Rescheduling ASAP tasks in a project scheduled from finish date

[Jeff Sweeney]

Imagine you have a project that is scheduled from the finish date, but
you have some tasks that are "As soon as possible"

When MS Project reschedules uncompleted work, the "As soon as
possible" tasks that that were scheduled to start but haven't yet have
their constraint changed to "Do not start before". However since the
project is from the finish date, these tasks now appear to behave like
the default, "As late as possible". They now are NOT scheduled to
begin as early as they should. (I still want them to still behave as
soon as possible, just not to start before today's date…not as late as
possible.)

I suppose I could pre-select the tasks that I want, and choose the
"Selected tasks" option but on a large project that isn't very fun.
…and when the updates come from resources through the PWA, things seem
to get even stranger.

Anyone know of a better way?

Thanks!

MS Project Pro 2002 (Server) 10.0.2002.0502

 

[Mike Glen]

Hi Jeff,

Welcome to the Microsoft Project newsgroup

Yes - never schedule from the end! If you do, you run into the problems
you've seen because all tasks are finishing as late as possible, you've lost
all your slack, everything is critical and is a relative time bomb of
troubles! Always schedule from the beginning, get yourself a sound plan and
see when Project calculates the finish from the data you've given it - ie
what is possible. Now compare that to your required completion date and
then tweak the plan to match that with some contingency built in. You could
use several Deadline dates in key places to keep you alert.

FAQs, companion products and other useful Project information can be seen at
this web address: <http://www.mvps.org/project/>

Hope this helps - please let us know how you get on

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP