Lags

[glen.e.mettler]

Using 2003
I am evaluating a project that has lots of large lags - FS & SS
I need to reduce the overall project duration by 10%.
I have reduced all of the critical path and near critical path tasks by
10%.
However, the lags are posing a problem with final reviews and delivery
dates because the lag is hard coded. This is especially true of the SS
lags.

Is there a way I can reduce these long lags by 10% (say anything
greater than 90 days)?

There are over 1000 of these. I don't like the idea of going thru each
one manually. Or is there a macro someone has already created that I
can run that would do it?

Any thoughts?

Glen

 

[davegb]

Using 2003
I am evaluating a project that has lots of large lags - FS & SS
I need to reduce the overall project duration by 10%.
I have reduced all of the critical path and near critical path tasks by
10%.
However, the lags are posing a problem with final reviews and delivery
dates because the lag is hard coded. This is especially true of the SS
lags.

Is there a way I can reduce these long lags by 10% (say anything
greater than 90 days)?

There are over 1000 of these. I don't like the idea of going thru each
one manually. Or is there a macro someone has already created that I
can run that would do it?

Any thoughts?

Glen

Don't have a simple solution to your problem. But I thought I should
ask, are you sure you don't have any fixed duration tasks in all those
critical tasks that you shortened?

 

[Rod Gill]

You will need VBA to do this accurately. However, if a number of lags are
exactly the same, then save your project and try an Edit, Replace on the
Predecessors column to update many at the same time. If 80% can be changed
like this, then you have a much smaller job with what's left if you have no
access to VBA skills.

--

Rod Gill
Project MVP

NEW!! Project VBA Book, for details visit: http://www.projectvbabook.com

 

[glen.e.mettler]

Dave,
There are a few Fixed Duration tasks - interestingly, they are all zero
duration.

Glen

 

[glen.e.mettler]

Rod,
They are not all the same. They range from 3 to 261 days and they are
all over the map - 42, 97,103 etc. I am not as confortable with
Project VBA as I am in Excel.
What I would like to do is to move thru each task (skipping Summary,
completed, and tasks less than 30days) and reduce the lag by a selected
percent (say 10%) - take an integer of the result and replace the lag.

Do you have a code snippet that would get me started?

Glen

 

[Rod Gill]

Not for this, but how about copying the Predecessors column into Excel and
doing your mods there, if you know Excel VBA, then copying them back and
pasting over the Predecessors column with the modified data?

--

Rod Gill
Project MVP

NEW!! Project VBA Book, for details visit: http://www.projectvbabook.com

 

[glen.e.mettler]

Rod,
I thought about that but I wanted to eliminate a step or two. This may
give me an opportunity to explore proj VBA a little more. I'll post
the question on the proj VBA group and see what I get. I have a little
time. If I can't do it in proj, I'll revert to Excel.

Thanks,
Glen

 

[Steve House]

Before going in will-nilly and arbitrarily reducing lags I'd suggest you
first ask yourself why they're there in the first place. If a task could
have started Jan 02 according to its links but has a lag time that delays
its start to the 1st of Feb, I always figure that that lag time is there for
a concrete reason, otherwise we'd have scheduled it ASAP and been gotten the
project done sooner. So to abitrarily declare all lags > 30 days will be
reduced by 10%, without individually evaluating each and every one of them
for feasibility, seems to me to be begging for trouble. In fact, if there
are a lot of lags and you CAN reduce them arbitrarily I'd say there's a good
chance they were thrown by someone trying to force the schedule to conform
to some pre-determined idea of what it ought to look like and they really
shouldn't be there at all regardless of their length. I'm a big believer
that project schedules should be driven by the nature of the work.