Steve,
We can agree on this: "Project completion is measured by successfully
creating the mandated deliverable objective." There are shades of meaning
for your assertion that "Anything else and the project is a failure." often
depending upon what you learned along the path from Start to End.
Formula 1 racing rewards the driver who travels the furthest over a fixed
time, while NASCAR ends the race after the leading car has passed over a
fixed line a pre-determined number of times. Both projects end after some
arbitrary expenditure of time or level of expenditure. Both are enormously
rewarding to its multitudinous sponsors, even those who don't achieve the
singular objective of "winning". All of them benefit from a plan that is
based on fixed duration, the original topic. Yes, many of my company's
clients pay to gather incremental knowledge. One of my clients paid $32
million to learn that the product he envisioned, and we prototyped, would
fail in the market place.
CPM is a simplistic method for analyzing a network. It does well with
deterministic problems that require a fixed outcome. PERT charts, a superset
of CPM (within MS Project), are even more realistic approach to network
construction. However, CPM does not work well when you try to map an effort
that comes to a place where the work statement should say "If this happens
take this path, ELSE, take another path" and you need a published plan for
all of the other paths.
Nevertheless, once one accepts that understanding the network is the
essential feature of CPM, and therefore MS Project, doesn't it seem strange
that tools for working in the network view are so much weaker than those for
working with Gantt charts and tables? That's the reason I always have a copy
of Jim Spiller's Pert Chart Expert available. It's worth its cost just for
the ability to display the information your team needs to understand about
the network, while providing a better capability to draw and analyze the
network.
Yes, I know you can do that in Project. Project's network manipulation and
drawing features have steadily improved over the years. However, in all the
years of this newsgroup, how often has there been a question about drawing
and manipulating the underlying network required by CPM? In all the
discussions threads about establishing task relationships, I've never seen a
responder point the questioner to a time-phased network chart as a graphic
way to understand the meaning of task relationships. If we are not using the
network, why are we wedded to CPM?
Norm
Steve House said:
We are saying the same thing - the PM IS the management who's making the
decisions that I am referring to.
Are you saying your projects are finished when you run out of time or run
out of money (whichever comes first) whether or not their charter
objective is achieved? That's a rare project indeed. CPM is based (and MS
PRoject is based on CPM) on the notion that there is a specific, tangible,
measurable objective that must be achieved and the project is done only if
and when that objective is realized. They can't just stop at some
arbitrarily defined time or level of expenditure. Yes, you have a
deadline that must be met and you have a "must not exceed" cost objective
that has to be met but those are not the metrics that determine project
completion. Project completion is measured by succesfully creating the
mandated deliverable objective. Anything else and the project is a
failure.
--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm for the FAQs
Norman Goldsmith said:
Steve,
I'm months behind reading the newsgroup, sorry. I disagree that "the best
feature of Project is its ability to predict the impact of management
decisions on the outcome of your project." I think the best feature of
Project is its ability to predict the outcome of MY decisions on how I
choose to run the project. PM's are not always the victims of poor
management decisions. Certainly if Fixed Work were the best option Eric
Uyttewall's book would have been much, much shorter. Removing tasks,
effort driven or not, that are in the critical path will always shorten
the project. Adding resources will not always shorten the duration -
pregnancy still takes nine-months and, as modern science has shown, you
can now generate as many as eight children with the same amount of Work.
FWIW, I always work in a two pane view with the Gantt Chart on top and
Task Details Form in the bottom. The latter allows me to see and edit
almost every aspect of the selected task on the Gantt Chart. Besides the
ability to see and enter all three pairs of MS Project dates, I have
quick access to the task type, predecessors and resource allocation.
Depending upon the need, I find that I often change the task type. Most
of the projects I run are research-like. You have a fixed amount of time
to spend a fixed amount of money and the results are variable. Fixed
duration works well for this case.
Norm
Steve House said:
You can do it as Sean described but are you absolutely sure you really
want to? Project's best feature is its ability to predict the impact of
managment decisions on the outcome of your project. That means that for
other than tasks like staff meetings and the like, as you adjust the
number of resources on them they should get longer or shorter depending
on whther you're adding or taking away workers. And how could a project
have a fixed duration when you add or remove tasks? The more tasks you
have, the more work you have to do. And the more work you have to do,
the longer it will take you to do it (unless you have infinite resources
to throw at the work as needed). Project is not just there to document
your deadlines - it's to give you a "what-if" model to help you figure
out the optimum workflow and resource assignments required to meet those
deadlines. For it to do that, it needs to change durations in response
to the various strategies you are considering so you can predict if a
possible plan is actually going to work to meet the project's
requirements. Yes, of course the final plan has to fit into a certain
timeframe most of the time. The reason to use scheduling software is to
help you come up with one that actually will do it.
--
Steve House [Project MVP]
MS Project Trainer & Consultant
Visit
http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm for the FAQs
Is there a way to globally make my schedules and any new tasks that get
added
Fixed Duration, and NOT Effort Driven? Neither come as default
settings.
I have to manually change both settings on all new projects, and each
time I
add a new task, by clicking on the propreties icon.
Thanks for any wisdom.
