Best Practice – Lag Time?

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    • #5269
      lucas madeira
      Keymaster

      Hi –

      I am looking for help with a situation I ran into. I inherited a MS Project Schedule that appears to be pretty well set up. There are around 26 major tasks in the project all with several sub-tasks. There are a total of around 468 lines in the project plan overall. There appears to be a good use of successors and predecessors.

      I was asked by the customer to update some of the subtasks within Task 17 of the project. They asked me to change 3 weekend days to work days. Prior to this, all of the weekends were non working days.

      I went ahead and made the changes. Now three or four of the other major tasks will end 3 days sooner than what was on the original plan. This makes sense since we are now working on three days that, previously, we were not.

      The customer finds this unacceptable and wants those few tasks to end on their originally scheduled dates. I was under a time crunch and working with the original PM on the project so in the interest of time, rather than track down each sub task that was affected and add back in a day of lag time, I just added a sub task at the end of Task 17 called “Regain Lag from adjusting workdays during training to include the weekends”. We set the duration to three days and gave it the same successors as the task below it.

      This set the times back to the original dates just as the customer expected but now she is complaining that the durations for the affected tasks is 3 days longer. I showed her that the duration is 3 days longer but that the effort remains the same. I explained to her that if I tracked down each and every task I would still have to add in a lag time to keep the dates the same.

      Is there a best practice here? Should I just track down each affected subtask and add a constraint to the affected dates so it does not finish prior to a certain date? Can you do that? Help please!

    • #7000
      lucas madeira
      Keymaster

      David, it looks like you have a lot going on there between the project and client expecations.  I think I followed the gest of the situation (I don’t understand why but that’s not a concern), but will give you more of a general answer.  Generally, the best solution is the one that best matches the need.  So, modify the affected tasks to match the requirements.  In the long run that will best help track the project and provide the best update for your client.  If the client is asking you to do something that overrides” reality then make sure you document the change and why it is scheduled that way.  Hope that helps…

    • #7001
      lucas madeira
      Keymaster

      Thanks for the replies folks. I sure appreciate it!

       

      Bob –

      Thanks. I think that is how I will handle it. Now if I can only make her understand that the task won’t until that SNET date even though the other tasks will finish 3 days soon.

      I really appreciate the advice.

    • #7002
      lucas madeira
      Keymaster

      Ben – I meant to say Ben but keyed in Bob. Sorry about that!

    • #9646
      lucas madeira
      Keymaster

      I’ve had worse….:)

    • #9647
      lucas madeira
      Keymaster

      If I understand the situation correctly (?), another option is to apply the calendar with the extra weekend working days only to those relevant subtasks, rather than changing the main project calendar.

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