While the tool will allow you to schedule backwards, there are many reasons why this is not a good methodology. Scheduling backwards using either the “Schedule from Finish Date” or “As Late as Possible” methods is very risky. Basically you will be driving the start date of each task off of the latest finish date and the duration of the task, which means you will wait to start the task until the latest start date possible…and therefore any slip to any task in the schedule is a day for day slip to the project. A better method, in my opinion, is to schedule everything as soon as possible, from the start date of the project. Then put your milestone in with a deadline set for the date you need to hit. This way, your schedule can still move properly left or right with you starting everything on the early start date when possible, but MS Project will warn you when you have breached the deadline that you set on that task. It would probably also be a good idea to baseline that milestone for the date you want to hit so you can watch your finish variance to make sure you stay on your baseline date.
I am doing Earned Value using a resource loaded schedule at my business. We are not doing agile, but we are doing rolling wave planning, which might be similar in some ways. Do you have a specific question?
I discovered this issue when I installed forProject for DCMA 14-pt assessment and it errored. I entered a 0 in the field per the advise of the forProject rep and now the application runs fine. I was just trying to figure out if anybody had any clue how this could have happened in the first place. The company rep did say he had one other client with this issue prior. For the record, I never enter data into baseline fields – I always use the “Set Baseline” feature. So I couldn’t figure out how this issue occurred.
Thanks – I know about the webinars and I have attended a lot of them. I’m looking more for a comprehensive class. It seems like the advanced MS Project courses I’ve found are for 2010 and earlier – maybe the training companies haven’t updated their curriculum to the latest version. I’d take an online one if it covered the topics I’m looking for.
For the question above, that would be for if I just added 1 or 2 new tasks to the schedule. If I’m doing an initial baseline, I use the “Set Baseline” method.
Larry, exactly what I was looking for, thank you. So just for adding additional tasks to the project, I can safely add them to Baseline 0 and use the rest the way you said. That makes more sense and I hadn’t considered running out of baselines.
If I don’t have resources in my projects, is there any problem with copying/pasting the start and finish date into the baseline start and baseline finish date columns? That essentially is the same thing as adding them to my Baseline 0, correct?
I think of a summary task as a container for other tasks…a file folder. If you were looking at a folder on your computer with a word document inside, you wouldn’t write your content on the folder, you would write it on the document inside the folder. Same concept here…we should think of the content landing at the task level, not its container.
I also would challenge you this way…if you want to have resources and dependencies at the summary task level, why even have the fidelity of the lower level tasks beneath it at all? You should schedule at the level where you want to manage the work. And if you’re doing that, your resources and dependencies should also be at that level. If you’re tempted to use summary tasks for everything, you may want to question why you have subtasks at all.
Also…if you are doing resource planning…especially if it leads to something like EVMS reporting, it’s important to assign people to the specific work they will be doing. When you implement Enterprise project and begin doing enterprise-level resource planning, you can even add resources to the Sharepoint Engine and have them status the tasks they are responsible for. Therefore you will want them to status at the task level, not the summary task level.
If you are trying to maintain a critical path, linking to summary tasks can be a mistake. The logic can be confusing enough that you will create circular references because of it. Tasks underneath the summary task will appear to be abandoned in certain views because they don’t have successors. If tasks get added under the summary task or tasks get extended under the summary task and you aren’t re-checking the tasks linked to the summary task with each change, you can inadvertently extend your schedule and cause yourself more work trying to figure out the linkage error. In fact, to maintain a really good networked schedule, I maintain a guideline that all tasks should have a predecessor and successor with the exception of the start and finish task of the project (of course, I do occasionally have external dependencies with hard coded dates). If you are doing this, you will have a very accurate critical path and you will not need to link to summary tasks.
At the planning phase of the project, I consider each task individually and figure out what the entry criteria is to starting that task. Maybe it is a group of tasks…and even if it is, I will add each one as an individual dependency. You will thank yourself in execution of the project if dependencies change.
I’m with Sarah. We start with the deliverables of the project. Deliverable, however, is a loose term. A deliverable might be a report, a white paper/study, a product, a meeting, or a service. And as Josh said, you will find all of the key deliverables in your SOW.
Sarah I heard back on this post on Linked In from a colleague and he said, “Zero out the percent complete and then change the duration past the current status date and it should be good to go.” I haven’t tried it yet but I imagine it is probably correct. I’ll let you know next time I come across it.
