How to avoid start day on Fridays?

[sergarellano]

I need to avoid start ANY activity on Friday, but I have to Finish a lot
of them on Fridays. How can I tell MS Project 2003 to avoid start on any
Friday but at the same time allow to finish activities on Friday?

Thanks

 

[Jim Aksel]

This is going to get ugly ...
Project assigns single calendars to tasks. If I understand correctly, you
want the task to honor the calendar for finish dates, but not start dates.

One way to do this (and I hope my peers can post a better answer) is to
create a special "start days" calendar where only Monday through Thursday are
work days. You can do that with Tools/Change Working Time... then make a new
calendar from there. If you need more help, post back.

You will then have to create a milestone (or at least a 1 minute task) as a
predecessor to "every" task. The reason I say this is that your actual
schedule progress may cause any random task to want to start on Friday.

For each of these "ficticious" milestones, you will need to link a
predecessor from "above" and the normal task as a successor to follow. Then,
assign the "Start Days" calendar to all those milestones. I just doubled the
size of your schedule... I suppose you could create a filter to hide those
milestones.

By creating different calendars with single work days, you can force tasks
to start on any day of the week desired.
--
If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.

Jim Aksel, MVP

Check out my blog for more information:
http://www.msprojectblog.com

 

[Jim Aksel]

One more concern ... If you find your ordinary tasks starting a day later
than you want, investigate the finish time of the fake milestones. they will
want to end at 5:00 PM. You can manually change them to 7:59AM.

Or, on your Start Days calendar, make only one minute of work available for
each day (Monday through Thursday) at 7:59AM (one minute prior to the start
of a normal work day).
--
If this post was helpful, please consider rating it.

Jim Aksel, MVP

Check out my blog for more information:
http://www.msprojectblog.com

 

[Jack Dahlgren MVP]

Jim,

I agree with the approach, but I think the time frame for the start
milestone needs to be adjusted. It should probably be ANYTIME except for the
time from end of working day on Thursday (default is 5:00PM) and the close
of working time on Friday.

The regular calendars will take care of scheduling the rest of the time.

This is less likely to break if there is some change in calendar somewhere
or if the duration somehow gets rounded to slightly more than a minute...

-Jack Dahlgren
..