Best practice for on-going task

[dm0502]

What would be the best way to add an on-going task to a project?

For example, I know when planning a project that time will be spent
reviewing user questions and possibly researching answers. I can guesstimate
how much time is needed, based on previous projects (not in MS Projects),
but, there really is no start and finish for the task, other than start of
the project to the scheduled finish date. It wil continue over the life of
the entire project.

It's important for us to track how much time was spent on these questions so
we have the actuals for future projects. Occasionally one question will
become a task or tasks, if it involves multiple resources and or multiple
steps, but mostly we would just want to update the actual work for a single
task, such as 'User question review and research'.

Would we schedule the task from the start date, with no predecessors, and
allcoate a very small percent of resource time (such as 5%)? Could we use a
finish-to-finish dependancy on the final project milestone in case the number
or complexity of questions/issues start to affect the project outcome? Or
maybe a deadline using the projected finish date? Or is there a better way?

Thanks in advance!

 

[dwolf]

dm0502,

The answer to your situation is called a hammock task. Basically you
use links from the start and end dates of the project as the
constraints to your task. Instead of typing a date into the start
field of the task, select the start date of the initial project task
(or milestone, if you do it the way I set mine up) and use the copy
command to store it in the clipboard. Next select the start date of
the hammock task and Paste Special => Link the date. Do the same thing
with the end date and your end date milestone.

A couple of things to keep in mind...
1) Hammock tasks take up an increased amount of memory. They
recalculate every time your plan changes. For this reason you will
want to keep these tasks to a minimum - or plan to only use a machine
with a lot of memory.

2) Hammock tasks are flexible by their very nature. You will
experience increases in your budget as the project stretches in length.
You'll have to remember any tasks that are hammock to understand where
the additional cost is coming from.

3) The concept of hammock tasks works well with tasks like Program
Management or Product Support. If you are in an Earned Value
environment there will be restrictions on what types of tasks can be
set up this way.

4) Depending on the version of MSP you are using there may be some
difficulties getting this to work. I seem to recall that there were
issues with MSP 2003 Pro when using it in conjunction with the
enterprise version. Don't rely on my memory for this - check it
yourself if it applies to you.

Best of luck with this...

--dwolf

 

[dm0502]

Thanks for your advice! We are using Project Server, so I will need to test
this out.