how to represent a continuous activity in a project plan?

[Akhlaq Khan]

hi,
i have been working on a project plan and wanted to add certain activities
in the plan which are of "continuous" nature. For example, "communication",
"status reporting" are activities that are going to span throughout the
project and according to the plan, they'd consume around 15% effort of the
Project Manager throughout the project alongwith other activities.

For this purpose, I could simply add a task in the plan and assign 15%
resource UNITS to each of them. Since these activies are to be started right
from the very first day of the project, i know the start date, but the end
date of these tasks will actually be the LAST day of the project deadline
since these activities are going to last till the last day. Since, this LAST
day will vary depending on the changes i will be making during the project,
it cannot be fixed. I don't want to manually assign the end date myself, but
would like it to "update" automatically as i make changes to rest of the
plan.

I tried adding dependency of the 1st and last task from the WBS with
following type:

1st Task, Start to Start
Last Task, Finish to Finish

By doing so, i was hoping to tell MS project that this task is going to
start with the 1st Task and End with the Last task. But it didn't work.
Maybe this is not the way to do it. Can someone please help me understand
how to do it?

Thanks!

Akhlaq.

 

[Trevor Rabey]

Much easier than you think.
Copy both the Start of the first Task and the Finish Date of the Finish
Milestone.
Then Copy and Paste Special, Paste Links
Then the duration will adjust as the ends of the bar stay stuck to the end
dates.
You can use Hammocks for lots of things such as count down from NOW.

 

[Akhlaq Khan]

great tip! thanks!

but unfortunately my .mpp file resides on a document library in office
sharepoint server, and when i try to create the link like you mentioned, it
tells me "you cannot create links from a project file that exists on a web
folder to another file".

same method applied on a local file works fine.

any other ideas to acheive the same objective with a .mpp file residing on a
web folder?

thanks!

akhlaq.

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Akhlaq ,

Try posting on the server newsgroup. Please see FAQ Item: 24. Project
Newsgroups. FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information
can be seen at this web address: http://project.mvps.org/faqs.htm

Mike Glen
Project MVP