How do I back drive a project from a must finish by date?

[Larry ER]

I have been tasked to create a general form that will contan multiple
projects (i.e. a schedule for all in house orders for multiple end users).
This project file needs to be back driven from a shippng date of the multiple
projects. Our ship date is directly proceeded by 8 week period for parts
procurement and manufacturing. That time frame is proceeded by electrical and
mechanical engineering time frames which will run concurrently, but may not
require the same time frame. The engineering time frame is directly proceeded
by the application engineering time.
To add a twist to this, the form is also going to be used for scheduling the
equipment installation and start up following the ship date. this form could
have as many as 20 projects that are not linked and the form needs to accept
new projects that will be inserted between existing projects in this file, as
we get projects in that may ship prior to ones already documented.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Jim Aksel]

Project/Project Information.
Establish a project finish date and then set to schedule from the finish date.
You may want a separate file for Installs that schedules forward rather than
backward.

That said, scheduling from a finish date is an open invitation for disaster.
All your schedule margin is 0. If your procurement runs one day long you
are late. Far better to do it the other way around and leave yourself some
margin. Of course, you can create as much artificial margin as you want with
the final task of you project .... call if planned margin and set it equal to
something large.
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Jim

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for FAQs and more information
about Microsoft Project

 

[Larry ER]

Thanks Jim. The disaster comment is what I have been dealing with and I can't
seem to get the message across to my supervisor. He is determined to back
drive from the ship date, or finish date and also combine multiple projects
within one Project file. I can get things close and then they fall apart when
I have to add a new project whose dates are prior to other finish dates. The
way he wants to use Project is not what Project was designed for. The very
word Project is singular as in one project. Wish me luck and thanks again for
the posting.

Larry ER

 

[Jim Aksel]

You may want to try a master project file, then insert separate project files
as subprojects. Good luck my friend.
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If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.

Jim

Visit http://project.mvps.org/ for FAQs and more information
about Microsoft Project