MS Project question for any PMs out there

[Antman]

Hi there,

I'm a BA who's been lumbered with updating a project plan in MS project standard 2003. I've a question regarding the task types and all that stuff.

I've got a load of tasks that have been assigned to a developer. Because we've only got one developer, these tasks are linked (finish to start or whatever it is, the normal way). The tasks don't have to be linked this way in that the actual work doesn't need A to be finished before B can be started. Really in terms of the actual work there is no dependencies, but to show that the work would take X amount (say 20 days), you have the developer doing the work sequentially.

However I would have thought that if you have 10 tasks each one taking 2 days and one developer working on it, you should be able to list them without any preceding task and because they are all being worked on by the same resource, then all of the tasks would expand out from taking 2 days to 20 days?

If you were to get another resource, so in theory halving the dev time, if you have task type set to fixed work, you'd see the time line go down by half. My problem is that they are not working on the same task together, dev Bob will work on tasks A-E whilst dev Dick will work on tasks G-J. So is this a case where a PM would go into MS Project and delete the dependency of task G on task E and set task G to start at the same time as task A but with dev Dick working on the second set of tasks?

I guess it is, I just want to be sure that I'm not missing anything obvious here

Thanks,

Anthony

[redgiant]

Hi there,

I'm a BA who's been lumbered with updating a project plan in MS project standard 2003. I've a question regarding the task types and all that stuff.

I've got a load of tasks that have been assigned to a developer. Because we've only got one developer, these tasks are linked (finish to start or whatever it is, the normal way). The tasks don't have to be linked this way in that the actual work doesn't need A to be finished before B can be started. Really in terms of the actual work there is no dependencies, but to show that the work would take X amount (say 20 days), you have the developer doing the work sequentially.

However I would have thought that if you have 10 tasks each one taking 2 days and one developer working on it, you should be able to list them without any preceding task and because they are all being worked on by the same resource, then all of the tasks would expand out from taking 2 days to 20 days?

If you were to get another resource, so in theory halving the dev time, if you have task type set to fixed work, you'd see the time line go down by half. My problem is that they are not working on the same task together, dev Bob will work on tasks A-E whilst dev Dick will work on tasks G-J. So is this a case where a PM would go into MS Project and delete the dependency of task G on task E and set task G to start at the same time as task A but with dev Dick working on the second set of tasks?

I guess it is, I just want to be sure that I'm not missing anything obvious here

Thanks,

Anthony

What you suggest would work.

As you point out MS Project uses effort driven scheduling by default so if you throw more resources at a task it will reduce the time taken to complete the task. I tend to find that turning this off for tasks that are hard to break down where the amount of work required is unknown as it saves me a lot of extra adjustment when adding further resources to those tasks later on.

This is a good overview on task scheduling in MSP 2003 specifically - Why would you turn off effort-driven scheduling? - Dig deeper into scheduling - Office.com

[Antman]

Cheers I'll give that link a look.