Keeping tasks together

[David M C]

I'm generating my schedule using levelling only. I have 750 properties. Each
can be considered it own "mini" project. Every property has the subtasks:

Pre-Paint Repairs
External Decs
Snagging

Each subtask is performed by a different resource. Each property is assigned
its resources from one of four teams (so 20 The Road, might have Repairs1,
Painters1, Foreman1 etc). You can't do the snagging until the external decs
are done, and you can't do the external decs until the pre-paint repairs are
done. I've setup the predecessors to do this. However, each subtask MUST
directly follow it's predecessor (you can't have Mrs Jones waiting a week
between pre-paint repairs and external decs for instance).

External Decs are the priority (they should dictate what the rest of the
schedule does). Pre-paint repairs are the next highest priority, with
snagging last. So, I need pre-paint repairs to always finish when the
external decs are due to start, and I need snagging to always start when
external decs have finished.

I then want to level the project so each property (the summary tasks), are
running sequentially. In theory, I should then be able to alter my resource
units (in the resource sheet) to alter the finish date of the project. I
should also be able to constrain the properties to specific dates where
required, and have the project work around this.

At the moment, all the Pre-Paint Repairs get done a long time before the
external decs.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Dave

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi again,

You will think that there probably isn't a problem in Project that I haven't
handled in VBA...
This one is far more tricky than the first one however.
Again, somebody may come up with something more elegant, but what I've done
once is to steer leveling by a VBA procedure, running it on a one-day basis
(From... To rather than entire project) and recalculating the priorities
after each loop. This way, when a predecessor is done, you can raise the
priority of the successor immediately and it is far more likely to follow
without delay.

Hope this helps,