Introduction: Microsoft Project 2010 Series Session 3 Structure the schedule by WBS and task dependencies
Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Techgig webinar series, our endeavor to empower techies, we believe that sharing of knowledge is the key to enhance our skills and grow us as professionals with this principle in mind we have initiated a series of webinars conducted by industry experts to give you all a crisp insight of various domains, the topic of today’s session is Microsoft Project 2010 Series Session 3 Structure the Schedule by WBS and Task Dependencies.Our guest speaker today is Mr. B. Sai Prasad, senior manager- Learning and Development, Cognizant technology solutions, India private limited. Mr. Sai was named the winner of the company's Global Trainer of the Year award. He has conducted 7,000 plus hours of training in technical and project management topics. He has trained around 4000 plus practitioners on project management concepts, risk management, scheduling, estimation techniques and Microsoft Office Project. He is a certified PMP, PMI-SP and Champion of Project Management, PMI India. Mr. Sai is also Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in Project 2007 and Project 2010. He started the first Microsoft Project User Group India Chapter to promote and help practitioners within and outside India on Microsoft Office Project. So without further delay I introduce all to our guest speaker. Good evening participants, I welcome you all to the session 3 of the project 2010 series which is on how to structure the schedule by using the work breakdown structure and with task dependencies.So just to give you a quick recap of what are the episodes we have seen so far on session 1 we talked about how Microsoft project structure the schedule data in the MPP file and in session 2 we were talking about different types of calendars and how these calendars work together in order to calculate the dates.Session 3 is what we are going to discuss today this is where we are going to talk about the work breakdown structure the activities and how to link activities by making use of different dependencies.The key takeaways of this 1 hour webinar would be, we will talk about how to create a work breakdown structure in terms of project 2010. We will also talk about a few features through which you can try to expand and collapse your work breakdown structure for readability purpose.We are also going to talk about a new feature called as Auto Scheduled or Manually Scheduled activities and how it can impact your scheduling.Then the second part of today’s webinar is going to be how to set dependencies between your work packages or your activities by different views in Microsoft project, we will also talk about how to create weight time or acceleration time between linked activities by what we call as lead time and lag time and finally we will close this whether webinar with talking about constraints and the different views to which you can understand how your activities are connected with each other.But 1st let’s talk about the fundamental term called work break down structure, if you are a practitioner in project management or you are preparing for PMP this term might be synonymous.
What is a Work Breakdown Structure
So you ideally know a work break down structure as per the project management institute they say it’s a deliverable oriented grouping of project elements that organizes and defines the overall scope of your project, in layman terms what we are trying to say here is you breakdown the scope of work into small manageable, definable and accountable pieces so that you have confidence level in terms of what should be delivered and what should not be deliver [Audio not clear] It is an assumption we are making here that a work breakdown structure exists because we would have understood what the scope of your project is.The 2nd step is as per standard the work breakdown structure each element in your WBS which is represented in a hierarchical manner should ideally have a unique code so the way in project 2010 you define the unique WBS’s code is making use of the project ribbon.So without further delay let me go back to project 2010 here, so as you already know project 2010 as a ribbon based interface.So the 1st step is if you want to define the different codes or the rules that needs to be followed for each level in your WBS; you just need to go to the project ribbon. You can find there is an option called WBS, so to which you can just say define the code here, so by default project 2010 will not have any default level which means the WBS codes will be more in a numerical format like 1, 1.1, 1.2, and so and so. In case if you like to have a different coding systems for each level in your WBS, may be you can define it here, an example let say we have 3 levels in your WBS let’s say the top level is going to be the name of the project, so I am just going to say the project code prefixes sample and the level 1 I am just going to say it is going to be numbers and when I say ordered it is going to be automatically generated as you create different elements in level 1, in level 2 let’s say I am just going to have may be characters since it says unordered I just need to key in what code or what character I want in my level 2. Let’s say in level 3 I just want to go by the upper case letters which is again ordered which means it is going to be capital, [Audio not clear] going to be automatically created you can also restrict the length in terms of each level here and you have a separate (( )) may be you can just use a different separator here and they will try to understand how these sequence will be used as we start creating activities in your project 2010, so let me save these settings now you might not see any big difference which will happen in project 2010.The first fundamental step is before you add activities into your project 2010 or create a work breakdown structure you need to turn on your project summary task, you just need to visit the format ribbon you can find on the right most corner there is a small option available called project summary task, the movement you turn it on by default the level zero of your WBS gets added by default the name of the file will be the name of the level zero, so let me double click this file name and just let me give a name here. So that’s good now let me save this file, I have ideally added my level zero and I just need to include my level 1 and level 2 in my project 2010.There are ideally 3 or 4 different ways by which you can add task to your project 2010 or your work packages one simple approach is you can directly (( )) the data which I will just (( )) it later the 2nd approach is you can try to use the enhance copy and paste special option available in project 2010.So what I am trying to mean here is let’s say you have a set of phases and the line items given in a Microsoft word document like we have bullets, in the earlier version of project it’s quite difficult to copy this and directly paste it in project.Because project 3 and project 7 does not support the automatic copy and paste option which will preserve the outlining level, whereas in project 2010 you can just try to copy it and you can directly paste it in project 2010, so let’s have a quick demo of this first. I am going back to my word document where I have what is called a requirement and these are all the task which I need to do in my requirement space, so let me just do a copy and I am just going back to my project 2010 and I am right clicking and then I am just going to a paste.The movement you do a paste you are able to observe the structure is still preserved, so this feature is newly added in project 2010.The 2nd way by which you can add your activities as a part of your project 2010 is you on the task ribbon on the insert data group you can find a few options available here for task summary milestones so let’s talk about summary task here so the movement you click on a summary project will automatically add a place holder for summary and it will have one sub task under this where you can try to have your own task name.Let me click on summary button on my task ribbon you are able to find a new summary task get added and you can see the sub task will also be a place holder, here I am free to type in what name I want, let me say I want to have my design to have a meeting may be let say I am having a meeting, I am preparing a design and I am approving it.So as you can see there are many ways by which you can add your activities, once you have added your activities you might be able to find though the task name looks the way what we wanted you can see the remaining 3 columns that is a duration start and finish will be left empty for some of your activities whereas some activities will have some data, so this is when you need to understand what is called as a task mode in project 2010.Though by default on the task mode you see some 2 icons you can see there are 2 icons one with a blue bar with an arrow and another with a pin and place holder a question mark, so the movement you click on this drop down you don’t get those icons instead you get 2 labels called a manually scheduled and auto scheduled.So this is a new features added in project 2010 so before I talk about how to use this, I think you need to understand what we mean by task mode the task mode ideally gives you control over how much of your data is going to be calculated by project 2010 or in other words if you want to have control over the start data finish data of your activities or in other words you don’t want project 2010 to automatically calculate the start date and finish date of the task.Then you go for what we call as (( )) schedule, if the dependencies, if the resource calendars the duration of the activities if that needs to be respected then you go for the mode called auto schedule, let me give a simple example you can see that you have the (( )) with some place holder that is a question mark.So with this one what we can ideally says is my requirements is currently I can just say it is around 5 days, so which means the movement I say 5 days you are able to see the scheduling mode, task mode of my summary task automatically changes to manually schedule and let’s say on my sub activities I will just give any data on my duration start and finish so this is ideally (( )) when you are preparing a proposal when you may not have much detailed information where you want to push information into project 2010.You may not want project to interfere and calculate the dates, so let say in identify stakeholders and let say I know that this activity is going to start or its duration is going to be 4 days and the conducting workshop I need clarification but I know that this activity needs to be completed by the day 19th. So as you can see in a manually scheduled activity you have complete control over what you have in duration start and finish but the drawback of the using the manual schedule is that it will not help you to build a realistic schedule, for example if I say my identify stakeholders it’s starting on 4th and my conducting workshop is going to start on 11th okay and I will try to set some dependencies between these 2 activities, you can see both these activities are connected by an arrow and you can see on my (( )) column the dependencies are set but since these 2 activities are manually scheduled.If I go to identify stakeholder and I just increase the duration from 4 days to let’s say 7 days you can see that my conduct workshops start date will not automatically get moved and you can also see that on the finish date of these 2 activities there is a separate colors quick line that appears if I do a mouse over on a top of it, it says there are certain scheduling problems with respect to those activities. If I want to resolve those scheduling problems the reason is identify is completing on Friday whereas conducting workshop is starting on Wednesday which means it is no more realistic if I want to fix this problem may be I can just select those 2 task which has the scheduling problems, under my task ribbon you can see there is a small button in the schedule group called respect links. So the movement there is a respect link we are able to see the activities get auto scheduled and I hope you are able to see that the potential problems would have resolved automatically but the next time if I change the identified stakeholders to let’s say 10 days this problem comes again so as you can see you need to respect the links every time so that now project will automatically shift the start date of my successors automatically.This might not be quite naturally used when you are preparing a very detail plan, so manually scheduled activities are more useful, as users if you want to control over the start date and the finish date and you don’t want project to interfere and you want project to interfere only when needed by making use of the respect link option. So what I am going to do is for some of the activities since we are always having it manually scheduled you might want to quickly change it to auto scheduled.The way you do it is you just select those tasks and you can find on the task ribbon on the task data group you can see there are two bottoms called manual and auto you just need to hit the auto schedule, so that project can automatically assume some default duration and start date and finish date, so let see what happens the movement I do an auto schedule you can see that all these tasks are now auto scheduled you can see for those activities where I have not provided the duration, it always assumes that this task is assumed to be complete in one day and you can also see that all these activities are also starting on a project start date by default but this was not happening when you are having a manually scheduled activity.The 2nd step is not every time you might want change from manual to auto, from auto to manual, there are sometimes where you would like to say any new task what I am going to add in my project, by default it should always be manual or it should always be automatic so there are 2 ways of doing it. One approach is on your status bar I hope you guys can find the place where I have my mouse it says new taskbar by default manually scheduled which means if I just create a new task here you can see by default it is going to be manually scheduled but instead if I am just going to say it is going to be auto scheduled and if I just use a same task option you can see that this task is now auto scheduled with a default duration of one day and it assume that this activity is going to start as per your project start date and finish on the same date, this is what is the difference between your manual and auto schedule. So I am just going to remove these activities and I am just going to convert all of them as per scheduled so as you can see you can always have a combination of manual and auto in a project but please remember the movement you have a manually scheduled activity project will not calculate the start date and finish date because since you have provided the start date it will not automatically move to the next date based on a [Audio not clear].This is a 1st point which I just like to emphasize on now let me move back so this is the next slide which I was talking about.You need to ensure that the right task mode to say that will allow you or prevent you from calculating your activities start date or the finish date, there are 2 ways of doing it, go to the task ribbon where you can just change the individual task from manual to auto or at a file level if you want to have your task auto scheduled or manually scheduled you can either use a status bar or you might want to use the more option through which you can say new task or either auto or manually scheduled. There are other ways by which you can add your activities into your project 2010 so but there are certain terminologies what project 2010 uses.Those activities what we are having at the least level that is at the lowest level of your work breakdown structure though it is called as work packages here we don’t say work packages instead it is called as normal activities so what I mean by normal activities are those activities that are done by your resources or your team members are called as normal task, I am just going to reduce is duration to much a lesser number okay.Let me say meeting is going to take 2 days my preparing design is 4 days and approval is 1 day so as you have already seen these are certain activities what I created by using the NMs copy or paste special or by making use of the task ribbon so what I mean by normal task are those tasks which you create by this option so the movement you use this option automatically a place holder gets added and since my new tasks are auto scheduled you can see my duration is set to one day question mark, the question mark in the duration column indicates that it is an estimated value, it is a calculated value that means transformation from the end user, if you prefer that this duration column is realistic naturally you might want to remove this question mark.Let’s say after approval you want to have a final review and you want to remove this question mark there are 2 ways of doing it you can go to the edit option, edit bar option here where you can remove this question mark or you might want to double click this particular task where you can say this task estimated, it is no more estimated it is having the right duration here so let me say okay.You can see this question mark would have removed but on the design you can see this 4 days question mark appears because one of the line items is having a question mark as you can see the approval is still having one day.Let me remove this question mark from approval you can see at a summary task level the question mark at the duration column would have disappeared currently my requirements and design as you can see all these tasks are currently starting on the same date and that the finish date is basically calculated based on the duration what I have entered in that field.Another type of task which you might want to insert as a part of your work breakdown structure is the milestones I hope all of us do know what milestones are, they are important even in your project which is generally added at the end of every module or every phase if you want to add a mile stone at the end of phase like requirement make sure that you are in the (( )) where you want to insert this milestone.Here I am in row 7 and I just go to the task ribbon where I just hit the milestones the movement I hit a mile stone the place holder appears and you can say the duration of a task will automatically be converted to zero because mile stones are assumed to have zero duration, there are a few best practices which people follow in terms of naming milestones if you look at the normal activities what I have given before like identify stakeholders conduct workshop it starts with a work and it end with a work, it starts with the work and ends with what I am going to do.Whereas generally milestones should ideally start with a deliverable and end with what event has happened for example in my requirement the mile stone will typically be my requirements document approve, it will not be approve requirement document because approve requirement of document looks like a normal task for me, it is a day to day activity. Whereas mile stones are generally consider as an accomplishment which means something has already happened in the project. So let me give a name for the milestone let me say requirements (( ))So this is generally a naming convention what people follow but I have seen people where they say I have a normal activity like review findings though I understands mile stones duration should be zero I want to have my normal activity also to be a milestone without changing the duration to zero so if you want both these to apply for a one specific task there is a way to do it in project 2010.Double click your review findings activity you can find on the advanced tab you can see there is a small check box called mark task as milestone, when you turn on this check box it will not reset the durations to zero, so the duration will still the preserved as 2 days but internally it will update that this task is some milestone.So you can see though the duration is not altered if you just look at my right hand side you can see a milestone icon is automatically placed on the finish date of that particular task, so the benefit is you might ideally want to use either option A where you want to say a task some milestone by zero or you want to go for option D where you say a normal task is also a milestone.But I recommend don’t use both these options on the same file because it tends to confuse people who are reviewing the plan, so let me undo this change because I am just going to go for option A let me also add a milestone here, let’s say design signed off, so what I have done here is I have added my normal activities and I have added milestones and I have also added my summary activities or my (( )) in this project.The last type of task which may not be so frequently used but you might want to consider this type of task when the customer enforces that there are certain activities that will have a recurrence pattern associated with it and you might want that to be planned in project 2010 for those types of requirements you have a recurring task, so let me take a small example.Let say we have a status meeting for the next 3 weeks and this status meeting happens only on Friday morning 9 to 10 and it happens on every Friday for the next 3 weeks. So there are many ways of doing it, you can just add 3 normal activities like this and you can just give the status meeting 1, 2 and 3 but what happens is if the pattern changes right you ideally need to go and edit so many number of times in your tool so the better way of doing it is rather than adding so many task into your project 2010 you can go for what we call as recurring task.I am on my task ribbon and I am just hitting the recurring task option and let’s say I have a status meeting and the duration of each status meeting let’s say it is around 1 hour and I say it’s happening weekly Friday, it starts from this week and it ends after 3 weeks and let me say okay now you are able to find this particular status meeting you can see there are 3 status meeting happening this week next week and the week after that.So the advantage of using a recurring task is you can always change the pattern the way you want. But there are some exceptions, let’s say your status meeting has already started, let’s say 2 status meeting is already completed and the customer says I just want to add a few more status meeting but it should not start on Friday but it should start on Monday of the remaining weeks which means you need to cancel the last status meeting and you need to insert another recurring task called status meeting.So as you can see you can have only one recurrence pattern for a recurring task you cannot have multiple recurrence pattern for the same recurring task so this is a small example which I just like to illustrate.Another point I would like to mention here is when you add your activities what I have added till row number 13, you can see some of these activities almost all these activities are starting on the project start date I hope you remember on the session one of this series that’s when I discussed about how to set your project start date just to have a quick recap you go to a project ribbon you can see there is a small button called project information. On the project information this is the place where you set your project start date.So since I have gone for a forward scheduling my finish date is going to be calculated by project 2010 based on the activities on the dependencies what I have, so since the project start date is going to be today’s date that is 4th, 10, 2012 it assumes all these activities are starting on project start date and the finish date is calculated based on the duration what I have entered.You can see my status meeting is not starting on the same date, its starts on different days the 1st starts on 5th of October the 2nd is on 12th of October the last one is on 19th of October so you might wonder how this happens (( )) this is because of a new feature [Audio not clear] project called as constraints you can see on the indicators column for all the status meeting there is a small calendar icon that is visible, let me do a mouse over on top of 1st status meeting, as the tool tip says this task has a [Audio not clear] constraint on 5, 10.If I do mouse over on top of the 2nd one it says 12.10.2012, the 3rd one says it has a start now earlier than constraint on 19.10.2012, so what it does this mean. By default all your task are scheduled as soon as possible whereas these 3 status [Audio not clear] earlier than a given date, so how this project finds out that days like 4th, 12th, and 19th all these dates are calculated automatically based on the recurrence pattern what you have provided and how long you want this task to repeat.But one of the common errors made by schedulers is they start entering the start date or finish date, I think it’s not using the word entering I will recommend that, they start manipulating the start date and the finish date, let me give you a small example what happens if I go to conduct workshop and I say this activity should not start on 10th but it would start on 11th because my identify is completing on 8 I just want to have a one day buffer and I just want to say it starts on 10th the movement you say 10th project respects you because you are the master in terms of creating the schedule so it automatically moves but if I go to identify stakeholders and revise my duration estimates 3 days to let say 7 days.You can see there is an overlap between my identify and conduct, so your conduct workshop doesn’t move to the next immediate date, the reason is obvious, the reason is in conduct workshop since I have keyed in the start date project automatically puts a date constraint on the indicators column you can see the same icon like status meeting appears, but the date is different.It says this task has a start now earlier than on Wednesday 10th of October 2012, so what I recommend to each one of you is don’t key in the start date and finish date when you are preparing a plan, because the movement you start entering dates project will automatically set constraints on those tasks which will force your schedule to be less realistic.So this is a very common error I have found when people use project so I just did an undo so we can just have it more realistic.
What are the different types of Task Dependency
Now we have understood the different types of task which we have entered but before I move on to this slide of dependencies I just want to give you a few tips and few features that you might want to use, this was just a demo so as you can see I just hardly have around 17 task in my project.Generally the projects which all of you manage will have at least or no more than 500 activities so it’s quite difficult to find out how many milestones we are having, it’s quite difficult to understand how many phases you are having in your project.So this is when you might want to make use of the view ribbon which we have seen on session one, I hope you guys can see there is on the data group you can see there is an outline option through which you can try to hide and expand the difference levels in your WBS let’s say if I say show outline level one it will give me only the level one and the level zero of your WBS which means your project summary task and the level that comes immediately below that if I just want to look at level 2, the movement I say is level 2 (( )) level 2, level 1 and the level 0. This is what we typically do, the 2nd one is you might want to I can say group your activities what we have entered so far by milestones and other activities this is when you might want to make use the group option you can say group by milestones, so the movement you use a group by milestones you can see one group is having all milestones- Yes, another group is having milestone- No, there would be one type of task that will be missing this group that is your summary activities or your phases in project because that will not be generally included when you are trying to do a grouping.Another one is you have something called filters where you can say I want to filter I want to see only milestones in my project so you can see only my milestones but if you want to find out only those tasks which are having constraints attached you might want to make use of the same filters where you might want to go for more filters here, on the more filter you can find there is an option called task with fixed dates when I say fixed dates, dates that are not flexible enough, let me say apply or I can even say highlight, you can see it will just tell you only those task will be highlighted that are constraints associated with it, this is something which you just need to remember when you are trying to make use of filters and groups but I hope all of us do remember when we started this session I was talking about what we called as the WBS codes, so far I have not talked about WBS codes here so when you double click every task here on your advance tab you can see there is a small WBS code available.So let me double click my identify stakeholders, you can see it says sample one, sample one is name of the project and followed by star here, so if I go to the project ribbon I hope all of us remember there are 3 levels one is number, another is character and 3rd one is (( )). I will just insert this column so that you guys can see it, so this is ideally the sample data so my level zero is having my name of the project you can also see the level one, the level one of my WBS is having only samples followed by a numerical number like 1, 7, and 9.If you want to provide a different number, you are free to do it but a key point is the WBS code should be unique, so you can just do a different code here, so the movement you said sample one you can see all (( )) will have sample one and as for my WBS code I have said the 2nd level should be characters, so I can ideally say here to my identify stakeholders I can say identify and for the 2nd one I will say workshop for the 3rd one I will say responsibility metrics, so you can your own WBS code, for the later point in time you want to group your activities by WBS so this may be quite useful for you. Let me show my entire task here and let me hide this column.Next step of content what we are going to look at is the different dependency types I hope you know between any 2 tasks you can have one of these 4 dependency types to start with you have a dependency called as finish to start, a finish to start ideally means only when the first activity finishes the second activity starts in this example you have a research and review and you can see the arrow that connects the research and review the tail of the arrow is pointing to the finish the head of the arrow is pointing to the review which means there is a finish to start depend review and may be the research and review, the 2nd type of dependency is start to start which means only when the first activity starts the 2nd activity can start on or after a particular date for example let’s say we have a workshop we also have a building prototype so the way in which the project is structured is as the workshop is conducted a prototype is going to be parallely developed.If the workshop is going to be delayed naturally I cannot start preparing a prototype because the workshop is giving feeding information for my prototype development, so here you can see the start of workshop is connected to the start of building prototype, so this is an example for start to start.The 3rd one is a finish to finish where you say only when the 1st activity finish the 2nd activity can finish on or after particular date, every simple example is testing and acceptance you have a distinct activity as you can see it’s only the start date with the customer starts accepting your product.One way is you can say only when it is completely tested you can try to accept it, the 2nd way is may be when majority or most of the testing work is completed you can start doing your acceptance testing which means when the testing finishes you want your acceptance to also finish on or after a particular date, so this is an example for finish to finish and the last one might look a bit peculiar it is called as a start to finish. But generally if you look at the last 3 dependencies you can see your predecessor is before time and your successor is after time.Predecessor will generally say previous, on successor we say next but the true definition of a predecessor is any activity that drives the other activities is called as the predecessor if you look at starts to start both these activities are parallel activities so nothing is happening on the past or nothing is happening in the future both are parallel task.So the workshop is driving the prototype development so the workshop is the predecessor whereas building prototype is my successor, if you look at the finish to finish my testing is my predecessor my acceptance is my successor which means if my testing is going to be late naturally my acceptance is also going to finish late, both are tied on a finish to finish dependency.Whereas start to those finish dependency is more like, let say you have 2 task integration and testing the customer says integration should ideally start on Friday, which means he is already given you a date, which means it cannot be pushed earlier or after that date so depending on when your integration is starting naturally you are testing should finish just the earlier day in this example if you look at it, integration start date is driving the finish date of my testing so in this example it is a start to finish dependency, so though we have four dependency types between any 2 task you can have only one of these four in project 2010 and by default you can have only the finish to start dependency between any 2 task.
How to link tasks using Gantt chart view
Let’s look at a few examples of how to set these dependencies I am just going to go back to my project 2010.I am just going to show you a couple of ways, one way of setting dependency is by making use of the predecessors column you can see there is a column called predecessors where you ideally say before this activities start or finish what activities should start or finish, in this example let’s say if I say conduct workshop can be started only after identifying stakeholder is completed, I can just go to row 3 predecessors column and I can key in the predecessor ID which is 2.The movement I enter 2 you are able to see there is a small highlighting that happens that is the start date, finish date, the duration of some of the task is highlighted because these are all the task that got impacted because of this recent change coming back to the right hand side you can see my finish is connected to the start of my next activity okay this is one simple way of doing it but for a fairly large project one task might have multiple predecessors.For example let me say my create is also going to have 2 and let’s say my review findings can start only after conducting the workshop and creating the responsibility matrix so in my predecessors I should generally say 3, 4 but ideally we make from human errors when you key in some numerical values and the predecessors they might give a wrong value there to avoid that I recommend double click the task review findings on my predecessors tab you have an option to select multiple predecessors not by ID alone or but by task name here I can say its predecessors is conduct workshop and the next activity is dependent on is creating the responsibility matrix.You can see that though the predecessor’s column does have a numerical value like 2 and 2 you can see by default the dependency type it was said versus finish to start dependency and that’s what you see even in the type column here.There are other dependency type that you can change like start to start finish to finish and start to finish the last one says none you can just ignore it, the movement you say non and say okay this dependency will be removed from that particular task. I just need to say finish to start and let me say okay, you can see 3, 4 and you see a few self targeting highlighted again.So when you have multiple predecessors or you want to have more confidence in terms of what task I am trying to say predecessors successors make use of the task information form predecessor tab to set those multiple predecessors here.Another way by which you can set your predecessors is by making use of a drag and drop option but you need to be a bit careful in doing it because if you are not used to do drag and drop in using a mouse, I recommend you use your old approach what I showed you. But let me give you an idea. let’s say after reviewing the findings I want to submit for approval, so I am just doing a mouse over on top of my task that is my review finding you can see there is a small tool tip that says task is review finding, I want to say after this task I want this task to start, so I can just drag this task you can see the movement I click that task and drag it down you can see there is a small thread coming out of it, I can drop it on top of my review findings the movement you drop it, it assumes that both are linked by a finish to start dependency, if you want this dependency from finish to start to be changed to start to start one way is you can double click here approval where you can just say it is start to start.The 2nd way is you can double click the link that connect these 2 task here so on my right hand side on my chat area double click that link which opens up the task dependency form where I say it is a start to start dependency.The movement you say okay you can see the dependency type would have changed the dates would also got changed and you can see on your predecessors column it does not have 5 but it says 5 cases which means it is a start to start dependency between 2, 2 activities and let me do the same way I am just dragging it and dropping it, so as I have already told you there are many ways but I am just giving you only the few simple way by which you can set dependencies between any 2 tasks. The next requirement you might want to have is, you might want to have a wait time or a delay time between 2 linked activities, or you might want to have overlap between 2 linked activities.On the screen you can see there are 2 task I have given 2 scenarios there is a research activity and a review activity though the research is completed on Monday you might want to have some kind of a proper time may be to get people or set up meeting rooms to start the review.So 2 days you might want to put it as a task in MS office or you might want to hide it may be because nobody is accountable for it, so you might want to have a wait time in this case the same 2 tasks may be you want to do it the opposite way, you can see when some research work has been completed you can start your review simultaneously.So you can see these tasks, both these two are two different scenarios but if you look at the arrow that connects these two, it is still a finish to start dependency so the dependency type is still finish to start but you want either have a lag time that is a delay time or you might want to have an overlap time between 2 tasks. Let’s take a few scenarios and see how this can be implemented, let me also connect these 2 tasks and let me connect these 2 tasks here.Now I have connected all these activities you might want to have delay time between any 2 task for example after identifying the stakeholder you might want to have one day to review it, how do I do that so double click your conduct workshop the movement you double click your conduct workshop the predecessors identify stakeholder is listed, you can see there is a small filed called lag by default the lag is zero days, lag is called as delay time by default the delay is zero you can either provide a fixed value in the lag or you can give a percentage based value, let’s go by the fixed approach here.I am just going to say I need a wait time between this task and the second task as one day and let me say okay, you can see that between conduct workshop and this you can see there is a one day delay between it you can see my identify is getting completed on Monday, whereas my conduct workshop starts only on Wednesday because I have one day delay time between my identify and conduct but instead of going for a lag you might also want to go for a lead which means that you want to overlap 2 task.So when you want to overlap you might want to use a same lag column but give a negative value here like minus one day which means your conduct workshop will start one day earlier than the finish date of my identify stakeholders.Let’s say okay you can see there is a one day overlap between identify and conduct which means identify is completing on Monday, on Monday itself my conduct workshop will also parallelly start.So in these 2 examples one I have done is as gone by fixed value which is minus one day or plus one day but sometimes you might want to go by a percentage based value for example you might want to say when 80% of my identifying stakeholder is complete I want to start my workshop complete it.So I might want to say the [Audio not clear] year is 20% which means that this particular task, conduct workshop will start when 80% of my identify stakeholders work is completed, so let’s say okay.You can see there is a small over lap but this overlap is very dynamic which means if my identify stakeholders changes to let’s change 8 days, so 20% of 8days that’s how the overlap is going to be calculated whereas if I say minus one day the overlap is always going to be one day always.This is how ideally you might want to set a lag or a lead between any 2 activities so just to summarize this is what I told the lag time is generally represented by a positive whereas lead time is represented by a negative value and you can either provide as a fixed duration or a percentage based value, you can either go for a predecessors column where you can set a lag or you might want to make use of the task dependencies through which you can set a lag or the lead.The final part of today’s webinar is you might want to set some constraints between any 2 activities.So let’s talk about constraints in more detail so I have talked about at a very high level earlier.By default all task in project 2010 will have some constraint, so when you look at identify stakeholders and let me save this file, let me double click this particular task you can see on my advance tab of identify stakeholders, you can see the constraint type is as soon as possible because I have gone for a forward scheduling.Whereas when I double click my status meeting on my advance tab you see the constraint type will start now earlier than, which means every task can have different constraints types based on your own requirement, to understand how constraints ideally work, the first information which I would like to share here is to use this inspect option on your task ribbon so that you can understand how it works and now in my conduct workshop activity and I am just hitting the inspect button.You can see my conduct workshop on the left hand side where it says this is the activity and these are the factors that effects this start date and the finish date of this activity which is the predecessors is the only one and the calendar of the project which is standard calendar decide the start date and finish date of this activity, so what it means is if I go to identify stakeholders and increase the duration by 4 days you can see my conduct workshop start and finish is going to change accordingly because in my conduct workshop the constraint type is as soon as possible which means the movement my stakeholders are identified immediately my workshop can be started.There are sometimes when the customer might say irrespective of how quickly you identify your stakeholders we might want to have the sponsor to be there in the conduct workshop and he will be available only on or after a particular date, which means there is an external dependency which you may not have much control over, in those cases want to go for what we call as constraints or a hard constraints here, let me double click my conduct workshop and you can see on my constraint type there are 8 type available I am just giving a few seconds to you please go through the values in this drop down. You are able to find there are many options here like as late as possible, as soon as possible, finish no earlier, finish no later, must start on, must finish on, start no earlier and start no later.So you are free to choose any other constraint types as long as you understand what it implies here, when you say an activity is scheduled as soon as possible which means that the movement earlier activities finishes it is as quickly as possible, whereas when I say as late as possible this activity will start as late as possible without affecting it’s success of activity.So as I can say these 2 tasks or these 2 constraints I saw flexible constraints but when you have a fixed date which means this training can happen only on or after particular date.You want your conduct workshop to start only on that date not before or not later, then you might want to go for must start on (( )).So let say the customer wants this activity to start only on 12th which means it should start on that day there is no flexibility respect to t hat activity but since when you have a must start on which means the if the earlier activity is getting delayed, if it gets delayed even after 12th of October which means your conduct workshop cannot start on this date.Which means your schedule is going to be unrealistic at that point in time so project will automatically give you an alert because it can see that must start and must finish on and in future it might create a scheduling conflict.So please read through this alert, it says you are setting a must start on so and so task this could result in a scheduling conflict now or later but for us it will not create any scheduling conflict now because our identifying stakeholders is completing on 9th of October itself.It says you either set no constraints or you go for a big flexible constraints like start now earlier or you can continue with what you have selected but let me go with what I selected here that is continue must start on constraint and let me say okay, so the movement I hit okay button you can get the same calendar icon but with a red dot which means that it is a hard constraint, when I say hard constraint I go to identify stakeholder and I say due to some delay this activity takes 10 days.The Movement you take 10 days naturally identify stakeholder’s finish date is going to be 17th and you can see this activity is no more realistic conduct workshop is still starting on 12th of October whereas my identifying completes only on 17th of October.When you go for hard constraints please remember your dates will not be automatically adjusted based on the predecessors, so this is how you might want to understand what is hard constraints there are other constraints available let’s say that the customer phase may be you can start the workshop on or after 12th but he doesn’t say on 12th, on or after 12th, so I will just say 12th here and I will say okay. Now currently when I say conduct workshop you can see on my task inspector it says it is auto scheduled, it is constraint the task date, task start date and the finish date is more driven by the constraint that is start now earlier than. If my identify stakeholder’s duration now increases to let say 10 days you can see now my conduct workshop is now driven by the predecessor rather than the constraint because naturally my predecessor’s finish date is falling after the constraint date which means my predecessor is now respected (( )) the constraint date.I always recommend that ask yourself if it is a hard or soft, if it is hard always try to minimize it, if it is soft always go for other flexible constraint like start now, earlier start now, later and (( )) and most of the times when you try to negotiate with a customer you might end up in removing most of the soft and the hard constraints by just changing the methodology and the way in which you are executing your project okay. This is what I just told you when you start entering start date or finish date project automatically put some constraints and you might want to change your constraints through the advance tab.
How do you Review task dependencies
The final option which I just want to demonstrate is how to review the task dependencies, by default you might want to look at the dependencies on your item side though it gives you the arrows and how these activities are connected, this might not be giving you more like a flow chart kind of mechanism so this is when you might want to make use of the new view called network diagram.I am on my task ribbon I am clicking on my view data group where I change my current view to network diagram, on my network diagram you can see my activities are represented by different shapes the parallelogram represents the summary activities and you can see the rectangles represents my normal activities and my milestones are represented by polygons so as you can see depending on what view you are currently looking at the format ribbon will change.In this example I am not focused on my summary activities because I just want to understand the flow of evens in my project.So I can say hide all the summary activities and I just want collapse the boxes which means I just wanted to take a look at only the high level data but since you don’t have details about these activities you might want to split this window into 2 parts. I will go to the view ribbon where I can click on details and as I select each activity on the top, you can see the activity name, its information, and its predecessors at the bottom, so this is my DF quite easy way by which you can review the dependencies. but if you don’t want to go to a network diagram rather I want to make use of the Gantt chart along with something like a network diagram, you can do a window split go to the view ribbon and click on details, on my bottom instead of using the task form I recommend you make use of what we call as the relationship diagram.So I just go to the more views here where you just change the view to relationship diagram so the relationship diagram is more like a sub set of your network diagram but the only focus it gives you only the immediate predecessors and immediate successor of the task what you are selecting on the Gantt chart.So I have selected conduct workshop it gives me only the (( )) identify stakeholders, its predecessors and the successor review findings, so this is what are the different views what you might ideally want to look at if you want to analyze your dependencies.Just to summarize as you know work breakdown structure is a deliverable oriented tree structure.Next is make sure that you decide whether your task mode needs to be auto or manual depending on whether you want the days to be calculated or not.3rd there are different types of task you can create like normal summary milestones and recurring activities and the different ways by which you can create these activities also. We talked about dependencies where we said it can be finish to start, start to start, finish to finish and the start to finish dependencies. where you can try to make use of the task information form or a drag and drop option to secure dependencies, if you wanted to have a lag time or an acceleration time between any 2 linked activities make use of the lag field at the predecessors tab to set those dependencies and finally we talked about constraints when you have some external dependencies or deliverables which cannot start as soon as possible. This is the upcoming series so next week session 4 is when we are going to talk about how to setup resources like people, cost and material as a part of your project 2010.We will have a focus Q and A session on 18th October so if any of you have any questions on project 2010 or its earlier versions please check the techgig.com website so that you can register for this webinar also.So that you can register for this webinar also, thank you guys I hope if this program was informative to you please go to my facebook page or write an email to me so that I can understand how to change the topics for the upcoming programs.