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MSP Forcing an activity to start on a new day/whole day

12 replies [Last post]
Fri, 2008-12-19 06:47
John Matthews
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Although I have seen solutions to similar problems on the web, I have been unable to find one that solves my problem so am hoping someone can help.

I have a task that starts on a Monday and takes 0.2 duration of a day. It has a successor task which takes 2 day duration. This successor task needs to happen all on 2 full days not partial ones.

Left to its own devices MSP will start the successor task part way through Monday with the task finishing part way through Wedensday. Is there a way to force the successor task to not start part way through a working day, but in the example above start on the Tuesday & finish on Wednesday? Some kind of force start to new day ability!

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
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Replies

Thu, 2009-05-07 00:19
#1
John D Adjokatse
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Dear Daren,
To start with do the following changes before you import your MSP. Create a new Project in P6 and in the Project Window, do the following.
1. Select the newly created Project (No wbs)
2. Select the Calculations tab and tick " Reset original durations and units to Remaining".
3. It might be a good idea also to select a defalut global calendar matching the MSP Project, though this does not really affect the imported files calendar (as the imported file comes with its Calendar).

After the import, this may work with all task dependent resources. There may still be problems with resource dependent activities which might have been specified in MSP before your import. There are two ways in doing this and and one way out of the 2 is to go to Enterprise, Calendar, Tick resource calendar and modify current project resources hours per day to reflect your settings in user preference(Thus 10 hours a day in user preference calendar(admin- admin preferences).
There is yet another thing to look out for especially when the calendar of the imported file differs from what you have in P6(for Start/finish milestones,Resoruce/Task dependent activities.After changing the durations, you might need to change your lags. Reason being on importing an MSP with 8 hours/day and later changing that calendar to say 10 hours in P6, a 10 day lag may become something 9.60 and this decimal will play on the successor duration. So instead of a successor finishing at 5pm(for 10 day lag) on thursday, it might finish say 3pm on wednesday allowing its successor to start 3pm on wednesday (if there is no lag). So you need to adjust the lags to reflect what you want. A bit in a rush so I might not make a complete sense but I hope I have been helpful. Thanks.
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Thu, 2009-02-19 02:04
#2
Ben Hall
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John,

There is a solution to your problem, all you need to do is add a lag to the relationship with the successor activity, keep playing around with the duration lag until the successor activity is starting on the tuesday and ending on the wednesday.

Hope this one helps you mate.

Regards
Ben Hall
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Wed, 2009-01-28 06:52
#3
John Matthews
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Thanks for all the helpful responses. I have decided to take the simlistic approach of rounding such tasks up to a full day and recording a comment. I had been hoping that there would have been a simple flag or checkbox somewhere I could tick to force an activity to start at the begining of a day if it was not already due to do so.

Thanks again for all the suggestions, certainly gave me food for thought!
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Wed, 2009-01-28 04:39
#4
Terry Barber
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Why not change the 0.2 days to a full day?
You could put a note on this activity that it should be only 0.2 days to remind yourself. In effect you are only adding 0.8 days risk to your activity.
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Wed, 2009-01-28 03:07
#5
Geoff Pratt
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Try using Elapsed Duration. Insert a task after t1 with an elapsed duration of 7.4 elapsed hours (7.4 ehrs). Link all 3 tasks f-s.
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Sat, 2009-01-24 23:39
#6
Trevor Rabey
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The dummy Task inserted immediately before the T2 is a good way to impose a very soft constraint. There is some flexibiliy so that even if the durations change and/or plan moves to the right (or left), T2 can get pushed but it always gets bumped to the start of the next working day after T1.

Even though it is nice soft constraint that works, is it really necessary. We are not building a bus timetable.
We should remember that the objective is to find the Task’s earliest possible start date&time, which is where MSP wants to put it ("if left to its own devices").
So it is useful to know that a Task can start as early as this afternoon, and then nothing prevents us from deciding to start it later, say tomorrow morning after breakfast.
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Sat, 2009-01-24 20:23
#7
L.E.N. Lewis
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And I just realized that Colin gave almost exactly this solution - my (minor) improvement is to put the 1 minute work time immediately before midnight.
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Sat, 2009-01-24 20:20
#8
L.E.N. Lewis
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1. Create a Calendar (End-of-Day) and set it up so that it uses 11:59PM-12:00AM as a non-standard work time Monday thru Friday.

2. T1 is the 2-hour task that is the predecessor. It can happen at any time (so it could, for example, Start at 4:00PM on one day and Finish at 9:00AM on the next -- assuming standard 8 hour work day calendars that project uses out-of-the-box.

3. T-dummy is a special task inserted immediately after T1. Double click on T-Dummy and assign the calendar "End-of-Day" to it. Set the duration of T-dummy to 1 minute, work to 0, do not assign a resource.

4. T2 is the task that must start at the start of a workday (8:00AM using the standard out-of-the-box calendars).

Link T1 to T-dummy using a standard FS link.
Link T-dummy to T2 using a standard FS link.

To confirm that this works click on Tools > Options > View-tab and set the date format to a display that includes the time.
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Mon, 2008-12-29 06:00
#9
Terry Barber
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2 other ways to start activity are 0.8 days lag or just apply constraint to start it on that day. Both solutions may cause problems if you change the first activity start time.
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Fri, 2008-12-19 17:18
#10
Se de Leon
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Hi Mathew,

From what I understand from your query, make sure the 0.2 day duration falls on the last hour of the day so that the successor task will be forced to start the following day. You can check this by changing the date format with time.

I hope this helps.
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Fri, 2008-12-19 11:24
#11
Darren Kosa
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Hi John,

Firstly I’ll start with a couple of questions. What is the duration of the preceding task(s) and why does the task in question have duration of 0.2d?

I’m asking as I’d like to know if 1) the 0.2d task starts at the beginning of the working day, or starts partway through the day because of the precedence network and 2) on a standard 8hr day a duration of 0.2d would be approximately 1hr 36mins, do you need to plan to that level of detail?

From a layman’s point of view it looks like work is driving duration, so if you change the 0.2d task to 1d what would be the impact?

If I’m understanding the problem correctly, you start work on the task at 0900 and any successors don’t need to start until 0900 the next day, why not make the duration 1d? To me this would be the simplest solution rather than have to fiddle about with calendars ad infinitum.

Regards,

Darren
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Fri, 2008-12-19 08:01
#12
Colin Blair
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John

A solution is to maybe insert a task in between those 2 tasks. Give it a 1 min duration, set it up with a customised calendar a time frame of eg 7am until 7.01. link activities

I’m leaving the office now and won’t be back until tuesday

post back if you have any problems and I’ll repost on tuesday

Regards

Colin
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