How to set up that a finished task supports an other task to fasten it up?

[mischling]

How to set up the resources of a finished task to help out and therefor
speed up a running task.

An example to explain better.

Person A counts 20 coins of 2EUR a minute. (800 coins to be count)
Person B counts 10 coins of 1EUR a minute. (900 coins to be count)
As soon as Person A finished counting the 1EUR coins he helps ou
Person B to finish counting the 1 EUR coins earlier earlier.
How can you reflect this situation in MS Project?

Thank

 

[Rod Gill]

This is probably way to much detail, unless this is for a very time critical
go-live type project. I would at most have one task called "Count coins"
with 130 minutes of work and two people assigned to it. You're not worried
who counts what, just that the coins are counted?

--

Rod Gill
Microsoft MVP for Project

Author of the only book on Project VBA, see:
http://www.projectvbabook.com

 

[Dave]

How to set up the resources of a finished task to help out and therefore
speed up a running task.

An example to explain better.

Person A counts 20 coins of 2EUR a minute. (800 coins to be count)
Person B counts 10 coins of 1EUR a minute. (900 coins to be count)
As soon as Person A finished counting the 1EUR coins he helps out
Person B to finish counting the 1 EUR coins earlier earlier.
How can you reflect this situation in MS Project?

Thanks

In the general case of schedule optimisation, Project cannot do this for
you automatically. You have to estimate how long each of the tasks will
take and if one task looks as though it will finish earlier than the
other, you would have to manually apply the resource from the first task
to the still running task when they became free.

 

[Jim Aksel [MVP]]

To add a little more to Dave's post, Project is not sensitive to the work
capabilities of Person A and Peron B. It has no way to know that B can
work faster (ie: harder).

If you estimate it will take 40 hours of work to accomplish a task, and
assign "A" to it, then after 2 days you should have 16 hours spent and 24
hours remaining. I am assuming you will status this correctly in the
schedule as 40% duration complete (%Complete=40%=2/5 since we are on day2).
And, you have your status date set correctly.

If "B" becomes available, you can assign "B" to the task manually as Dave
said. Before doing so, verify that the task type is of type fixed units,
and the effort driven box is also selected. Adding "B" will then divide the
remaining work (24 hours) amongst the available resources getting them each
12 hours of remaining work if they work full time on the task. The task is
now complete in 3.5 days.

Project cannot distinguish the additional capacity of "B." As such, the
task will finish earlier.

If you want to account for the reamining work: at the end of day 2, count
the number of remaining coins (but that actually completes the task doesn't
it?). Then, mathmatically determine how much work effort it will take for
each of A and B.... it is an algebra problem. You can then reset the amount
of remaining work for both A and B on the task usage or resource usage
views. Project will recalculate the duration and end date.

One other thing to consider, if "A" has 50% of the work rate of "B" you
might consider toying with their assignment percentages. However, taht
approach would not be valid as it deals with work availability, not output
capacity.

Probably more detail than you wanted?