Activities that have high float or no successor make monitoring schedule progress more difficult. Microsoft Project dangling activities may indicate missing logic. And finding the best way to tie up these Microsoft Project dangling activities may require some investigation. Relationships are like gears; they are the interconnection between tasks in the schedule. These relationships are […]
Translating Level of Effort Activities from Primavera P6 Professional to Microsoft Project
A student recently asked about translating Primavera P6 schedules to Microsoft Project. In particular, moving LOE Primavera P6 to Microsoft Project. There are difficulties in translating Primavera P6 schedules to Microsoft Project. One such challenge is the translation of P6 level of effort (LOE) activities. Although we do not recommend translating Primavera P6 schedules to […]
Microsoft Project and Copying Down a Column Using Fill Down
You may have found that the popular copy and paste feature found in most windows software applications, does not work quite as well in Microsoft Project. Don’t worry though. Microsoft Project has a Fill Down tool that can be used to populate a column. Novice schedulers may resort to the laborious process of manually entering […]
Microsoft Project and Level of Effort or Hammock Activities
Level of Effort (LOE) or hammock activities do not produce any one particular deliverable, but they span the entire duration of the project. Yes, it is possible to define hammock activities in Microsoft Project. Deliverables in Microsoft Project are defined by summary tasks, and the work required to produce those deliverables by detail tasks. But […]
Displaying Driving Tasks in Microsoft Project
The larger and more intricate the schedule the greater the challenge to understand the relationships between tasks. Finding the one predecessor among several that may the cause of slippage can quickly become tedious. But Microsoft Project has features to support displaying driving tasks. Understanding the root cause of schedule slippage is a common dilemma in […]
Displaying Free Float and Total Float Gantt Chart Bars in Microsoft Project
How to display free float and total float Gantt Chart bars in Microsoft Project. Total float is important because it specifies how many days a task can postpone without delaying the entire schedule. A lesser known, but helpful tool is free float, which tells how many days a task can postpone without delaying a successor […]
Microsoft Project and Fixed Price Task Costs
Using Microsoft Project and fixed price task costs. Microsoft Project has a cost column to display the total cost of tasks. This cost is the sum of all task costs, plus any fixed costs. You can also display fixed costs in their own separate column. The sum of labor, material, and equipment costs in Microsoft […]
Microsoft Project Summary Tasks Dependencies
Yes, you can define summary tasks dependencies in Microsoft Project. It can also happen unintentionally when you promote tasks to summary tasks by indenting activities below them and fail to remove pre-existing links. However, links between summaries are generally not a good idea according to best practice guidelines. Let’s discuss. Microsoft Project has both detail […]
Leveling Workloads Manually to Achieve the Tightest Schedule Possible
In resource constrained projects the end date of the schedule is driven by the availability and assignment of resources. Leveling workloads on resource constrained projects manually helps to achieve the tightest schedule possible. Here’s a look at a few different ways to achieve this. Microsoft Project has a ‘level all’ feature that will automatically level […]
Addressing Microsoft Project Elapsed Time Lag Critical Path Issues
Microsoft Project elapsed time lag in days is a useful feature. This works great to model the 24-7 nature of material cure time. However, there are situations when the elapsed time lag causes the critical path to become discontinuous. Let’s explore this further. Lag is a helpful modifier that specifies waiting time between predecessor and […]