New users often experience frustration when MS-Project’s start and finish dates change and the project manager doesn’t know why the change occurred. New users to MS-Project often find themselves using MS-Project like a task list, assigning team member names, updating them to be 100 percent complete and changing start and finish dates as a project executes. Other project managers learn tool implementation through on-the-job usage, self-study or trial and error without the benefit of structured training. Some project managers have had formal training in project management tools such as MS-Project or Niku’s Workbench. The answer depends on the project manager’s experience and an organization’s project management support and training. Asking Bob to continuously alternate his attention between Task A and Task B is inefficient, especially if they are not related tasks.How do project managers first learn how to use MS-Project or another project-scheduling tool? Your approach number 1 - stretching and overlapping the two tasks - can be done manually in the software that I'm most familiar with, but the resulting multi-tasking of resources would normally be frowned on. The different tools provide different levels of sophistication here.įor your simple example, these resource levelers would apply a solution similar to your approach number 2, forcing the two tasks to be sequential. Optimized solutions are extremely difficult to obtain in general, so 'good enough' is the typical objective, and some user tweeking of the leveling rules is normal. the critical path method (CPM) and its derivatives then b) applying heuristics to delay lower-priority tasks from their CPM dates as needed to relieve overallocations. MS Project, Oracle Primavera P6, Elecosoft PowerProject, Spider Project) all address the problem by: a) first scheduling the project using standard logic-based precedence, i.e. The mainstream project scheduling tools (e.g. You have described a very simple version of the the classic resource-constrained scheduling problem. Automatically make Task 1 and Task 2 sequential so Bob does one and then the other.ĭoes anyone know if there is any Gantt software that could automatically handle over-work issues like this?.Automatically schedule task 1 and 2 to be twice as long and at 50% time.

The solution I'd like a Gantt project to provide is to automatically balance Bob's time by one of the following: However I want to make sure Bob is never assigned to work more or less than 100% time. Now, neither of these tasks have dependencies on each other. One issue I've had, however, is handling who is doing what task and avoiding any individual from being over-tasked.įor example, lets assume I have a 1 person project and have two tasks: For reference, I use GanttProject but I am not tied to it. I like to use Gantt charts to model the time tasks will take and the dependencies of those tasks.

Ms project resource usage gantt chart