construction Project

[e5engineer]

I utilize MS Project 2000 for new construction projects and struggle with
effectively displaying the impact of weather. Currently, when a weather day
develops, I change the working time to non-working for that day. Is there
any other way to tackle this besides breaking every task for that day (too
tedious)? I'd like to visually see weather days in the Ghantt Chart instead
of manually having to keep track of such impacts. Perhaps newer editions
have a feature that could help me?

Thanks

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi,

First, don't hope for newer editions, nothing is there.
I once developed a macro for a customer with a similar request and published
it on my website (see URL below, click "Article on MS project") - but it is
far from straightforward and does probably more than you need.
HTH

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi e5engineer ,

Welcome to this Microsoft Project newsgroup

I haven't tried these 2 suggestions, and I don't think they'l give you
complete automation, but they might be worth having a look.

You could create a 1-day task when it occurs, give it a Must Start On
constraint and a priority of 1000, assign all your resources but with zero
work. Then level with Priority,Standard selected and allow splits.

Another possibility is to Insert/Recurring task and assign all your
resources to it. To begin with, put in an arbitary 1 days for 3 or 4 weeks
to set it up. Then click the + to open up the individual days, then delete
or adjust the days as and when necessary. These tasks are automatically
assigned as priority 1000.

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
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials

 

[Jim Aksel]

When applying non-working days or other special situations, make sure that
your job is at a 100% halt. Sometimes there is some amount of work that can
continue on a project despite weather delay. For example, you can still do
drawing modifications, file planning documents, processes other paperwork.
Your Level of Effort tasks will continue even with weather delay.

In the solutions of the other respondents, you can accomodate this situation
by not assigning every resource to the weather delay task.

 

[Jack Dahlgren]

Jan,

Project 2007 allows labeling calendar exceptions, so you could change the
calendar for that period and label it as a weather day. This is a big
improvement over previous versions.

-Jack

 

[Rod Gill]

The way I've done it before is to create a new base Calendar called Earth
Works. This calendar is only to be used for tasks that can be halted by
rain. I set the calendar to have an expected amount of working hours per
week. For example if the average rained off days for a week in June is 1,
then there would be 1 less day in the Earthworks calendar.

Assign the Earthworks calendar to all rain affected tasks via the Task
information dialog. I can't remember if 2000 has this feature. look for a
Calendar field in the Advanced tab of task information. Tip, select all rain
affected tasks then press Shift+F2, click the advanced tab then select the
Earthworks calendar.

When tracking, if a marked off rain day didn't happen, make it working. If a
working day was rained off, then mark it non-working.

Create a new View called Gantt Chart - Earthworks
Edit the view to display the Earthworks calendar. When displaying on a day
scale, all non-working days will appear in grey.

Now you can re-schedule rain affected tasks using the earthworks calendar
and not affect all other tasks.

 

[e5engineer]

Jack,

How does the label display when printing out the schedule? Is it similiar
to adding a text box in that it would "point" to the day that an exception is
made? I'm impressed with the responses I've gotten and will keep this
discussion group in mind for future questions. Since I don't really need to
assign resources to my tasks, your response seems the easiest to implement.

Thanks

e5engineer

 

[Jack Dahlgren]

I don't see the name of the exception showing up except in the change
working time dialog box. But it is easy to write some VBA to spit them out.
For example, this code should list all the exceptions in the Project
calendar with their name, start and finish dates and type. Type 1 appears to
be a simple non-working exemption. .

Sub calendarExceptions()
For Each Exception In ActiveProject.Calendar.Exceptions
MsgBox Exception.Name & " - " & Exception.Start & " - " & Exception.Finish &
": " & Exception.Type
Next
End Sub

Perhaps the new visual reports will list exception days as well, but I
haven't tried.

-Jack Dahlgren

 

[Nana Ekua]

Hello can anyone share a sample of a schedule for road earthworks with me? Thank you