How to make all finish dates update

[Bill Cole]

When resources apply hours towards assigned tasks and the manager accepts
those hours, the "Finish" dates only update for tasks that the user had
applied hours toward, and tasks 'further down the schedule' which are
dependent on tasks that changed.

How can I tell Project to update the Finish dates of all tasks as of now to
reflect today's date and remaining work?

For example, the user has 10 tasks in his schedule, and is working on
various tasks at once. For this week he applied hours to tasks 3, 4, 5, and
8. So those tasks' Finish dates updated based on the Remaining Work and the
date the user entered hours for. And tasks that are dependent on these
tasks (which would be tasks 6, 7, 9, 10) update also.
HOW do I get tasks 1 and 2 to update? The resource didn't apply hours
towards these so Project didn't update them. Technically all 10 tasks'
Finish dates are wrong because
all depend on tasks 1 and 2, who's dates did not update and in fact may be a
date PRIOR to today.

- Bill

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Bill --

Since no Actual Work was applied to tasks #1 and #2, I believe you are
saying that you have uncompleted work in past time periods, and that this
work needs to be moved to the next reporting period. If this is what you
mean, do the following:

1. Open the project in question
2. Select the tasks with uncompleted work in the past
3. Click Tools - Tracking - Update Project
4. Select the "Reschedule uncompleted work to start after" option
5. Select a date that is one day BEFORE which work will be resume on Tasks
#1 and #2
6. Click OK

Hope this helps.

 

[Bill Cole]

Dale,

Thanks for your help. This did do what I intended. It updated the dates on
all tasks with remaining work to schedule that work beginning today (or the
date the resource last entered hours, whichever you prefer). That gives me
a projected finish date for everything as of today.

I did notice that if there were any tasks on the list that were finished,
then I have to perform this action (Update Project) for the task immediately
following the completed tasks, otherwise their finish dates would be
calculated off of the finish date for the already-completed task, which
again is scheduling hours for dates that are in the past.

There is a way to tell it to Update Project for ALL tasks in the entire
project but I didnt try this.

Bill

 

[Barry]

Hi Dale,

If this reschedules the remaining unfinished work, what does the
collaboration option do? The one where it says to move the remaining start
date to the status date?

Barry

 

[Dale Howard [MVP]]

Barry --

It only affects tasks in which some progress was entered. If no progress
was entered for the task, the Remaining Work will not be rescheduled
automatically. Hope this helps.