Preleveled Start/Finish Do not equal start/finish

[Norman Sanin]

I have a problem where I told MS Project Pro 2003 to remove leveling, but
some tasks still have preleveled starts or finishes that are different from
their start/finish dates. I believe this occured when I leveled, made some
work contour and resource assignment changes to my schedule, and leveled
again. I did not like the subsequent results, so I asked it to remove all
leveling. All leveling delays seem to be removed, but start & finsih dates
were not returned to their original values. I am aware that the Remark on
the Preleveled Start (task field) entry within MS Project help states
"Remarks You can use the Leveling Gantt view to see the preleveled start
date shown with the preleveled Gantt bars. Once you've leveled the project,
specific tasks will have preleveled start dates that you cannot remove."

Has anyone found a work around? Any help would greatly be appreciated.

Norman Sanin

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Norman,

To cut a long story short:

Whenever you do ANY action on leveling, Project copies the then present
Start values into Preleveled start. So if you level twice withjout Clearing
in-between, Preleveled start contains teh values after the first leveling.
If you want preleveled start to really represent Start without leveling, you
have to each time explictly run Clear leveling between two leveling runs

Annoying, maybe, but when you know it, it works for you.

HTH

 

[Norman Sanin]

Jan,
I understand what you are saying, and I appreciate your help. I have
been inactive in this group for some time, but I do recall your being very
helpful in the past. I thought I had done what you indicate in that I had
checked "Clear leveling values before leveling" on the Resource Leveling
dialog box before running the leveling. I was hoping to find some work
around to correct my problem--such as copying out certain data then copying
back into Project, or maybe saving as an MDB and clearing certain values. I
am currntly looking at copying out to excel, changing the values, then
pasting back in--I am still comparing the results. What do you think would
be the result if I copied all the "Preleveled" values into the corresponding
start/finish fields and removed all the constraint dates (ie change
Constraint Type to ASAP)?

-Norman Sanin

 

[Jan De Messemaeker]

Hi Norman,

Read carefully, I mean litterally what I write.
When I say you have to do an explicit round of clear leveling, that is an
explicit, extra run of clear leveling, not just putting "clear leveling
values before leveling", no, go to tools, resource leveling, click clear
leveling and then again tools, resource leveling, level now.
The "clear leveling values" tick doesn't play any part in this preleveled
start story.
HTH