Expected finish constraint

Alex,



Yves already clarified that the “constraint” was only applied on the activities that “has started”. Refer to post#12, second sentence. By this, he meant that he wanted to maintain the finish dates of the updated task…well, hoping that the finished dates or remaining durations were already confirmed.



Cheers!

Sen

Yves,



If your project is almost on schedule, the way you use is good. If you have lot of activities delayed,ahead or out of sequence,what you do will give you wrong forecast.

I used this kind of method before but only for some activities as someone mentioned before,e.g. procurement,delivery...(but if i have more information about these activities, i will update them manually)

Anyway,you need to update progress according to what actually happened.

You can use this method,after that remove the constraints,then check your schedule,do some manual update if needed.

Yves



Let me guess, what you try to do is to maintain the schedule in a fastest way where when the schedule change data date you want the finish date more or less same as before prior to schedule except the updated task.



From what I can see and experienced, during this process, you may lost some of the critical path activity. Ie prior to last update certain activity may be not fall into the CP and if you maintain those date and thinking they are mostly on track then you may miss report the end date. I guess what others are very correct is to avoid using constraint during or after progress update; except some of the critical dates such as milestone, equipment delivery date etc...



Remember there is no short cut comes to updating your schedule.

You have to update all activities in order to see the full picture of the CPM network. Of course some data will not be availiable, then you have to have a educated guess, but still you need to update it all.



HTH



Alex

Hello Yves



I support 100% the ideas here refering that you should avoid the use of constraints.



Even though I can support your idea of expected finish constraint in one case:



After placing the Purchase Order for a certain equipment to be supplied by external contractor.



Assuming that the informations you are getting from the field confirm that the contractual delivery time remains - then i would accept, after the manufacturing phase realy started (actual start) to use the expected finish date.



Meanhwile, periodic updates from the supplier will need to be checked for accuracy and consistency towards the constraint.



Please be aware that P3.1 will update automaticaly the activity during the further updates of the project but when the expected date arrives it places there automaticaly 100% (even though displays an error message concerning that particular activity in the reschedule log.



Best regards

JMFrade

I think that you are missing the point of updating your plan. It is not merely to confirm the date you had on your last update, but must be a researched and validated estimate of the amount of effort required to complete a task.

It seems to me that Yves has found a way to ease the work in updating a schedule. I myself did an updating of schedule and ‘twas pain in the butt rechecking the logics and finish dates after inputting the actual dates especially for those activities that are out of sequence.



What Yves did was to identify those activities that will not anymore be completed as per original plan. In my opinion, temporary constraining some activities for the purpose of updating the schedule is ok.



Just make sure to remove them after the schedule has been finalized and before issuing to the client/project manager.



Cheers!

Hi Yves,



Constraint distort the logic.



It is preferable to have a free flowing logic.



Charlie

Yves,



IMHO, I think you can apply constraints on Baseline Plans. Just use it as plain baseline for comparison later on, but on your current (updated) it’s not advisable.

Hi again,

Actually, i dont know this is revised schedule or what,

but its seems very tedious works may cause the calculation will give wrong answer(file error) and how about the manhours, budget?. To me instead u do that style of work better u try to find activities can be overlap, can be shorten the duration or double the manhours. I think much proper way.

try this equation :

IF _ PCT _ LT_ 100 > then (SELECT CONTRAINT)EQ (CLENDAR)