Deadline

[Ashley McKown]

Can someone think of a reason why if i assign project a certain deadline, the
project would scheldule the tasks after the deadline and a little note
appears that tasks such and such are ending after the deadline.

thanking you all in advance

 

[Rob Schneider]

Project does not 'schedule' (when leveling) based on deadline date.
Deadline is just a field holding information. A very key bit of
information to hold about a task, indeed. I use it ot display the
deadline date for reference on the Gantt chart. Project will also
display an indicator if the deadline date passes and the task is not yet
complete.

Read more in "Help" about the field Deadline.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi All,

Allow me to add a little precision to this.

It is the "(when leveling)" that is not exactly true.
Project (apart from leveling) indeed does not take deadline into account
when sheduling.
Leveling does. Standard leveling priority has Total Slack as the most
important component, and Total Slack is definitely influenced by Deadline!
Even so, with the option "Level only within available slack" leveling will
not push a task beyond its deadline.

So it is BUT FOR LEVELING that Project ignores deadlines in the scheduling
engine.

HTH

 

[Rob Schneider]

Didn't know that.. Thanks for the catch.

Hope this is useful to you. Let us know.

rms

 

[Steve House [MVP]]

Consider the simplest possible project - 1 single task. Your boss has given
you a deadline of this coming Friday to build 100 widgets. The most you
can build is 10 a day. How should Project schedule this task? What it does
is schedule it for 10 days, a week beyond the deadline, and alerts you that
unless you get some help, you're going to be in trouble with the boss. But
there's no way it can schedule the task to meet the deadline as input
because it's up to you as PM to figure out what strategy will make 20
widgets a day instead of only 10. Unless you do, meeting the deadline means
you'll only make half the required number of widgets and a project is not
complete with only half the entire deliverable requirement satisfied.